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