' The Architectonics of Alienation: Antonioni's Edifice Complex by Frank P. Tomasulo Architecture is a forgotten language. --Goethe, The Langua ge of Architectur e 1 It is difficult to imagine a narrative or documentary film in which there are no buildings. In most films we simply ignore them as mere backdrop to the dramatic action or human activity. Some filmmak- ers, however, use architectural space more meaning- fully, thereby enabling spectators to follow John Ruskin's entreaty to "read a building as we would read Milton or Dante." 2 The architectural analogue goes back to Aristotle's tapas eidon ("place of ideas"), Ovid, Augustine, Aquinas, Locke, and Hegel. 3 Even Freud used a city—Rome--to propose an analogy between mind and memory: "Rome is not a human habitation, but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past. .. and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one." 4 This article will address how architecture can serve as analogue, metaphor, or structuring device within the semiotic system of an entirely different art form: cinema. No European filmmaker epitomizes the metaphori- cal and dialectical use of modern architecture more than does Michelangelo Antonioni . The expressive architectural spaces seen throughout the director's oeuvr e constitute a veritable mise-en-scène of objec- tive correlatives for the "alienation effect" of the modernist condition. The contemporary buildings and urban centers seen in his films go far beyond traditional setting and backdrop, even beyond analogue and anthropomorphism, by using space to objectify artistic, cultural, religious, historical, psychological, and even political discourses. For Frank P. Tomasulo is the Chair of the Department of Communication at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He is also the Editor of the Journal of Film and Video. WIDE ANGLE Volume 15, Number 3 (July 1993) pp. 3-20 © 1993 Ohio University School of Film 3