Joanna Biggs’s essay “Smarrimento,” featured in the winter 2025 issue of Brick, opens with a description of Monica Vitti’s sleepy eyes, her ruffling hands, her perfectly sculpted hair—hair so animate it literally “feels.” Visual enchantment is an entry point—for Biggs, for many cinema-goers—into Vitti’s world, the one she created with Michelangelo Antonioni, her partner through the 60s and the director of the trilogia dell’incomunicabilità, the three films that made her famous. In her essay, Biggs peers beneath Vitti’s twentieth-century super-muse status to consider the forms of exchange inherent in any relationship held together not only by love but by the imperative of artistic collaboration, as well as a kind of three-way contract with the viewer.
This brief interview was conducted over email, not long after the issue was released.
Rachel Gerry: To start, can you tell us a little bit about your relationship to cinema?
Joanna Biggs: I’ve been wondering about this since I began living in a city without a cinema a few months ago. It shouldn’t matter, because of Criterion and Mubi, but I don’t like knowing there isn’t a movie theatre close by, because I think of it as one of the few places I can go to leave the world behind. I sort of need it to be there in case I have a bad day.
Gerry: Do you recall the first time you encountered Monica Vitti on screen? Was it love at first sight?
Biggs: It reminded me of an experience I often had as a teenager, when I would read about a new band before hearing their music. Vitti was a name to me, maybe a black-and-white image. When I first watched the trilogy on my laptop screen at the tail end of the pandemic, I was surprised by Vitti: her combination of chic, warm, and intelligent or maybe even intellectual—perfectly dressed and a total mess. How could you not fall for her?
Gerry: Right! Some personas just have that something that keeps you looking. Your book A Life of One’s Own examines the lives of nine women writers who sought creative freedom and fulfillment outside of paths typically prescribed. And you wrote it partly to better understand possibilities for your own life. I wonder if you thought of this essay, turning to Vitti, as a continuation of that project.
Biggs: In some ways, I wonder if Vitti was a test case. Most of the artists I wrote about in that book made their own creative work under considerable social pressure not to do so. Vitti played a role someone imagined for her. How much power does a muse have over a creator? Might it be more than we think? What would a feminist theory of the muse look like? Vitti’s allure and career pose these questions, it seemed to me.
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Gerry: It’s true that it’s kind of an unavoidable topic when it comes to Vitti, a.k.a. the “musa dell’incomunicabilità,” in a relationship with Antonioni, whose films, you write, “use her qualities to the utmost, so that everyone would be able to see them, forever.” But you don’t dismiss the role of muse as inherently negative. Like you say, you’re intrigued by the complexities of the exchange. And you draw connections between the director’s gaze and the viewer’s, noting where they may coincide. Did your sense of the muse shift as you wrote the piece?
Biggs: Oh god, yes. I suppose I looked down on the muse before and was probably envious. For a long time I thought writing was a more superior activity to nearly everything else in life, but I was young and can be forgiven. When I looked into Vitti’s relationship with Antonioni, there was much more back and forth than I imagined, and I was heartened by her decision toward the end of her life to write and direct herself. When women couldn’t go to university—think Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch—it wasn’t that uncommon for them to attach themselves to erudite men. Were they that wrong to exchange youth and beauty for education and the run of a good library?
Maybe being a muse is just an education like any other. And there are other women who saw it that way around the middle of the last century, like Lee Miller, who was Man Ray’s muse and model before learning to use the camera herself.
Gerry: Is cinema a muse for you? Does the visual ever leak into the written?
Biggs: In my own writing, I’m more often thinking about sentences than about what the reader sees as they are reading. I’ve never liked to read long physical descriptions, and I don’t approve of the tendency for contemporary novels to sound like prosified film treatments. I think one of the marks of a good novel is that it inhabits its medium and can only be a novel. But I am trying to write fiction these days—badly, slowly—and I have been thinking more about how to take a reader into the scene with me. And maybe my experiences of getting lost in a movie are helpful for this.
Gerry: As a critic, you’ve been interested in reading biographically, acknowledging that while books and films are about many things, they are also rooted in the lives and obsessions of those who write and direct them. What does it mean to be a good student of a life?
Biggs: It has taken me a long time to come to this position, and I am still criticized for it. There are reasons students at university are not taught to read biographically: It can cause you to be self-obsessed; it can be pointless, because how can you know how someone experienced their life; it can bring everything down to a sub-psychological level; it can ignore the other aspects of a text, genre, syntax, traditions, etc. As a woman critic, it’s dangerous to read biographically; if you’re enjoying splashing around in your feelings too much to notice an unusual polysyndeton, you’re letting the side down. But books are one way of knowing what it’s like to be another person, and if we treat reading as a tricolon-spotting exercise, what are we doing?
I’m exaggerating. But I think using biography well in criticism is a reminder that books were written by people who wanted to communicate with other people. Although I do think biographical knowledge should be tempered with other knowledges, technical and practical. I read because I don’t know how to live well, and one of the important things I’ve learned from books is that I have to put down Memoirs of Hadrian and go out and live as best I can.
Gerry: Which Vitti film should we go home and rent tonight?
Biggs: Do you have a projector? Then La Notte.
RACHEL GERRY is the associate editor at Brick.
JOANNA BIGGS is the author of A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again.