Hi gang,
Definitely a sad week for all lovers of cinema with the passing of both Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni.
Front-Ranger is absolutely correct - around the time that Brokeback was released one of the New York Times articles or another trustworthy source had Ang Lee state in an interview that Antonioni was a major influence on his own film-making. There are so many places in Brokeback I can barely count all of them
where Ang Lee uses precisely Antonioni's technique of creating a significant moment or imducing a psychological response merely by the way he frames a face, divides the screen to show opposing/conflicting moods, or comments on something else in the frame by juxtaposing it with another significant object or portion of a landscape. The Antonioni film which for me triggers the most visual associations with Brokeback is L'Aventura.
TWO examples:
1] the way Ang Lee and Rodrigo Prieto [not to forget the magnificent eyes and lenses of Rodrigo !] reveal so much about Ennis and Jack in the opening 'meeting scene' at Aguirre's trailer. Ennis is shot full on, centered in the frame,
surrounded and hemmed in by the stark, flat, motionless background of grey wooden panels of the trailer, alternating with Jack shot against the multi-dimensional depth of windswept green fields, rustling trees and the blue sky. The iconic final image of the film is a recapitulation of this same juxtaposition, but this time in the same frame - Ennis's flat wooden cupboard encapsulating the shrine of the shirts in the left half of the frame juxtaposed with the multi-dimensional depth of the windswept fields of grass and blue sky seen through the window on the right side of the frame.
2] the wonderful morning scene, early on Brokeback, where Ennis and his calm, docile horse tethered to a tree are captured in the left half of the frame while Jack struggles gamely with his crow-hopping Cigar Butt in the right half.
Every scene in the film shows a master film-maker at work, using techniques of European film genii in every detailed shot, precisely aligned for maximum effect without resorting to extraneous camera movement - saving camera moves for those moments of incredible significance which we've discussed in other threads.
A propos Ang Lee, it is synchronistic that Ingmar Bergman died a day earlier than Antonioni, for it is Bergman more than any other film-maker that Ang Lee identifies in interviews as the major influence on himself. Ang Lee was enormously affected by Bergman's Virgin Spring and Lee is in point of fact interviewed and comments on the film in supplementary material in its recent Criterion Edition.
