Carving Cameras: Antonioni’s Lo Sguardo di Michelangelo

Dealing with Michelangelo’s famous 1513 statue of Moses, Antonioni’s 2004 short film Lo Sguardo di Michelangelo (literally The Gaze of Michelangelo) is an impressive meditation on the encounter between film and sculpture. By means of the dynamic, immaterial, two-dimensional, and volatile images of the film medium, Lo Sguardo evokes the static, material, three-dimensional, and durable forms of sculpture. Antonioni not only confronts the heroic and muscular statue of the Old Testament prophet with his own old and weakened body, he also juxtaposes visual and tactile perception: the gaze (the director’s eyes and glasses are explicitly framed) is paired with tactility as Antonioni’s hands are touching the marble surfaces. Rearticulating some of the discussions and concepts central to sculptural theory since the eighteenth century, Lo Sguardo di Michelangelo also demonstrates that the medium of film not only represents, reproduces, or duplicates artworks but that it also reconfigures, re-imagines, and remediates them.