The Shape of a Pocket by John Berger Page B

stepmothers. A city where fathers unaccountably become strangers to their children. Where nothing, however familiar, is what it appears to be, and everything becomes slowly more and more distant.
    I have no right to say this, for I have never lived there, but every visit during forty years has confirmed this impression, and when I began reading the stories of Bassani, I came to the conclusion it was probably true. A city like a glass case whose panes are always misting up. Containing what? A secret. Maybe a necklace of secrets. Or maybe a weapon, if so, a cruel one.
    Whoever says Ferrara, says also the River Po. Other places are more intimate with the river – Cremona, Torino, the little town of Paesana near its source, but Ferrara is its monument, its mortuary headstone. After Ferrara the river begins to negotiate and finally join the
beyond.
This dimension of the beyond is marvellously held at the end of Antonioni’s first nine-minute documentary film,
Gente del Po
, made between 1943 and 1947.
    The plain of the Po has given northern Italy its wealth, but the river is unpredictable, always shifting, meandering, refusing norms. A sprawling story of regular repetitions and unpredictability. It silts up. It pushes the sea back! Its riverbed gets higher and higher – hence the everlasting danger of floods. On the surface she is still (the Po is a feminine river – perhaps the most feminine in the world: by contrast the Danube is male) but deeper down, there are invisible, ferocious currents. Beware all inexperienced boatmen! The Po irrigates, offers harvests and is indifferent, as are all rivers.
    In Antonioni’s film the river is the chief character, defined by her colossal will, but not her impatience, to reach the sea. When she does, the sea, instead of embracing her, gives her a leg up and she clambers into the white bed of the sky.
    The other principal characters in
Gente del Po
are the captain of the tugboat, hauling five barges down the river, the captain’s wife and their daughter, who is down below in her bunk for she has been taken ill. The mother goes ashore to buy a remedy for her daughter in the chemist’s shop of a poor riverside village. The tugboat is called
Milano
and the river constantly reminds the villagers of
elsewhere.
This was twenty years before Italy’s postwar economic miracle.
    In Antonioni’s later films the milieu tends to be rich and elegant rather than rural proletarian. Yet isn’t it true that in most of them there is a search for a remedy? A remedy which never quite works – despite all the effort.
    This first, brief, black-and-white film without spoken dialogue is prophetic in another way too. In it we today recognise Antonioni’s special way of framing his shots – as though the focus of his interest is always
beside
the event shown, and the protagonist is never centred, because the centre is a destiny we do not understand and whose outline is not yet clear.
    Essentially his cinematic handwriting hasn’t changed since he began making this first film when he was thirty-one years old. An immense evolution is to come – including that of colour – but the same vision, the same pair of eyes was already there in 1943.
    Whoever says Po, says Fog. It is part of the river’s character, like the smell of her skin. The Po was the first river – years after this film was made – on which radar was installed, for her worst fogs are impenetrable.
    The fogs extend over the plain of the Po, creating a very special atmosphere and tension, which writers like Gianni Celati and, earlier, Césare Pavese have described so well.
    To understand this tension one has to ask the question of what is hidden by the fog and what isn’t. In the sunlight the plain is flat and wide and long, often stretching to the horizon; the roads are straight; the farmhouses are rectangular; the poplars are in perfect line; the irrigation channels never meander. It’s impossible to imagine a less mysterious landscape.