Profession: reporter

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Movie
German title Profession: reporter
Original title Professione: reporter
Country of production Italy , France , Spain , USA
original language English , German , Spanish
Publishing year 1975
length 121 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Michelangelo Antonioni
script Michelangelo Antonioni,
Mark Peploe ,
Peter Wollen
production Carlo Ponti ,
Alessandro by Norman
music Iván Vándor
camera Luciano Tovoli
cut Michelangelo Antonioni,
Franco Arcalli
occupation
synchronization

German dubbing files

Occupation: reporter (original title: Professione: Reporter , English release title: The Passenger , German Alternative title: The reporter ) is a feature film by Michelangelo Antonioni from the year 1975 . In this psychodrama with culturally pessimistic undertones borrowed from the thriller , Jack Nicholson plays a reporter who takes on the identity of a deceased arms dealer.

action

The reporter David Locke tries to contact freedom fighters in the desert of Chad . He fails and his car gets stuck in the desert sand. He reaches his hotel exhausted. He discovers that David Robertson, a mysterious businessman who lives in the same hotel and looks like him, is lying dead in his room, apparently having died of a heart attack. Locke, frustrated with his life, assumes the dead person's identity and exchanges the photos in the passports. From now on he poses as Robertson and pretends that Locke has died.

Locke returns to London , fetches some personal items from his apartment and then travels to Munich to keep Robertson's appointments from his calendar . In a locker he finds photos of weapons and ammunition; Robertson was apparently an arms dealer. In a Munich church he meets a rebel from Chad and a German middleman, from whom he receives a large sum of money as a deposit on the weapons. Robertson's next appointment is to Barcelona , where he is supposed to meet another business partner in the Umbraculo , but he doesn't show up.

Meanwhile, Locke's former boss Martin Knight and Locke's wife Rachel are preparing a memorial broadcast for Locke in London. They try to clarify the circumstances of Locke's death and look for Robertson, whose lead leads to Barcelona. Knight flies there; Locke flees from him to the Palau Güell , where he meets an enigmatic young girl whom he has already seen in London. He asks her to help him, and the two of them flee Barcelona in Locke's car.

After Rachel has picked up her husband's remains at the embassy in Chad, she discovers that there is someone else's photo in the passport. She travels to Spain, not realizing that agents of the Chadian government are following her. They are looking for the arms dealer Robertson to kill him as he is supplying weapons to the rebels.

Locke tries to give up his stolen existence and flee to Tangier , but the girl convinces him to keep his role in order to fulfill Robertson's legacy. You rent a room in the Hotel de la Gloria in the small southern Spanish town of Osuna ; Locke is tired and exhausted and asks the girl to leave. The camera leaves the room; one sees the girl in the forecourt, then the two Chadian government agents, one of whom goes to the hotel. The two leave soon afterwards. Rachel appears accompanied by the police. The camera turns and you can see Locke's room from outside. Locke is dead and you can't see his face because he's turned to the side. When the policeman asked if Rachel recognized Robertson, she said, "I never knew him." The girl answered yes.

History of origin

Antonioni wanted to make a film called Tecnicamente Dolce (Technically Sweet) as the third film of his contract with MGM , which was to be set in the Amazon region . After two years of preparation time for this film, including the search for locations in Sardinia and the Amazon and the solution of technical problems such as lighting the jungle, the film was canceled by Carlo Ponti shortly before shooting began. Since Zabriskie Point had made losses for MGM and the content was controversial in America, Antonioni was asked to refrain from this expensive project. Instead, Antonioni took up his profession: reporter . The film is based on the story Fatal Exit by Mark Peploe , the brother of Antonioni's partner from the 1960s, Claire Peploe. Topics that should already play a role in Tecnicamente Dolce , such as the motif of the change of identity and the longing for “wild” places and death, were taken up again in this story. Planned narrative experiments - Antonioni wanted to tell large parts of the story in tecnicamente Dolce in front of the screen - were brought in in Profession: Reporter .

Antonioni initially hesitated to work on foreign material for the first time, but then worked with the film theorist Peter Wollen over parts of the script in his own way and stated: "Now it looks more like espionage, is more political." Jack Nicholson was won over for the lead role and was ultimately so enthusiastic about the project that he later acquired the worldwide rights to the film. He was supported by Maria Schneider , who had recently become very well known through The Last Tango in Paris , who joined the film at the last minute. Antonioni had to shoot quickly because Nicholson was bound by other film projects. Therefore, with the preparation time of the individual scenes unusually short for Antonioni, large amounts of film were shot in order to have a sufficient selection of material available for editing. The actual conception of the film should then take place at the editing table.

The film was produced for MGM by the Italian Compagnia Cinematografica Champion in international coproduction with the Spanish CIPI Cinematografica SA and the French Les Films Concordia . Filming took place in Spain, Germany, England and Algeria , where the desert near Fort Polignanc served as the setting for the scenes that were to take place in Chad.

The first cut of the film was four hours long; the film was then shortened to two hours and twenty minutes and finally to a running time of two hours. The version marketed for the American market under the name The Passenger was a little shorter because two scenes were missing compared to the European version: One shows Locke picking up some personal items from his London apartment, the other takes place in an orange grove in Spain, where Locke and the girl were resting. The American cut version created at the instigation of MGM was criticized by Antonioni. In particular, the fact that the London scene, which illustrated the failure of Locke's marriage, had fallen away, Antonioni described as a "massive mistake" .

reception

The film premiered in Italy on February 28, 1975. It was released in American cinemas on April 9, 1975, and then also launched in the Federal Republic of Germany on May 16, 1975.

criticism

Antonioni's last film before a five-year break was received very ambiguously, especially in America. Acting performances and camera work received praise, but his unclear film language sometimes caused irritation among the audience and critics. Praise like Vincent Canby's in the New York Times was rather rare: “Profession: Reporter […] is first and foremost an extraordinary suspense melodrama about Locke's efforts to become the man he knows nothing about, but whose life, in his opinion, has more meaning has as his own. […] In the course of the film […] an abundance of details unfolds that act like dozens of small mirrors, through which the life is reflected that he never led, but could have led. His journey through Europe [...] brings him closer to the truth than to suicide. […] Profession: Reporter has an insatiable appetite for landscape and local landmarks. [...] It is probably Antonioni's most entertaining film. "

Antonioni replied to the American critics from his point of view of the European film artist: “I think you Americans take films too literally. You're always trying to figure out the 'story' and some hidden meanings where there might not be any. For you, a film has to be totally rational, with no unexplained secrets. Europeans, on the other hand, see films as I intend to see them, as visual works of art to which one should respond as if it were a painting, subjectively rather than objectively. For Europeans, the 'story' is secondary and they are not afraid of what you call 'ambiguity'. "

Roger Ebert was one of those who gave a negative review in 1975, but he revised his judgment in 2005: “In 1975 I didn't admire this film. In one negative review, I found that Antonioni had changed the title from The Reporter to The Passenger, apparently as a decision that it should be more about the girl than Locke. Or maybe it's just about passengers traveling into the lives of others, Locke into Robertson's, the girl into Locke's. More than 30 years later, I admire the film. I can feel more sympathy for him. When a movie so steadfastly refuses to speak up at the story level, all that remains is the mood. Profession: Reporter is about being in a place where nobody knows or wants to know you and you recognize your own insignificance. "

The review of the Lexicon of International Films is representative of the predominantly positive European criticism : “Antonioni sums up […] the thematic and cinematic motifs of his previous work and arrives at a pessimistic analysis of the alienated forms of communication and perception in the modern world. The spread-like plot is only a pretext and background for a masterfully staged visual discourse about the pseudo-character of the real and the reality of fiction. "

Hans-Christoph Blumenberg states that Antonioni created “an oppressive climate of total existential alienation from the start” . Locke is "a 'homeless person' in the concrete sense of the word" . The film drifts "with its wrong movements [...] systematically aimless, with bold montage sequences reminiscent of Jacques Rivette , merging different levels of time and perception."

Awards

Profession: Reporter was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival . At the Bodil Awards in 1976 the film won the prize for Best European Film. At the Sindacato Nazionale Giornalisti Cinematografici Italiani awards ceremony in 1976, both Antonioni and Luciano Tovoli won the Nastro d'Argento for Best Director . Jack Nicholson won the Spanish Premio Sant Jordi for Best Foreign Actor in 1977 for his performance in this film, together with those in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and in The Art of Love .

Aftermath

In 2005 the film was shown again in its European version in American cinemas and shortly afterwards also appeared on DVD. The reviews reacted mostly positively to enthusiastically. For example, Chicago Reader's Don Druker considers the film “a masterpiece, one of Michelangelo Antonioni's best works. [...] Less of a thriller (although a mysterious mood is omnipresent) than a meditation on the problems of knowledge, personal responsibility and the relationship between artist and work. "

Film critic Neil Young sees the film "in a postmodern way forward looking in the way it treats identity, especially in the context of travel within Europe" . The film is "a kind of original text for [...] variations on similar themes" , as they are also dealt with in Dominik Graf's Der Felsen , Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar and Nanouk Leopold's Guernsey .

Film analysis

The thriller as an external form

Antonioni investigates in his job: Reporter does not investigate a historical phenomenon in its full range, as in Zabriskie Point , but focuses on the existential problems of an individual's fate. As an outer form, he uses that of the thriller, but without serving the conventions of this genre too much. Antonioni explains: “I knew one thing for sure: I had to minimize the tension, although of course some of it had to be left over - and some of it is left over, even if only as an indirectly conveyed element. It would have been easy to make a thriller. I had the pursuer and the pursued, but it would have been banal. That didn't interest me. ”The MacGuffin in the Hitchcockian sense, the core of tension in the film that drives the plot forward, which in the case of a job: Reporter would be the question of whether the rebels get the guns or not, is accordingly neglected in the film and in the Just “forget” the course of the action.

The doppelganger motif

The director chooses a motif that is popular in film and literature in order to sound out the states of the human soul, that of the doppelganger. Already Edgar Allan Poe , Oscar Wilde , Guy de Maupassant and others it had used the Unentwirrbarkeit the fates of two is foreign, but show ähnelnder or equal meaning people. While the theme at Zabriskie Point was the escape into other levels of experience, Antonioni takes an even more radical approach here: the main character flees his old life out of weariness and disillusionment into the life of another person. While the doppelganger motif in films like The Student of Prague , for example, is dressed up romantically as the result of a devil's pact and there, according to Chatman, fatefully leads to death “as a shocking consequence of violence”, the protagonist's death here is a peaceful function of nature, Goal of life in the mutual conditioning of life and death.

From the moment of identity change to Locke's death, he carries the premonition of death and the longing for it with him. When asked at Munich Airport how long he would like to rent a car, he replied “For the rest of my life”. When he takes the cable car across the port in Barcelona, ​​he leans out the window and spreads his arms like wings like an angel. In Spain an old man sitting under a large white wooden cross shows him the way. These and other references in Antonioni's cryptic symbolic language make death omnipresent in the film.

Escape from the historical context

The theme of escape was taken up by Antonioni in the choice of his filming locations, beginning in the desert and ending in the dry expanse of Andalusia . The archaic character of these places exerted a special charm on him: “It wasn't just the desert in and of itself that attracted me, I always had the feeling that I had to live in a different historical context, in a non-historical world or in a context, who is not aware of his historicity. […] I […] noticed a kind of hidden dissatisfaction […] in the sense that my characters have to leave the historical context in which they and I live - the urban, bourgeois, civilized - in order to be in to enter a different context, for example the desert or the jungle, where they can at least imagine a freer and more personal life and where there is the possibility that this freedom also works. "

The lack of history of the locations corresponds to that of the characters: they appear in the film without traditional exposition and without a detailed history, and their rootlessness can be characterized by a few words like Locke's “So good! I don't care! ” When his car gets stuck in the desert sand, which implies all his weariness with life.

Action motivation of the characters and acting implementation

Locke's motivation to swap his identity with the dead doppelganger is at least partially made clear in the flashbacks. The contradictions and ambivalences both in Locke's work and in his private life are highlighted for the viewer: Locke is disappointed and frustrated by the constraints and conventions of his journalistic work; in addition, his marriage failed because of a cold love. When they meet in the desert, Robertson appears to him as an independent person freed from constraints, whose paths are apparently guided by spontaneous desires. He achieves understanding with the people he meets because he deals with tangible things , with goods, and not like Locke with "words, images, fragile things."

The girl's motivation for helping Locke and accompanying him on his escape is even more unclear than Lockes. We learn even less from her, not even her name. However, there are hidden indications in the film that the girl could very well have an identity that motivates her actions: She shows up in some places that Locke visits as Robertson to keep appointments from his calendar, so she may be the one there recorded mysterious "Daisy". Somewhat clearer is an incidental note towards the end of the film, which the viewer can only perceive when concentrating on the story: Locke wants to check into the hotel in Usuna and shows Robertson's passport, but the hotel owner says he does not need the passport. because Mrs. Robertson has already checked in and he only needs a passport. The consequence of this would be that the girl is the wife of the dead Robertson, which would explain why she motivates Locke again and again to hold out his role as Robertson, so to speak to fulfill the legacy of the dead man.

To portray the uprooted Locke, who is looking for a functioning identity, Antonioni instructed Nicholson to take back his well-known expressive game. Nicholson, chosen for the role by Antonioni because of his “cold, Northern European face” , convincingly implements the role's requirements, in Arrowsmith's opinion, “because the softness and expressionless colorlessness of his portrayal are so convincing for a man who desperately needs an identity needs [...] who lives a borrowed life like a vampire ” . Chatman also praises Nicholson's unusually reserved game. He communicates "wonderfully to what degree the character is controlled by Freud's  [...] death instinct, the way he speaks and moves, always a little too deliberately, even forced, as if he had to fight the impulse with every gesture to lie down and let [...] waves of defeat roll over you. "

Questioned the objectivity of the image

The flashbacks that illustrate Locke's earlier work as a reporter are abrupt temporal and spatial displacements in the film. You can see him interviewing an African dictator and later criticized by Rachel for not being critical enough of him. Another flashback shows him interviewing a medicine man in Africa, who however turns the situation around, turns the camera on Locke and wants to question him, but Locke remains insecure and silent. Real documentary footage showing the deadly shooting of a rebel in Africa is also incorporated into the film, as if Locke had shot it.

These flashbacks serve as carriers of memory: Locke's earlier identity is manifested in these memories, and yet, due to their nature as film material, they are always shaped by a subjective point of view. Antonioni explains: “A journalist sees reality with a certain degree of consistency, which, however, is the ambiguity of one's own point of view. It appears to him - but only to him - to be objective. Locke sees things his own way, and as the director I play the role of the journalist behind the journalist: I add more dimensions to this reproduced reality. ” This questioning is most evident in the scene when Locke interviews the African dictator. You can see the video image of the interview in which the dictator looks self-confident and convincing, but Antonioni's objective camera also shows the shooting of this interview. In a 360 ° pan of the camera with the aim of capturing the full truth and not just a section, you can see how the ruler is surrounded by countless soldiers and police officers and his own words that peace in the country has been restored, Lies.

By throwing these flashbacks into the film, Antonioni criticizes journalistic practices on the one hand (the liberation movements in Africa were in full swing in the 1970s and the often one-sided reporting in the western media about them could, as a convinced Marxist, give Antonioni cause for such criticism) , but also criticism of the nature of images themselves. The question that Antonioni asks is what relation images have to reality and whether not every attempted objectivity in the representation of the real is doomed to failure from the start and is illusory, since only parts of the whole can be captured. This discourse on the importance of documentary images can also be seen as processing Antonioni's own experiences as a documentary filmmaker in Antonioni's China , which was created immediately before .

Since Locke finds himself in a new situation with the stolen identity, he can only be certain of the memories of his old identity shown in the flashbacks. Brunette expresses a guess about his name in the film. John Locke , from whom David Locke's name could be derived, was a representative of empiricism and postulated that people were born without innate ideas, that their minds were an empty board, a tabula rasa on which memory writes. Memory is the only necessary and sufficient criterion for a person's identity.

Function of architecture

On the roof of Casa Milà , Locke meets the girl for the second time in Barcelona. Antonioni emphasizes the bizarre plot through the choice of his locations

Antonioni depicts the most diverse aspects of architecture in the film, starting with the primitive dwellings in the desert, through the sober functional architecture of London, the baroque opulence of the Munich church, the romantic chaos of Gaudí's buildings, to the postmodern loneliness of a southern Spanish city, which in its simplicity Closes the circle to the African buildings.

When asked about the function of the Gaudi building in the film, Antonioni says: "Gaudi's towers may reveal the strange encounter between a man who bears the name of a dead person and a girl who bears no name at all."

In relation to the building, people always seem small and lost, they fade in the presence of the overpowering architecture. The modern man portrayed by Antonioni, rootless and freed from all ideology, cannot feel at home in any of these architectural environments. Locke is just as lost in these places as in the hostile environment of the desert; an aspect of Antonioni's analytically cool pessimistic worldview in this film.

Chatman notes that a clear assignment of meaning to architecture, as was possible in Antonioni's earlier films, does not work here. Characters and buildings in Profession: Reporters would not correspond in any discernibly meaningful way.

Philosophical and psychoanalytical interpretive approaches

The possibilities of interpreting the film are varied due to the openness and omissions of the script and Antonioni's veiled symbolic language. Representing the many attempts to interpret the film, here are just a few:

Aurora Irvine is reminded of Walter Benjamin's Angel of History , whose interpretation of the painting Angelus Novus by Paul Klee , on which Aurora Irvine is in a scene when Locke and the girl drive through an avenue and the girl turns to look at the street that has been left behind Angel can be seen, who, according to Benjamin, “looks as if he is about to move away from something [...] He has turned his face to the past [...] which is incessantly piling rubble upon rubble and hurling it at his feet . [...] a storm is blowing from paradise. [...] The storm drives him inexorably into the future, which he turns his back on [...] What we call progress is this storm. "

In their essay Reporting on The Passenger, Larysa Smirnova and Chris Fujiwara relate the film to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger , who dealt with the ontological fundamental questions of existence in Being and Time . They discuss the question of whether there is the possibility for a person not only to be like someone else, but actually to be someone else, and examine the different conceptions of death (Robertson's death and Locke's death) in the film regarding Heidegger's thesis that that Existence only distinguishes itself as real life in the awareness that it is merely a run-up to death, and death isolates existence, since no one can be represented in front of it.

In his essay Antonioni's The Passenger as Lacanian Text, Jack Turner reads the film as the implementation of Jacques Lacan's basic assumptions regarding the human soul: Locke represents the imaginary by living out his dreamlike fantasy of being someone else in order to escape reality. Rachel and Knight stand for the symbolic by trying to restore the regularities of order by looking for Robertson to shed light on Locke's "death". The girl stands for the real , something that stands outside of normal reality and is much more mysterious and inscrutable than the first impression one gets of her. In support of this, he argues that three times in the film glances in mirrors have a narrative function, according to Turner, references to the mirror stage postulated by Lacan as an essential developmental phase of human consciousness.

Arrowsmith sees Locke's change of identity and his journey as a process of transcendence , as "the transition of the ego beyond the boundaries of the self , merging or dying into a larger world, into the other that is beyond the ego" . Locke's journey is a “ way of the cross ” , on which he leaves behind his earlier, conventional and locked up life - Arrowsmith reads Locke's surname as a meaningful name ( Lock is the English term for bolt, lock, lock ) for being locked in. He had to leave behind his “ Faustian equipment” , the products of modern technology such as his car and his tape recorder, in order to be able to finally separate soul and body in the moment of transcendence shown by the camera in the final sequence. For the first time in Antonioni's work, the film therefore has an “obvious, but typically downplayed religious dimension” .

Cinematic means

The objective camera: the author as "the other"

The camera work at work: Reporter is mostly a distant view in the long shot . Landscape and architecture are depicted with a searching, panning gaze, and the people involved sometimes only seem to be in the picture by chance. Information is withheld from the viewer when the protagonists disappear behind closing doors or conversations can no longer be followed acoustically. As if the camera constantly had the urge to show something else and give in to distractions, it often neglects to advance the narrative. For example, she chases a man on a camel in the desert who is of no importance to the plot, instead of focusing on Locke. In another scene, when Locke and the girl are sitting in a restaurant, she waves to the cars passing by the window instead of doing her narrative task of putting the couple at the center of the audience's interest. Antonioni explains this urge to be obsessively distracted as follows: "Every time I am ready to make a film, a new one comes to mind." Antonioni is fascinated by the diversity of the world and the possibilities it offers to tell many other, more interesting stories. The so disregarded by the camera Locke remains small in his fate and insignificant for the course of the world.

The close-ups used sparingly by Antonioni work in a similar way; in the scenes between Locke and Robertson, for example, they are not used to create emotionality, but rather reflect the people's insecurity and lack of roots. As only parts of a face are shown, it is difficult for the viewer to grasp a facial expression in its entirety; important information to develop empathy for the protagonists is denied.

Antonioni explains his objective camera work, separated from the protagonists: “I no longer want to use the subjective camera, in other words: the camera that represents the point of view of a single person. The objective camera is the camera in the authors' hands. By using them, I let my presence become perceptible. ” The director is thus“ the other ”, an entity that can be felt in the film and whose freedom is godlike; his gaze is clearly differentiated from that of his characters and serves to objectify them and to avoid excessive emotionality. From this situation Antonioni also explains his relationship to the main character: “As a director I am a god. I can allow myself all kinds of liberties. In fact, the freedom that I take in this film is the freedom of the main character, which she tries to achieve by changing her identity. ” The often irritating effect of the objective camera makes it difficult for the viewer to interpret the course of the story himself , not to mention possible meanings that could be the content of the film. There is also a technique of, according to Chatman, "misguiding cuts" ; the viewing habits of the viewer and the cinematic conventions are undermined by unusual changes of perspective and axis jumps . Nonetheless, Chatman is convinced that Beruf: Reporter cannot be seen as a metafilm - as a film that constantly makes people aware of the filmmaking process, such as that made by Michael Snow and Jean-Luc Godard . The cinematic illusion and the story itself are too strong for that.

The color scheme: mannerist concealment of social symbolism

Dunes in the Algerian desert

Antonioni uses colors as a cinematic design element in the film. The function of the white and gray tones of the scenes in the African desert, corresponding to the earthy yellow and orange of the sand, is like that of an empty screen on which the identities of the protagonists can be projected and changed and transformed at will. In contrast to this, the director repeatedly uses expressive color surfaces and individual color accents, mostly in red, in the course of the film . In the final sequence, the boy wears a bright red shirt; a red van prevents Knight from following Locke in Barcelona.

Antonioni's handling of color and symbolism is most evident in the scene that takes place in the AVIS premises in Barcelona: the red and white of the company logo is first shown in extreme close-up, so that the viewer initially remains in the dark what it is about; the design of the picture suggests the American flag . In a mannerist manner, which is contrary to a naturalistic representation, Antonioni achieves an effect of concealment and ambiguity with his color design: the symbols of society are alienated and presented without an implicit approach to interpretation, thus indicating the difficulty of unambiguously semiotic unraveling. Arrowsmith puts this in relation to the theme of the film, what reality is and what pitfalls there are in the possibilities of depicting it: “The [...] immovability of visual codes disappears, only to open up in new and unexpected ways, as if one were still there never seen ”.

The A of the AVIS logo, which is prominently featured in the car rental scene, makes Chatman speculate that he is getting a reference to the omnipresent, all-powerful filmmaker. The A could stand for Antonioni as well as for author ; analogous to this, there is a mighty neon advertisement in Blow Up , which with the letters TOA shown there could also refer to Antonioni as the superordinate authoritative authority.

The flashbacks: chronologically and spatially broken narrative style

Antonioni breaks through both the linear narrative structure and the stylistic uniformity through the often irritating integration of flashbacks , which for the most part deal with Locke's journalistic work before the change of identity and partly have the character of a documentary. The most subtle flashback comes when Locke finally assumes Robertson's identity and swaps the photos in the passports. You can hear from the off as if it were a voice-over , a conversation between Locke and Robertson, until the audience realizes that the conversation is a tape recording that Locke is currently playing on his recorder. The camera pans to the side and looks through the door onto the porch. Locke and Robertson suddenly appear there and continue the conversation. The camera panning is therefore not only a spatial movement, but also a temporal movement due to the appearance of people from the past; Chatman is for the concept of Rückgleite (Glideback) as a classic flashback would be separated by a cut which is not the case here. The camera pans back and you can see Locke again sitting at the table, the conversation comes back from the tape, so the plot is back in the present.

Another example of Antonioni's non-linear, but rather associative style of editing is a flashback built into the wedding scene in the Bavarian chapel. While watching the wedding party, Locke ponders the status of his own marriage; the flashback that illustrates this shows him in the garden of his London home burning a pile of branches. His wife comes out of the house and asks him if he's crazy, to which he, laughing madly, affirms. There is a cut to Rachel standing at the window, but the garden she is looking at is empty. The next cut leads back to Locke in the church. His feet can be seen striding through the scattered petals of the wedding flowers. Locke and Rachel thus “share” a memory that Antonioni has put into film through a parallel montage that transcends time and is manifested in the flashback, abolishing the temporal and spatial consequences .

The final sequence: camera commentary on Locke's death

The seven-minute last big sequence of the film, realized in a single long tracking shot without editing, is considered to be one of the most famous final scenes in film history. Locke lies exhausted in his hotel bed in Osuna, the camera pans from him to the barred window that looks out onto the plaza. She drives slowly towards it, through the grille and out into the square. Outside you can see two men talking on a bench, a dog, a child playing with a ball, a driving school car doing its laps. The girl who left the room joins them. Locke's two pursuers drive up in a car; one goes to the hotel while the other talks to the girl. Shortly afterwards, the two leave again, and Rachel appears accompanied by the police. The camera rotates on its own axis and moves back to Locke's room. You can see Rachel, the policeman, the girl and the hotel owner standing by the bed of the now dead Locke.

Antonioni needed eleven days to complete this sequence. It could only be filmed between 3:30 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. to avoid a difference in light between inside and outside. First guided on rails under the ceiling, the camera in the window - the grille was removed invisibly for the viewer via a hinge - was taken over by a 30-meter-high crane construction and stabilized with gyroscopic elements in order to make the trip outdoors and the pan back without vibrations to be able to.

Antonioni wanted to show in this scene that Locke dies, but not how he dies. The leaving of the room by the camera is to be seen less as an escape of Locke's soul in the metaphysical sense than, according to Antonionis, more philosophically justified: Locke's existence as being-in-the-world in the Heideggerian sense is ended, the world and its tones ( scraps of Spanish language, the sound of a trumpet, the striking of a bell) is outside the window, the dead lock remains in the room.

The objectivity of the camera is taken to extremes with this tracking shot. The moment of death is not shown in a point-of-view shot of one of the protagonists, but rather the camera, as an external observer, chooses its very own perspective, which is very dominant due to the unusualness. The high degree of freedom of the camera in its movement allows the viewer to participate in this freedom; the viewer becomes aware of the artificiality of the camera view, and the subject of the status of images when depicting reality is recorded for the last time. Locke's death becomes peaceful, natural and de-emotionalized by the design of the sequence ; he has finally reached his goal of being "elsewhere" by leaving the earthly state.

Sound and music

The predominant elements in the film are the sparseness of the dialogues and long moments of silence, sparsely accentuated with distant everyday noises, with the hum of flies or the sound of the wind in the desert. Claudia Lenssen perceives Antonioni's “sound composition” as a complement to what is visible in the film, as a mise-en-scene that is expanded in the viewer's imagination and goes beyond the depicted cadrage .

Except for a few flute tones in the desert and the sound of Spanish guitars towards the end of the film, there is no music to be heard, and even there it has no commentary or emotional character. Commenting on the use of music in his films, Antonioni said: “I have always been against traditional musical commentary, the soporific function that is usually assigned to it. It is this idea of ​​images to music, like writing an opera libretto, that I don't like. What I reject is this refusal to give space to silence, this urge to fill what is believed to be emptiness. "

literature

  • William Arrowsmith / Ted Perry (eds.): Antonioni - The Poet of Images , Oxford University Press 1995, ISBN 0-19-509270-8
  • Peter Brunette: The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni , Cambridge University Press 1998, ISBN 0-521-38992-5
  • Seymour Chatman: Antonioni, or, the Surface of the World , University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1985, ISBN 0-520-05341-9
  • Seymour Chatman, Paul Duncan (Ed.): Michelangelo Antonioni - Complete Films , Verlag Taschen, Cologne 2004 ISBN 3-8228-3086-0
  • Peter W. Jansen / Wolfram Schütte (eds.): Michelangelo Antonioni , Verlag Hanser, Series Film No. 31, Munich, Vienna 1984, ISBN 3-446-13985-0
  • Uwe Müller: The intimate realism of Michelangelo Antonioni , Verlag Books in Demand, Norderstedt 2004, ISBN 3-8334-1060-4

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Chatman 1985 pp. 176-202
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Chatman / Duncan pp. 134–149
  3. ↑ a b c d Claudia Lenssen: Annotated filmography in Jansen / Schütte pp. 198–211
  4. ↑ Official film website
  5. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Brunette pp. 128–145
  6. ↑ Antonioni's Characters Escape Into Ambiguity and Live (Your View Here) Ever After - review by Vincent Canby
  7. ↑ quoted from The Passenger . notcoming.com. October 17, 2005. Retrieved June 7, 2012.
  8. ^ Review by Roger Ebert
  9. ↑ Profession: Reporter. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  10. ↑ quoted on the cinema pages of the taz
  11. ^ Critique by Don Druker
  12. ^ Essay by Neil Young at www.jigsawlounge.co.uk
  13. ↑ a b Müller pp. 232-257
  14. ↑ Jack Nicholson's DVD audio commentary
  15. ^ Chatman: p. 181
  16. ^ Arrowsmith p. 128
  17. ↑ Chatman, p. 188
  18. ↑ Chatman 1985: 261
  19. ↑ a b DVD audio commentary by Aurora Irvine and Mark Peploe
  20. ↑ quoted from Walter Benjamin . Phil-o-sophie.ch. Retrieved June 7, 2012.
  21. ^ Larysa Smirnova and Chris Fujiwara: Reporting on The Passenger on fipresci.org
  22. Jump up ↑ Jack Turner: Antonioni's The Passenger as Lacanian Text on othervoices.org
  23. ↑ a b Arrowsmith / Perry pp. 146-175
  24. ↑ Geoffrey Nowell-Smith: Michaelangelo Antonioni in: The Oxford History of World Cinema , Oxford University Press 1996, ISBN 0-19-874242-8 , p. 568
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on March 25, 2007 .