Antonioni
The
Passenger (1975)
Profession:
Reporter
film
review by Theodore Price
Cinemonkey
magazine Spring 1979
Κινηματογραφικά
Jack
Nicholson Maria Schneider
By
Theodore Price
This article
is the text of a paper given at Purdue University's Film Conference last March,
where it electrified an audience of film scholars with its explication of the
Antonioni film's meaning. The Passenger, in 16mm, is available from Films, Inc.
This paper is
the framework for a monograph I'm writing on The Passenger. Although my current
work is mainly concentrated on detailed book-length studies of the films of
Fellini and of Hitchcock, I find Antonioni's latest film remarkably enjoyable
to watch and comment upon.
The film has,
for the most part, assumed an important place in Antonioni's oeuvre. Yet I find
that just about all contemporary reviewers of the film, certainly the American
ones, from first to last, seem not to know quite what the film is about, and
certainly not what it is about politically; or, if they do know, they are
keeping it to themselves. They either like or dislike the film for all the
wrong reasons or, at least, for reasons irrelevant to the film's political and
artistic thrust. They give their readers the impression that the film is
enigmatic, and difficult to explicate; and so the explicate it very little. I,
on the contrary, find the film eminently clear and easy to explicate, and not
just in an erudite way for other film specialists, but in a matter-of-fact,
unsophisticated way for the intelligent layman.
Many
reviewers, not really having understood what Antonioni was about, make some
chancy, witty, or cruel remarks about the film, and, far from placing the film
politically and artistically, are, in fact, bluffing. Or such is my feeling. I
have, therefore, developed a very specific five-point litmus test to alert the
reader to whether or not they are bluffing.
[ synopsis ]
But first,
especially for those who may not have seen The Passenger, let me just give a synopsis of the story the way most
reviewers give it, reviews intended to help their readers get a fix on what the
film is about.
The hero is
the Jack Nicholson character David Locke, a man in his early thirties, who is a
successful, respected, and rather famous maker of television documentaries for
the British public television network. He specializes in political
documentaries. He's not happy at home: his wife argues with him about his work,
and she has a lover.
When the film
starts, Nicholson is in some African country finishing up a documentary on
political events and trying to get an interview with a guerrilla leader of the
country. He fails to do so, which sparks off what is evidently a
long-smouldering feeling that he is dreadfully unhappy with his life and work.
When a
stranger in his hotel, who resembles him physically, dies of a heart attack,
Nicholson swaps “bodies" and passports with him and flies back to Europe
so that now everyone thinks that it is Nicholson who has died.
The stranger
had an appointment book with meeting dates in Munich, Barcelona, and Algeciras;
Nicholson decides to keep the appointments. We learn that the stranger had in
fact been selling guns to the guerrillas of that African country, and the
contacts now simply believe that Nicholson is that man.
In flashbacks
in London, where Nicholson's colleagues are planning to make a television
documentary of his life, we see Nicholson interviewing the black dictator of
the country, we see the execution of a guerrilla leader that Nicholson had got
on tape, and we see an interview with a former witch-doctor of the country. The
dictator's secret police now get on the trail of Nicholson in his new identity,
and Nicholson's wife and colleague also try to locate him in order to learn
more of the "real” Nicholson's "death."
Meanwhile,
Nicholson meets a semi-beatnik type young girl who is touring Europe studying
architecture, especially the buildings of the Spanish architect Gaudi, in whose
buildings the two meet and talk. She tells Nicholson that Gaudi died after
being hit by a bus. Nicholson looks at Gaudi's unusual buildings and asks if he
was crazy. The girl goes off with him, they sleep together, and she urges him
to keep the gunrunner's appointments.
The wife,
meanwhile, discovers that Nicholson has changed identities and is, in fact,
alive. She tries to locate and warn him that he is being hunted by the
dictator's secret police. In fact, it is her actions that help lead the secret
police to him.
The film ends
in a hotel in Algeciras, where we do not see just what happens, but we can
assume that the secret police kill Nicholson. When the wife sees his body, she
says she does not know him; the girl says she does.
Now, if
that's all you know about the story of the film (and remember, old Aristotle
was fond of saying that the "story" of a drama was by far its most
important element), it's no wonder you might not be sure of the thrust of the
film and find the film enigmatic (or worse, just a fancy version of an
old-fashioned Hollywood chase film, as some reviewers describe it). Well, here
is my five-point litmus test to determine whether a critic of the film is
bluffing or not:
1. He is bluffing if he doesn't tell you a little
about the Spanish architect Gaudi, whose works are so prominent in the film,
and whose philosophy of Art and Life, and whose life and death relate so
significantly to the theme of the film.
2. He is bluffing if he doesn't discuss the political
events of the real-life African country where Nicholson is shooting his
documentary, and show how these events relate so centrally to the story of
Antonioni's film. (The country is Chad.)
3. He is bluffing if he doesn't discuss Chung
Kuo/China, the television documentary that Antonioni made in Red China just
before he made The Passenger, and
which gave rise to such bitter personal feelings between him and the Chinese
leaders.
4. He is bluffing if he doesn't discuss The Passenger in relation to some very
common-knowledge Leninist revolutionary theory, which relates dead-center to
Nicholson's artistic malaise in the film and to the general malaise of many
real-life liberal reporters of current revolutionary events.
5. Finally (by far the best test of all), he is
bluffing if he doesn't tell you why the film is called "The Passenger," or if he doesn't
know, tells you he doesn't know.
Before I go
on to try and show you that I am not bluffing, let me just place for you
quickly the artistic design of the film.
This design too is quite simple. It's similar to that of Fellini's 8 1/2. There
we have the spiritual and artistic tribulations of its hero-director Guido, who
throughout the film can't seem to make the film he is working on. Finally,
though, he resolves his spiritual and artistic impasse and successfully does
make the film, and the film he makes is the film that we have just seen: 8 1/2.
Antonioni's The Passenger is the
genuine film documentary of the Jack Nicholson character's life, in contrast to
the essentially false documentary that his friends and colleagues are planning
to make.
Let's now
take our five points, but working backwards, and show how just a little
information about each of them helps explain what Antonioni's film is about.
First, why is it called The Passenger ?
[ The title
of the film ]
Well, in
common parlance, a passenger is someone not in the driver's seat, not in
control of the vehicle, passive, someone along for the ride, often for pay.
This rather vague meaning is what some reviewers (very few) call attention to.
It is not incorrect, but it is not really the precise reason for the film's
title, as I shall go on to show.
The word has
two other meanings never really mentioned in any review, but impeccably
relevant: (1) a "passenger" has a long history of meaning a passerby,
a wayfarer, one who is on a journey, going from place to place, stopping here
and there, but not for long and; (2) every human being is a passenger on the
journey from life to death.
Since there
are three important deaths in the film (that of the gunrunner, David Robertson;
that of the executed revolutionary leader; and, at the end of the film, in the
famous long-take, that of the hero. Jack Nicholson), there is no question that
the title functions on this level, too, and functions well. I'll discuss this
aspect more when I discuss our "fourth" death, the real-life one of
the architect Gaudi.
But the true
meaning of the title, and the one that helps alert us to the political thrust
of the film, is more specific. If Antonioni had made a film entitled The Texas
Leaguer and it was nothing about Texas or some league, a conscientious reviewer
would easily explain it, or wonder about it and say he didn't understand. A
Texas Leaguer is, of course, simply common baseball slang for a short fly ball
that is hit too far out of the infield for an infielder to back up fast enough
to catch, and too far in from the outfield for an outfielder to race in to
catch. It falls safely for a hit, usually an extra-base one. The term lends
itself to interesting metaphorical use; if a non-baseball film were indeed to be
so titled, the first thing we'd try to do would be to see how that image
functioned as a metaphor to help place the meaning of the film for us.
"Passenger"
is simply a term of British boating slang, "one of a crew who cannot pull
his own weight," or "a member of a racing crew whose weight retards
the boat more than his power adds to its speed." (It's also used by South
African farmers to designate an animal in a herd that "contributes little
or nothing to the functioning or productivity of the group.")
The film's
original title was Profession: Reporter
(that's still how it is known on the Continent). The two Davids of the
film, David Robertson and David Locke, are "doubles." Robertson's
profession is Revolutionist. Nicholson is a liberal, bourgeois reporter whose
sympathies, like those of so many liberal, bourgeois reporters (or filmmakers
or film critics or film teachers) lie solidly with the guerrilla
revolutionists, but who just observe, write, talk, or make
"objective" documentaries. Robertson is a revolutionist who is
engage, who participates, who acts, who is prepared to fight. (Nicholson
carries a Uher tape recorder; Robertson carries a Walther automatic.)
From its
political aspect, Antonioni's The
Passenger is a political fable, a brief for Lenin's key pronouncement that
anyone for the Revolution must act and not just talk.
The year
before he made The Passenger Antonioni made a documentary on China for Italy's
television network, RAI, in which, I gather, he uses his camera as an observer,
with a point of view, but subtly, and not very propagandistically (as in his'
interesting, early documentary short, "The Garbage Collectors"
[Nettezza Urbana]). All hell broke loose among the Chinese, who had expected
him to make a propagandist PR film about the Chinese New Man.
What they
seem to have resented most was Antonioni's claim to objectivity or what they
thought was his claim. They called him a charlatan and a clown and tried to
keep his film from being shown in Sweden, France and Greece.
Interviewed
at the time of The Passenger about "objectivity" in reporting and
filmmaking, he kept declaring against the "myth of objectivity" and
maintaining that "pretending to be objective you annul yourself. . . What
sense would life have, then?"
He says that
the Nicholson character, as a journalist, sees reality from his own viewpoint,
which to him seems objective; but in the film he, Antonioni, as the director,
plays the role of "the journalist behind he journalist." He adds
other dimensions to what Nicholson considers reality. [ In
short, one could perhaps consider The
Passenger as the Chinese argument against Antonioni's China documentary.
]
The events in
The Passenger take place in 1973 (the
film came out in '75). Chad is a former French protectorate given its
independence in 1960.
It is just
south of Libya, about the size of France, Spain, and Italy combined, with
between four and five million people. About half the population is Muslim,
living mostly in the north; about 5 percent of the southern Blacks are
Christian; the rest are of native, "primitive" African religion.
The Chad
president, Tombalbaye, presumably the dictator in the film, soon set up a
one-party dictatorship. A typically Communist National Liberation Front, called
Frolinat, mostly Muslim Arabs of Northern Chad, backed by Libya and Egypt's
Nasser, began guerrilla operations against Tombalbaye. He proceeded to call in French
troops to fight the guerrillas, the French, under De Gaulle, wanting to
maintain French influence in Africa, and feeling, in line with the domino
theory, that if Chad fell to the National Liberation Front, so would the rest
of Africa. At first there were just advisors, then helicopter units, finally a
small army of French Foreign Legionnaires
The point is
that in the early 1970s Chad was, for France, another Vietnam, like the
original North Vietnam before Dienbienphu, and Algeria later, the situation
portrayed by Gillo Pontecorvo in his film, Battle of Algiers, Liberal French
journalists were calling for the return of French troops, and during 1973 (the
year of the story of The Passenger) a Chad political opponent of Tombalbaye was
assassinated in Paris, causing a scandal.
All this is
background to what simpleminded reviewers of The Passenger refer to in their story summary as Nicholson's
attempt to interview some guerrillas in a new African country.
The film is
not objective in its attitude to these events. The "good guys" in the
film are the German and Black rebels who meet Nicholson in Munich and, thinking
he is Robertson, pay him for the guns and thank him for his personal
involvement in helping them. The "bad guys" in the film are the
President dictator and his Black and White Teddy-Boy thugs. The good guys
include Robertson, who is described in the screenplay (by Antonioni, Mark
Peploe, and Peter Wollen) as having deserted from the British Army in Kenya,
and the executed rebel leader, whose execution constitutes such a powerful
sequence in the film.
Incidentally,
the "witch-doctor" sequence in the film, which puzzles some viewers,
is simply understood once we know that the "witch-doctor" and the
executed rebel leader are one and the same. The screenplay makes this quite
explicit. Nicholson's questions are meant to be both stupid and funny —
"Isn't it unusual for someone like you to have spent several years in
France and Yugoslavia?"
The film was
originally an hour longer than it is. Antonioni had to cut it because the
producers and distributors wanted a two-hour film. The published American
screenplay (it is not the derived screenplay) has some dialogue that makes
absolutely clear what we can only surmise from the truncated film. The key
sequence here comes in the roundtable television discussion of Nicholson's
life, work, and spiritual discontent by his colleagues. The "bad guy"
here is Martin Knight, the producer-friend of the film. The "good
guy" is a colleague named Harcourt.
Knight says
that the Nicholson character had a "kind of detachment," a
"talent for observation. He was always looking, always noticing." He
had a "fairness." This went with his "objectivity," with
his "control on life. He was always controlled," (controlled in the
sense of unimpassioned).
These sound
like good traits, do they not? Not so. That's to miss the point of the film. It
is the meaning and brief of the film that these qualities in a reporter and in
a man are bad qualities.
Harcourt,
Antonioni's spokesman, goes on to say, in rebuttal to Knight: "Though sometimes
I think he [Nicholson] regretted it. Once in Beirut he told me he felt angry
with himself, with his habit of observation. He said he thought that
objectivity in a reporter was often just a style, a system of conventions. The
public recognizes it, but it might have very little to do with the truth."
The announcer
then adds that there was certainly a "change" in Nicholson's recent
work. He seemed "more personally involved." To which Harcourt,
spotlighting for us Nicholson's problem and the desperation that leads to his
dropping out at the start of the film, adds: "I think he wanted to be
involved but didn't know how."
With the help
of the girl (she functions as sort of a guardian angel to Nicholson), he
discovers how. If you don't like the way the world is, if you find it so
terrible, so horrifying, then stop just filming revolutions — start making
them. Or, at the very least, get rid of this myth of filming
"objectively," showing both sides.
Finally,
Gaudi. And here we must shift gears a bit; for we leave the purely political
realm and enter, say, a more existential realm, or, more precisely, the
religious realm of Antonioni's film: the question of the meaning of life.
It was while
walking to church that Gaudi was one day hit by a tram, and his death is as
famous to Catalonians as his architecture. No one recognized him. He was just
an anonymous old man who carried a Gospel book in his pocket and who was dying,
just another "passenger" on his way to glory.
Cab drivers
refused to pick him up, thinking he was a beggar. He was finally taken to the
hospital of the Holy Cross, where he had once said he would like to die.
His funeral
cortege was nearly a half-mile long. The story is told by an eyewitness that
some of the mourners were not sure who the dead man was, but they thought he
was a bullfighter.
Nicholson's
death in the film takes place in a hotel (the Hotel de la Gloria) near a bullring,
where we hear the shouts of the crowd (earlier in the film Nicholson is shown
in a Rococo German church, with the Stations of the Cross prominently displayed
behind him).
Antonioni
said that he did not show Nicholson's death because in any case "he was already
dead." That is, the Reporter Nicholson. We are to assume that had
Nicholson, instead of Robertson, died of a heart attack in that Chad hotel at
the start of the film, his life would have had no meaning. And if the
"gunrunner" Robertson had been killed by the assassin's bullets in
that Glory Hotel at the end of the film, his life would have had a meaning.
Like Gaudi, to give your life meaning you have to involve yourself, immerse
yourself utterly in what you believe in, and not just be an observer.
When
Nicholson asks the girl if she thought Gaudi was crazy, she replies, "What
do you think?" And he answers, "No, he wasn't."
Cinemonkey magazine, volume 5, number
2, Spring 1979, pp. 34-37
Hotel de la Gloria
(φωτο από το IMDb)
The Passenger (1975)
σκηνοθεσία:
Michelangelo Antonioni
σενάριο:
Mark Peploe
Enrico Sannia
Michelangelo Antonioni
Οι ηθοποιοί:
Jack Nicholson (as David Locke)
Maria Schneider (as Girl)
Jenny Runacre (as Rachel, Locke’s unfaithful wife)
Ian Hendry (as Martin Knight)
Steven Berkoff (as Stephen)
James Campbell (as Witch doctor)
Chuck Mulvehill (as David Robertson)
Jose Maria Caffarel (as Hotel keeper)
Angel Dep Pozo (as Police Inspector)
ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΟΓΡΑΦΟΣ
[ ανάρτηση 8 Δεκεμβρίου 2024 :
Antonioni
The
Passenger (1975)
Profession:
Reporter
film review by Theodore Price
Cinemonkey magazine Spring 1979
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