On Antonioni's American films

These notes contain spoilers that might mar the enjoyment of these films if you have not seen them. Unending thanks to the National Museum of Singapore for putting together a whoppingly extensive Antonioni retrospective, which has helped me understand many of his films in in their rightful context.

Both Zabriskie Point and The Passenger were distributed by MGM, so I'll make a gross generalization and group them together as Antonioni's 'American period,' even though The Passenger was made through foreign coin and shot in various parts of Africa and Europe. My grouping them together has more to do with their form, one that he flirts with briefly and subsequently abandons in his later films. Having just seen The Passenger for the first time today, it has struck me that both films represent a departure from the style Antonioni is famous for (what Pasolini hails as his 'obsessive framings').

Instead of the obsessive colors and elaborate mise en scène of his previous films up to Blow-Up, both films are 'looser,' in the sense that the camera is often taken off the tripod and tracks: the camera is often handheld in these films. Moreover, the actors have become less 'moving space' as in his other films, but rightful stars; though plot is still scarce in his American films, the actors ground the films with their presence. Long takes are abandoned in favor of short, quick cuts that convey blocks of information (most notably, the signboards in Zabriskie Point; and, for once in Antonioni's films, establishing shots, as found in The Passenger); for the first time, a conversation between two characters is punctuated by cuts, a Hollywood master shot/shot-reverse shot strategy; here, a cut is used to separate two blocks of information (unlike his other films, where the space between one shot and the next lies an entire world of implications), becoming somewhat similar to Pasolini's 'cinemes': the short, almost unruly shots that make up Pasolini's cinema. Because of this, movement (and therefore, space) is less emphasized; although landscapes still play an important role, they form a different relationship with the characters; through excessive medium-shots and long-shots, the characters are entirely plastered into their environment, forming an organic whole (instead of the dissonant whole in his previous films).

Most possibly, this style is used to reflect a growing social consciousness on Antonioni's part. The three films made during the 70's all contain overt elements of social commentary - Zabriskie Point about the '68 protests, Chung Kuo - Cina about Communist China, and The Passenger about the Western world's contribution to the horrific crimes committed in Africa. The characters in these films are hence inseparable from their geopolitical milieus, probably reflecting Antonioni's interest in an 'investigative reality' (ironically, one already debunked in Blow-Up). These short 'cinemes' serve to construct narratives much more coherent than any 60's Antonioni film (although to a lesser extent in Chung Kuo, whose sprawling narrative is made more abstract by its sheer ambition).

In terms of pace (what I gather as the speed at which new events occur in the plot), the 'American period' films are much sparser than his 60's output, although their new choppy style make them seem quicker as new information is delivered more rapidly. In fact, their narrative style reminds me of an American contemporary of Antonioni, Monte Hellman, specifically his two existentialist Westerns Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting (is it merely the Jack Nicholson factor and the fact that they're all set in deserts?). The two Antonioni films do retain some auteur touches though, as in the wedding that Jack Nicholson witnesses in The Passenger, and the famous hallucinatory scene at Zabriskie Point (are the other couples who join in the lovemaking real? or are they just manifestations, metaphors of youthful love? I refuse to see any symbolism; to me, I only see one couple and that is Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin). But while the narrative events might be called 'Antonioni-esque,' the 'invisible' camera, unlike his usual 'felt' camera, is certainly not.

These newfound strategies unravel at the end of both his 'American period' films, of course. In a sense, the endings of both films represent a return from the particular (the personal, the local) to the infinite (the unknowable, the enigma, the void), a return that his earlier films suggest. Zabriskie Point ends with a series of explosions; first the resort house of Daria's boss, then explosions of general emblems of American middle-class culture - a refrigerator stocked with food, a television, a shelf of books etc. The explosions become slower and slower, until movement, again, is intensified. The infinite is suggested by particles separating from each other, as the frame zooms closer and closer with each explosion. The universe is un-created; the world goes back to originary chaos when matter still lay in primordial soup. The film abruptly cuts back to Daria, looking at the house, all quiet. She then drives away in the sunset, leaving us uncertain if it really happened or it was just a hallucination.

The Passenger famously ends with a virtuoso 7-minute long take that slowly brings the camera from the hotel room interior, floating away from Jack Nicholson's body on the bed, through a window grate into the exterior, then circles round to view Nicholson's corpse in the hotel room from outside. Meaning eventually gives way to pure form, a camera whose presence is readily 'felt'; it is the short, choppy cuts earlier in the film that truly emphasize the power of this sequence. Antonioni explains that he wanted the camera to resemble Nicholson dying. The result is almost Zen-like. Nicholson, who has been escaping from his life and reality so much so that he had to replace the life of someone else (creating a fiction for himself), is finally reconciling with the world around him through his death. In the face of death, life is pushed to the infinite, the precipice where life ends and death begins; it is almost as if Nicholson, who has been struggling to forge his identity separate from the world (running away from it), is merging with his environment; he becomes the dust created by the car, the shouts of the young boys playing soccer, the distinct trumpet solo coming from afar; he becomes total, the infinite, the universe. Is it merely a coincidence that the real last scene is also that of Maria Schneider getting into the car and driving off into the sunset?

The final shot of The Passenger

Notes on Blow-Up

Unlike many other Antonioni films that are mise-en-scène-based (positive space), Blow-Up is a montage-based film (negative space). The film's elusive diegesis directs perspective onto what is beyond the frame, the space between two edits. Onscreen narrative is not only unreliable, it is constantly attacked, contradicted and undermined by paradoxical dialogue and impossible scenarios. Characterization is thwarted by dialogue; characters often lie and contradict themselves (in both the first antique shop scene and the scene where David Hemmings talks to Vanessa Redgrave about his wife). The characters are not concrete; they are fluid, like flickering specters under the camera (one scene even has Redgrave vanishing mysteriously into the crowd; at the end Hemmings' figure fades into the green field). They do not have fixed identities - when we first see Hemmings, he is an undercover photojournalist; then he becomes an arrogant mod-fashion photographer who disregards a protest placard; then he becomes a detective trying to solve a murder mystery through his photographs.

Narrative is further complicated with incongruent scenarios. Similar to the aesthetic of horror films, impossible time or geography is introduced to question the normalcy of the diegesis. There is a fantastic instance of creative geography when Redgrave runs out of frame after her initial meeting with Hemmings, only to run into frame again, a few scenes later, at Hemmings' studio, as if no time has elapsed in between. When Hemmings asks her how she knew his address, she just shrugs it off. Logic as confined within the film is defied here; it is a logic that hints at forces greater than the film's diegesis. We see this again when Hemmings leaves a studio teeming with assistants and models only to return, a while later, to a completely empty studio. When the model at the rave exclaims 'I am in Paris!' how can we know for sure that the house Hemmings stumbles into is really in London and not actually in Paris?

The linear quality of montage allows for multiple realities (if we inspect his varying use of distances, POVs, and timings, it could even be said that every shot is a separate reality) to be laid alongside each other, subtly interacting within an open set of probabilities. The incongruous object is our guide to this dissonance: the discarded guitar neck creates a riot in the concert room, but is regarded as trash in the streets; Hemming's doppelganger mistakes Hemmings' car for his. The narrative is thus always collapsing upon itself, because these realities do not become a cogent whole. The whole's instability creates a series of blind fields that extend beyond the frame; in other words, the frame does not contain, it endlessly expands; what we see is always fading into what we cannot see, and vice versa.

At the same time, it can be said that Antonioni's aesthetic is distinctly Japanese. Symmetry is avoided whether in the contradictory plot construction or the off-center framing. The mise-en-scène, in particular, does not develop around human bodies (unlike classical Hollywood cinema, humans are not the locus of camera movements). The camera tracks to put human shapes at odd angles with the lines of the spaces they're in; the space in the sets are often offset with odd corners protruding out (getting in the way of characters' heads), dissected by screens and large beams that obscure and intrude into the characters' bodies. It is this asymmetry that does not allow for facile interpretations: the film can be about the unreliability of photographic reality and images (even cinematographic reality, since it's fundamentally anti-cinema), a social reflection on 60's mod London, an elegy to mortality etc., but it is always more. Talking about it is talking around it; these are merely the cultural (local) aspects that can be understood; the enigma, the impossibility of knowing, is what we really love.