ABSTRACT
Most critics have agreed that Antonioni’s fi lms create a new cinematic language and visual poetry in which his characters, their identities, and their narratives dissolve. Clothing plays an integral part in this project. At fi rst sight, this might seem an insurmountable contradiction since it is impossible not to acknowledge intimate links between dress and the formation of identity. It is, however, only an apparent paradox because what clothing does in Antonioni’s fi lms is, on the one hand, to articulate the relationship between clothing and identity, and, on the other, to reveal, through fashion and cinema, how clothing becomes an integral part of cultural mediation. These two mechanisms are complementary since clothing, and especially how it appears in cinema, does not have a straightforward relationship with identity. The clothed body is always made up (in the many senses of the expression). Dressing implies a sort of masquerade that is in turn a semiotic act. It is this process that ensures that the Self enters the social scene and becomes, through clothing, culturally visible. Self and identity are also engaged in a fl uid process of becoming as an examination of some of the characters in Antonioni’s fi lms will show. The clothed Self in cinema illustrates in the strongest of ways the presence of an external gaze, the gaze of the Other who redefi nes one’s own identity (Bakhtin 1990). This process, which is always open-ended, never done once and for all, is emblematic in cinema, and, I would say, even amplifi ed, insofar as the gaze, the role of the camera, and spectatorship are key in creating a multifaceted dialog with characters. Furthermore, the typical lack of continuity in Antonioni’s fi lms, the way they defamiliarize, and his use of the long take are all integral parts of an innovative cinematic language in which clothing plays a vital and leading role.
