Page 58 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

48 Alison Ross

Two features in the film are instructive here: first, all the elements of
narrative that could generate a meaningful context are stripped back, not
just by the project of the main character, which is reductive in respect of
narrative and necessarily privative in relation to meaning, but especially
by the use of techniques of narrative discontinuity, such that at key points
in the film it is a cinematic device rather than the content of a scene that
is emphasized. In the scene between Robertson and Locke, cinematic ele-
ments overshadow rather than stage the conversation between the protago-
nists; indeed, these elements reinforce narrative ambiguities. In this scene
Antonioni disjoins and then reunites the auditory and visual tracks of a
previous conversation between Locke and Robertson and in doing so effects
a striking temporal dislocation. At the outset of this scene Locke works on
changing the photos in the passports while a voice-over of a conversation
he had had with Robertson is played. As Locke speaks in this conversation,
the camera pans the room to show a tape recorder playing, and as the viewer
identifies this tape as the source of the voice-over, the camera pans outside
to a shot of Robertson watching the desert as the visual sequence rejoins
the sound. Similarly, Locke's famous offscreen death at the end of the film
is a spectacular staging of a technique (this seven-minute take took eleven
days to shoot and several complex technical adaptations to the equipment)
rather than of narrative content. In this shot Antonioni perfects the style he
had used since Un cronaca di un amor, in which the camera does not simply
follow the movements of a character, or narrative sequences in which char-
acters are present, but undertakes its own path of movement and its own
logic of sequencing. Further, in the case of the dialogue between Robertson
and Locke, not only do the devices of temporal and spatial discontinuity
dramatize this dialogue, but also Antonioni deliberately leaves unanswered
narrative questions such as why it was that Locke had his tape recorder
running. Did he suspect that Robertson was involved with the guerrilla
movement? Would he have used Robertson in his documentary? Or was
the recorder running anyway, and did he simply forget to switch it off when
Robertson dropped by?
The Passenger extends the theses of the other approaches to mean-
ing and experience in Antonioni's films into a question about what the
absence of a code or a binding meaning for experience would look like.
What would it mean to experience life without a code? Would this be pos-
sible? These questions, which Antonioni approaches in his use of cinematic
elements, undermine narrative as a sufficient way of explaining them.