Page 55 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Michelangelo Antonioni 45

of ourselves, to analyze ourselves in all our complexities and in every facet of our
personality. The fact of the matter is that such an examination is not enough. It is
only a preliminary step. Every day, every emotional encounter gives rise to a new
adventure. 11
In his films of the mid-1960s, such as II deserto rosso and Blow-Up> Anto-
nioni adopts a more formal perspective on the coding of experience. An
epistemological question now asserts itself: if paintings and photographs
present scrambled visual codes that need decoding to make sense, how do
we know that our interpretations of such codes are correct? In 77 deserto
rosso the character of Giuliana is able to sense things (such as the noise
that is the cry of the baby near the dock) that others deny; in Blow-Up it
is the sources able to testify to events that are examined. Significantly, the
photographer does not see the murder and the body in the bushes, and it is
his decoding of a photograph that leads him to understand a scene he had
earlier photographed. In both of these films, as well as his earlier works,
Antonioni explores how Western industrial life imposes patterns of pro-
fessionalization that dull the senses to experience in training them to the
practice of repetitious codes but that also, as in the case of the "blow-up"
in Blow-Up, provide auxiliary contexts and technological pathways for ex-
12
perience. In the face of these features of modern life, Antonioni does not
retreat to nostalgic invocations of an authentic human nature corrupted
by the rapid pace of industrialization but rather provides a dispassionate
documentation of the new forms of human life that these features bring
into being.
The general perspective on the dissonance opened up in modern ex-
perience between a petrified and stylized world of values, on the one hand,
and the historical register of human existence in changing time as well as
the specific critique of the formal operation of codes as the patterning for
experience, on the other, is extended in The Passenger into a more radical
13
thesis by the treatment of the schematization of experience. In this film the
identity of the central character is described in terms of the habit-induced
schematization of experience. Habit, even in the case of the profession of a
journalist whose immediate context is constantly changing, intervenes in
the form of the ready-made codes that stylize his context in terms of the
"rules" by which he relates to events: the journalist is a detached observer,
unmoved by what occurs around him, his métier is the words and ideas he
uses to communicate the significance of events to others. At one point in
the film, footage is screened from one of Locke's interviews in which the