GRAPHIC GOES GLYPHIC

We quit the Official Thingified World of Things with its rational lexicon long ago. Away from objecthood into....a un-place where it has become improper to speak even of reification anymore.

This was what Antonioni was so relentlessly after in that fierce middle period from Red Desert to The Passenger:

Antonioni: What interests me now is to put the characters IN CONTACT with things, because what counts today are things, objects, matter.

Giuliana panics not at what the world of objects MEANS, (what you would find in the ordinary expressionist world of Stendhal or Flaubert, -- & of course, Hollywood's) but rather at its' cryptic, occulted non-messages. Because things now have a sort of animal spirit and they chatter incomprehensibly -- rather like Princess Raccoon, if you would encounter her in real life. Communication frighteningly without expression. Grandiloquent Blankness. Strange OMENS of Further Abstraction and Separation.

Marxist unease (Panic!) with the fetishism of the commodity lies with the suspicion that the idea hijacks the scientific and inevitable character of revolution and leads ideology into what is, frankly, animism. The superstitious world of magic, the occult, and the primitive.

Two basic polarities in language that also apply to cinema and to reality:
explicitness and ellipsis. And the spirit-substance halfway in between is The Glyphic, which splits the difference.

QUEEN OF DEBT

Party Girl...

Radical in her passivity. Notice how this runs against the grain of the usual romantic protagony.

How disappointments grow entwined with a life. The making of a certain woman -- through a gallery of melancholy poses.

A woman who must be visible to her court.

Broken Glances at the camera. 

The superficies, the wealth of visual detail, the Antonionian concern with stuff, builds until we wonder what exactly the point is.

To shut out the world.

This movie was baffling before the "recession". Now everyone is a bit of a Marie Antoinette.

The author recognizes the throttling density of the superficial world, but does not deplore it. She thinks it's "sad" when the nice -- the beautiful things -- are violently broken.

But the author also finds this Resignation noble.

Sofia, in her own weird (& expensive) way, has paradoxically made a film  
as austere in its images and emotions as Rohmer's. 

COMPLEXITY OBSCURANTISM

Concreteness in density becomes utopian abstraction.

Man made systems that are so complex and fast moving and so reflexive that they are beyond human comprehension. The baffling phenomena, only "visible" through the rather dubious medium of computer modeling (if at all) render modern persons as terrified as the mythic savages before the eclipse.

Voila! A new nature, and therefore a new priest class for this narcisismo tecnico.