Word: antonioni
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...beginning, it makes each images new, each person distinct and alone, throwing our soft store of working axioms out the window. Audiences are always comfortable watching social comedies because they can immediately grasp the values and understand what they are being ordered to respond to within each given frame. Antonioni puts it all up for re-examination. Some time ago, he said...
...symbols, some of them easier to work with than others, most pliable and multi-facilitating. And for a home base, we get Antonioni's old favorite, that most accommodating of all vehicles, the desert...
...desert dominates The Passenger--it seems to sprawl everywhere except for the lush, over-cultivated scenes in England. A key to Antonioni's method, the desert offers no insights in the Eureka-gents-now-you-understand-the-movie sense. It serves, besides suggesting a million metaphorical possibilities, simply as a stage: anything Antonioni dots it with becomes the thing on which the audience must focus its attention. And so the film crawls along agonizingly, a slow methodical parade of pictures to be explored. The pace itself gives Antonioni's existential tendencies time to flower into unmistakable statements, momentary images which...
...wouldn't normally waste its time on, an audience can, with no qualms, just walk out. Many people will no doubt walk out of The Passenger. So much of it is unpleasant, and more will simply be tedious for those who aren't geared to the director. Only Antonioni's vision of a decadent, uninvolved and overinformed western civilization and its own use of the camera eye corresponds easily to a conventional sense of social criticism. David Locke, the journalist, his wife and his news colleagues all lead prechanneled lives, never confronting nature or themselves. The newsmen chase facts which...
...flaccidly interviews the only figures he can understand or even find, western-supported African fat cats. When he interviews a witch-doctor who turns the news camera on him. Nicholson has got to turn it off immediately, before it records the vacuity. It is a powerful statement by Antonioni, as his camera slaps down other film makers who have looked at the motion picture image as substitution for an exposition of the truth, synthesizing it with their small, willful, glib ways of portraying the world. Fittingly, Antonioni would have us see him in that witch doctor's role...