The Passenger: Antonioni's Cinema of Escape.

During the final stages in the shooting of a film provisionally titled Profession: Reporter, Michelangelo Antonioni in an interview with Philip Strick ("The Antonioni Report," Sight and Sound [Winter 1973/74]) talked about his enthusiastic involvement in the development of its script (from a story by Mark Peploe titled "Fatal Exit") and how it would inevitably be his most "rationalized" film. He described the film's story as a complex mosaic which in the shooting began to crystal- ize: "one day everything was clear in my mind, every part of the script" (31). Antonioni indicated that he made alterations in the original script (credited to Peploe, Peter Wollen, and Antonioni) to fit his own ideas and especially in its beginning and ending sequences. In a later context, he described the film to Gideon Bachman as "my story as an artist, as a director" ("Antonioni After China: Art Versus Science," Film Quarterly [Summer 1975], 27) and dwelt extensively on the point that he, as a filmmaker, discovered a heretofore unrealized "liberty" in his camera's abandonment of the film's characters and their movements. Such liberty, he added, provided him the opportunity to return to the piano-sequenza (the long camera take) which allows for "events to change and grow in the frame" (29). Since the first interview, of course, the film has been retitled and released as The Passenger (1975), along with Kubrick's Barry Lyndon perhaps that year's most uncompromising and challenging narrative film. The total structure of Antonioni's The Passenger resembles those Gaudian architectural landscapes which stand out so prominently in the film's narrative and visual center: a contrary blend in its natural and functional form of surrealistic spatial freedom and organic unity. The key to Antonioni's mosaic, however, resides in those beginning and
ending sequences which form a frame for the film's opposed patterns of narrative entrapment and cinematic freedom. While David Locke (Jack Nicholson), detached journalist turned reluctantly involved gun- runner, fails to escape the prison of self and narrative fate through his efforts at identity transmigration, Antonioni moves his camera - and ideally, his audience - through the symbolic bars of Locke's last win- dow and thereby frees the film from the rigorous mechanics of its plot structure and the grim implacabilities of its central character's fate.

THOMAS ALLEN NELSON, The Passenger: Antonioni's Cinema of Escape, Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Autumn, 1977),
pp. 198-213