Page 59 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Michelangelo Antonioni 49

Time and Mood: The Aesthetic Configuration
of Ideas in Antonioni's Films
The relation between narrative and technique that uses the narra-
tive device of Locke s "project" to undermine the significance of narrative
builds up as a further theme the idea of time as the dispersion of identity.
This idea is inimical to conventional character development. Instead of
being the medium of character development (as in adventure films), time
is deployed as a space for parading life fragments whose meanings are more
or less exhausted in their immediacy The films reflection on the "project"
of the loss of identity is executed in part by the reductive presence or au-
thority of the main character.
Characters may be viewed as complex systems. Time is one of the
ways in which character systems build up their internal complexity and
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ensure their own stability. What I want to emphasize through the use
of this terminology is the way that a normal cinematic character is built
up through connections with his or her environment and how he or she
stands out against that background by demonstrating stable character
traits. Time is the element that allows these otherwise contradictory fea-
tures to be intelligibly woven together. It is this relation to time that is
radically altered in Antonioni's film. The African agents still follow Locke
and believe him to be Robertson, despite the fact that he fails to approach
them (as Robertson would have) at the airport. Locke reduces to sparse,
arbitrary elements Robertsons character system. His decisions saturate an
immediate present, and although they may be seen to be related to an in-
telligible overall design that unfolds in time, they do so in a blind fashion.
Presumably this is one way of understanding his death: had members of
the cell failed to meet the real Robertson, he would have assumed that the
cell had been penetrated and ceased making his schedule of meetings. Un-
like the temporal scope for the development of character in an adventure
film, The Passenger lacks the premises, such as a genuine character and his
or her time dimension, to narrate an Aristotelian end or resolution. It is
in this sense that the film presents the idea of time as the element for the
dispersion of identity.
This idea is heightened by the film's languor-ridden mood, as well
as the major motif of waiting. Early on, Robertson describes the desert as
"so beautiful, so still—a kind of waiting." It is the technical achievement
of this film that "a kind of waiting" is shown that systematically undoes
Locke's "identity" as a coherent system. Each decision made unfolds in