William Arrowsmith Antonioni: The Poet of Images.
Edited, with an introduction and notes, by Ted Perry.
Oxford University Press, 195 pages, $25

reviewed by Karen Wilkin

Some years ago, when an architect friend of mine asked Clement Greenberg why he hadn’t written more about architecture, I was surprised to hear him say, “Too hard.” Did he mean that there were too many factors to be taken into consideration: the building in itself as a work of art, its relation to both past traditions and present innovations, and, most vexing, the intricate tangle of personalities and realities, of artist’s intentions, client’s needs and desires, economic and structural constraints, and all the rest of it, necessary for the realization of any architectural project? Perhaps, too, Greenberg was thinking of how elusive architecture can be, of how dependent we are upon memory and temporal sequence in experiencing buildings (even more than we are in experiencing most sculpture) since it is clearly impossible to see all exterior views of even a modest building at the same time, just as it is impossible to perceive even the simplest of interiors and exteriors simultaneously.

If architecture is too hard, what about films, which depend even more on collaboration and hard-to-control variables in order to be realized, and even more on one-way, linear sequences of time in order to be perceived? Not to mention the fact that films move, so that the visual compositions so essential to their coherence (and quality) go