The first essay shows that this reference to painting allows the filmmaker to entail a process of reduction that points to a particular kind of sublime: a sublime of what is immobile, fallen, routed and diseased, a sublime made of what frightens. By filming ordinary and therefore invisible objects, by literally ‘emptying’ the image the camera performs a phenomenological reduction which suspends the intentionality in the constitution of the object. The anguish of banality is the sublime that crosses Antonioni’s cinema: the poor phenomenon becomes saturated. This is how Bonfand explains the well- known final scene of Eclipse (L’Eclisse, 1962)
