The Performance of Reality: Antonioni's <i>Tentato suicidio</i>

Abstract

It is through its employment of complex 'structures of repetition' and its thematics of re-enactment and death, I want to suggest, that Antonioni's Tentato suicidio already contains within it a critique of the standard assumptions of the mimetic relationship between film and reality. A critique of the supposition that a sense of unmediated and unfettered access to the world anchors the film to the historical facticity of time and place.