THE SCREEN:
Jr, Colin L Westerbeck
THE SCREEN FELLOW TRAVELER A scene that occurs midway through Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger is typical. David Locke (Jack Nicholson) has been reported dead while filming a documentary in...
...The fact is that the person who has died in the African desert is Robertson...
...The cross members between the panes in ordinary win-dows become ever more prominent, until glass houses seen early in the film acquire the aspect of cages later on...
...What Antonioni has done here is create a flashback not by the customary means of editing, but by camera movement...
...He's disappeared," the producer replies, absently switching the interview back on just as David is mov-ing out of camera range too...
...Perhaps this is why David keeps the last appointment in Robertson's book, even though he now knows Rob-ertson was a gun runner marked for assassination...
...Like the cage into which .the grated window turns David's room, the characters and events that criss-cross the parking area are all ones we have seen be-fore...
...In the end that loop of carrera movement we saw at the beginning reappears too, transforming itself into a single dolly shot that lasts, without a cut, over five minutes...
...Scenes advance by a kind of geometric progression, multiply-ing images with such complexness that we are scarce-ly able to keep up...
...Yet within the confusion this rendering of the flash-back causes, the sense that it makes is also apparent...
...la The Passenger's early scenes, for instance, the quality that Antonioni wants to impart to human affairs, their fluid uncertainty, is suggested by a camera gesture more than by what is said or done...
...But he passes without a glance, and it is again someone else, a man from a hut on the edges of our field of vision, who takes David on...
...We thought we would find out what he was up to...
...Antonioni's point of view, his camera and imagination, have become the central event, displacing the murder of David...
...Often in Antonioni's films, as in this scene, what begins for us in suspense ends in frustration...
...Without editing to mark the time lapse, we have the peculiar illusion that the same man-not only the character but the physical body of the actor-is in two places at once...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.N L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...But far from being explained it-self, his disappearance has only led to other disappear-ances...
...Curious as this may seem, we are by this point in the film accustomed to such unfinished drama and tan-gential views...
...But before we learn what that is, the producer returns, and David's wife, switch-ing off the movieola, asks for his report on Robertson...
...Individual shots detach themselves from the story much as a brilliant line will de-tach itself from a poem, and it is the shot, rather than any character or scene, that stays with us after the film...
...Objective reality overlaps for the moment a daydream projected by memory...
...Past and present really have turned out to be a seamless loop...
...His characters and plot are to him only images he must somehow adapt to the subject his films are really always abouthimself...
...Like the moving camera in these two shots, or the images that so often reflect back at us in this film from mirrors and windows, David himself has only gone around in a circle since assuming Robertson's identity...
...The flashback makes the relationship between the two characters into an extraordinary, seamless loop...
...But like the witch doc-tor's disappearance, the mystery in these films is in the end always compounded rather than solved, and we are left, plot-less, to struggle with the mere images that re-main...
...As David lies down in his hotel room in the village where the date book has brought him, the camera stands at the foot of the bed staring impassively out a grated window...
...It is in such remarkable acts of self-assertion that Antonioni's films differ most from the conventional sort of thriller we are used to...
...In all Antonioni's filmmaking, including the last scene of The Passenger, the story is manipulated, or violated if necessary, to express the point of view...
...It is also the shot, the single image, that must make sense before anything else can...
...As David sits, at a table with the pass-ports, the camera pans from him to a window through which we see him again, apparently talking to Robert-son sometime earlier...
...Across the way is a bullring, and once or twice on the sound track, faintly, we hear the trum-pet music of the corrida...
...Far from escaping his life, David has simply repeated it by becoming Robertson...
...In this regard, of course, our view in the closing scene is not tangential at all...
...Incidents and re-marks that occurred in the desert at the beginning re-occur with increasing frequency as we reach the end...
...While David de-velops a rapport with one man, someone else slips un-noticed into the Landrover to direct him...
...The producer is referring to Robertson, but we are distracted by the applicability of his remark to the witch doctor and to David...
...The cam-era pans to David, who looks non-plussed at whatever the witch doctor is doing...
...Like many earlier Antonioni films, The Passenger is ostensibly a mystery story and a thriller...
...Done as one take, as a continuum, the flashback makes the assumption of Robertson's identity into a kind of metamorphosis, and imagery in the film there-after goes through constant metamorphoses as well...
...That the flashback begins and ends with a pan rather than a cut throws us off at first...
...The primitive architecture of the desert gives way to the modern fantasy of the Gaudi buildings David visits in Barcelona...
...If Antonioni's films are difficult to take in, this is perhaps the reason...
...David Locke (Jack Nicholson) has been reported dead while filming a documentary in North Africa, and back in London his wife is watching some of his footage as his producer tracks down a man named Robertson who stayed in the hostel where David died...
...When that someone jumps from the car upon sighting a camel on the desert, we look to the camel driver...
...ft is central...
...The fair-complected wife he aban-dons in London is replaced by a dark-haired girl (Maria Schneider) he meets in Spain...
...But we remain outside the arena and do not see the main event...
...In the long dolly shot at the end, the protagonist again turns out to be someone else-turns out to be not David, but Antonioni himself...
...This is the difficulty of Antonioni's films, then, but also their beauty and appeal...
...At the film's begin-ning David finds Robertson, the hostel's only other guest, dead in his room, and on impulse David decides to trade places with the dead man by switching their pass-port photos...
...Outside is a parking area, a bit of feature-less, primeval, arid ground set aside for a desolate, modern purpose-the sort of landscape we have tra-versed with Antonioni before, from the rock island in L'Avventura to Zabriskie Point...
...As David pursues appointments found in Robertson's date book, the young men who are David's guides in Africa become the old men he repeatedly asks directions of in Europe...
...It was the witch doctor who first "disappeared" here, and this is what established our expectations in the scene...
...When their conversation ends, the camera continues its pan around the room until it arrives back at David once more working on the passports...
...Past and present flow together...
...The footage is of a witch doc-tor who suddenly announces he can make David's in-terview more "honest" and moves off camera...
...That disconcerting illusion which the panning shot gives us is, we gradually realize, what Antonioni's film is all about...
...In conventional filmmaking, the point of view is manipulated to maintain the story...
...Shots made through plate glass become shots reflected in plate glass...
...From these incidents through the inchoate drama of the witch doctor to the end of the film, the protagonist is never the man we at first think...
...Like the network of guides through which David tried to contact some guerrillas in the desert, the series of appointments in Robertson's book leads David nowhere and reveals nothing...
...Although the entire story has somehow brought David to this death, Antonioni directs his camera elsewhere while it occurs...
...In a movie whose premise is an exchange of identities, this is the final exchange...
...As we watch their pantomime, the camera passes through the bars, around the area outside, and back to the grate, through which we now see David once more, dead in his room...
...The narrative line begins to dis-integrate, to be swamped under the load of pictures, to get lost in the labyrinth of associations...
...In the opening scenes, when David is looking for guides to lead him to the guerrillas, we are always surprised at who the guide is...
Vol. 102 • May 1975 • No. 4
