Page 61 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Michelangelo Antonioni 51

irreducible to any teleology of meaning or intention, as is shown by the
episodic narrative of the film and the manner in which the camera follows
movements that are extraneous to character and plot (such as the focus on
the cars passing the café where Locke and the girl sit and discuss his life
or the documentation of the events occurring outside Locke's window in
the penultimate scene).
In The Passenger the theme of time as the dispersion of identity is
presented in an experiential form. As in the case of the treatment of the
theme of meaningful codes in Antonioni's earlier films, this theme has its
impact on account of the way it is staged. Key cinematic elements—such
as the splitting of the auditory track from visual sequences and the inde-
pendence of the camera's movements from the functions of the descrip-
tions of space and character—give a texture not otherwise to be had for
this abstract theme.
In Antonioni's films the emphasis on cinematic elements reverses
the conventional position of narrative. The chief consequence of this re-
versal^ that instead of making meaning intelligible through narrative
elements, Antonioni's films make available abstract themes through evoc-
ative modes of aesthetic presentation; or perhaps one should have it the
other way around, that aesthetic presentation conjures such themes. Al-
though these themes can be integrated into a critical commentary on the
contemporary world, the aestheticizing intention in Antonioni's cinema
does not deploy them for this purpose. Rather, his cinema makes ideas
that would be inaccessible through conventional narrative—such as the
"project" to lose identity or the dispersion of identity in time—available
for emphatic experience precisely through his relative autonomization of
aesthetic moments.