Page 53 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Michelangelo Antonioni 43

Barcelona; and a revolver—Locke drags Robertson's body into his room,
switches clothes and passport photos, and engineers the deceit on the hotel
staff that Locke is dead and that he "is" Robertson. The film is compart-
mentalized into different episodes, including scenes of the past between
Locke and Robertson, as well as scenes set in both London and Africa,
between Locke and his wife, Rachel; footage from Locke's interviews, as
well as footage he had taken of an execution in Africa; and scenes contem-
porary with Locke's dissemblance, such as his meetings in Germany and
Spain as "Robertson," who, Locke discovers, was a gunrunner for an Afri-
can Liberation Front; the torture and harassment of agents acting for this
front in Europe by African government agents; Locke's relationship with
"the girl" played by Maria Schneider; Locke's pursuit as "Robertson" first
by his producer, Martin Knight, and then by his wife, Rachel, in Spain;
and his own death in Spain at the hands of African government agents
who believe that he is Robertson, in the film's famous penultimate seven-
minute take. Against the pull of a conventional treatment of this material
in the genre of a political thriller in which the protagonist's time is marked
by the drama of his pursuit, the film is remarkable for the languor that is
the dominant mood in each of the episodic scenes, as well as the absence
of a musical track that would infuse the succession of scenes and settings
with pace or continuity. 7 Indeed, it is notable that the episodic structure
allows Antonioni to eschew temporal continuity.
The significance of the narrative elements in this film can be seen
by comparing The Passenger to the treatment of the topics of meaning and
experience in terms of codes in Antonioni's other major films. In general,
the topics of meaning and experience are treated along two axes in Anto-
nioni's films: on one side Antonioni addresses the coding of experience as
meaningful in terms of what he calls "the modern sickness of Eros" {Un
cronaca di un amor, Lavventura, La notte, Leclisse, II deserto rosso); on the
other side he raises the formal dimensions of coding as such as an episte-
mological question (IIdeserto rosso, Blow-Up). The significance of The Pas-
senger as a stage for the confrontation of patterns of meaning is that this
film presents the codes of both "sick Eros" and the reflective relation to
8
codes as having lost their orientating value. In this respect The Passenger
confronts code orientation itself as a pattern of meaning.
Antonioni describes the "sickness of Eros" as a modern malaise
whose chief symptom is the overemphasis placed on Eros but whose causes
are the distinctive features of modern life. These features are documented