QUESTIONING THE CODES: The Passenger as Self-Conscious Narrative

In Citizen Kane, the editor-in-chief complains that the film clips of "News on the March" that the staff have assembled do not add up to a convincing account of the life of Charles Foster Kane. Knight has the same problem assembling a portrait of David Locke from the footage at his disposal. We see three examples of Locke's work: an interview with a reactionary African ruler who assures him that the rebels have been defeated, a clandestine sequence showing the execution of a rebel leader (actual footage that Antonioni acquired from some undisclosed source), and an interview with a witch doctor who reverses roles with Locke, turning the camera on him as he says, "Now we can have a real interview."

Critics were quick to note that Locke's footage "queries the relationship between 'documentation' and political commitment." The shots of the execution, for instance, substitute for the real issues sensationalist "human interest ... .. the voyeurist newsreel ... display[ing] no analytic or moral responsibility of any kind."(1) And in the interview with the witch doctor, Locke's voice and manner hint at the underlying condescension of the colonialist attitude, an attitude that leaves him at a loss for a response when the witch doctor turns the camera on him. The interview with the African ruler is even more revealing of the duplicity of media rendition of visual events. As a purveyor of television news, Locke accepts without demur the dubious answers that his questions receive. There is a clear difference between the facts as they are reproduced by Locke's video camera and by Antonioni's film camera. In the video shot, the African ruler appears to be master of the situation: his disarmingly bespectacled, scholarly face dominates the screen in close-up, and his calm measured voice exudes a studied confidence ("There is no fighting anymore ... a couple of hundred guns in the hands of some common bandits ... There is no opposition; we are a unified nation"). But the real picture (corresponding to Rachel's memory of the scene), which is registered by the authorial camera, is quite different. The camera makes a 360-degree pan, suggesting that this is the full view and that Locke's video shot was only a small and misleading selection. Antonioni's shot begins with the face of Rachel, the critical onlooker, who remarks just before this flashback begins that David "wasn't any different" from the run-of-the-mill reporters who callously serve the system. The camera proceeds to show Locke kneeling in front of the African leader (though his head turns back questioningly toward Rachel). The pan continues, first picking up the leader, who says that peace has been restored; then we see soldiers, policemen, and servants, whose numbers belie this claim. Finally, the camera returns to Rachel's ironic face, thereby closing the loop and implying that now the full story has been told. It is the same kind of turnaround that the witch doctor performs.

The view, of course, is Rachel's, and we know that she had other (though unspecified) reasons for being dissatisfied with her husband. But Locke is no mere sellout: he did ask the African leader a touchy question about treatment of foreign nationals (though he was not very forceful in following up on it). A degree of servility was probably necessary if he wished to get the interview at all. Locke's participation may have been culpable, but it was understandably pragmatic. Besides, in his conversation with Robertson, he is conscious of his own colonialist attitudes: he says, "Even the way we talk to these people, the way we treat them, it's mistaken." Who knows? Perhaps Locke was the kind of man who felt that it is better to show what one can of the world's plight, even in the sensationalist television network terms forced on him, than it is to show nothing at all, just as it is better to make a pseudothriller for MGM than it is to make no film at all. And Locke finally does have the courage to opt out, though in a bizarre way.

The Passenger, of course, goes beyond an inquiry into television news reporting. It ponders the very means by which stories are told through visual media. On the face of it, The Passenger resembles Zabriskie Point in using a narrative design familiar to the movies since Griffith, that of parallel crosscutting. First we see Locke in the baroque church in Munich, then Rachel and Knight in the television editing room in London, then the rebel leader Achebe being abducted in Barcelona, then Locke unsuccessfully searching for "Daisy" in the Umbraculo, then the television studio for more of Locke's unedited footage, and so on. The form is familiar, and it generates some traditional suspense, raising the question, Will Rachel be able to reach David before the Chadian assassins do? The question is urged by a not unconventional chase sequence, in which Rachel and the police pursue Locke's convertible across southern Spain from Almeria to Osuna. It is clear that Rachel's motive in seeking him is less to get him back than to warn him of the imminent peril. Indeed, in the hotel restaurant, he receives that message, relayed through the police and the Girl. But so single-mindedly bent is he on escaping the past that he fails to hear the new and genuine note of urgency in his wife's communication, or if he does hear it, his own death urge prevents him from listening carefully.

Thus, The Passenger differs from L'avventura, with which it has been compared, by adhering to the exigencies of suspense, at least nominally, whereas L'avventura simply loses interest in the search for the missing person. It also differs from BlowUp, which ends inconclusively both about the murder and about Thomas's fate. Still, The Passenger is not a thriller: the possibilities of suspense are undercut by the inevitability and tranquility of Locke's death. Thrillers depend on a sense that there is something to be saved--a fair maiden, the secret position of the fleet, the plans, everything that Hitchcock means by "the Macguffin." Here, the cause--guns for rebels--is forgotten. Not only is the hero not saved, but the question of his salvation seems in some ways to be a red herring.

In exchange for suspense, The Passenger offers some narrative experiments. Though it does not exalt juggling with time--or "anachrony" (2)--into a structural principle, as does Technically Sweet, it makes effective use of flashbacks at certain interesting moments. The most spectacular is the early sequence in which Locke recalls his conversation with Robertson as he is forging his passport. The flashback enables Antonioni to show the men together and hence their striking resemblance in face and frame, thereby establishing the plausibility of the exchange of identity to come. That exchange is marked at the appropriate moment by a simple change of clothing: Locke trades his own plaid shirt for Robertson's solid blue jacketlike one (see Frame 121 above). The flashback dramatically enhances a scene that must proceed in silence. Locke's bizarre opportunity depends on Robertson's past, but we must be convinced of both the plausibility and the magic of the exchange of identity. The flashback format emphasizes the frailty and relativity of life: here one moment, gone the next, though reconstitutible in memory. It makes the circumstance's of Locke's own approaching death more ironic and poignant. The effect would have been much flatter if the meeting between the two men had taken place in its "proper" place in the discourse, before Locke set out to look for the rebels. Both mysteries--that of the opening desert scene and that of his discovery of Robertson's body --would have been compromised.

Antonioni heightens the impact of the flashback in an unusual way. Instead of a straight cut or dissolve to the past, he uses a single sustained camera movement, a pan from the seated Locke, intent on his forgery, around the room and out onto the veranda, where we see him conversing with Robertson. A narrative discontinuity is conveyed by a cinematic continuity.(3) The pan argues not only that the camera can take us back in time but that it can do so as smoothly and as summarily as narrative can, that the few seconds of discourse time it entails can summarize a much longer period of story time--the day or so that has elapsed since Locke and Robertson had their drink and chat together. Thus it is less a flashback than a glideback. This novel effect raises some interesting questions about the meaning of time and its reality, questions appropriate to the theme of death as passage. The smoothness of the transition is particularly interesting as a precursor of the long tracking shot that ends the film. Just as the camera in the later shot can be said to move the memory of Locke to the outdoors, the flashback pan moves the memory of Robertson (in Locke's mind) to a similar place. Death is spatialized and smoothed as a movement out of a room, a confined space, through a window. Time, too, is spatialized and so (in a way) rendered powerless; the perceptions and the mind are set, rather, to eternity. This is not the kind of death that one expects to see in a thriller. But then The Passenger is not an ordinary thriller.

There is another interesting aspect of the same sequence: the visual flashback is apparently anticipated by an overlapping auditory flashback. First, we see Locke's passport containing his photograph; then, after a swish-pan, we see Robertson's, containing his. The next shot shows Locke's profile (though half his head is out of frame, as if the identity switch had already begun). During this shot we hear Locke in voice-over saying, "Come in." Another voice-over--it proves to be Robertson 's--answers, "Sorry to barge in." Cut to an extreme close-up of Locke's passport, his hand, and a razor blade, with which he removes his own photograph. During this action, Locke says in voice-over, "Oh yes; come in. I saw you on the plane." Cut to another extreme close-up of Locke's face intent on his work: Robertson says in voice-over, "My name's Robertson." Here again, Antonioni plays with a convention and undercuts it. We assume from past movie experience that these voice-overs are in the head of the character who is remembering, that they are the auditory counterparts of visual mindscreen effects and a device for introducing the flashback material. So accustomed are we to this convention that a more literal explanation does not occur to us. So in the next shot we are surprised to see Locke's Uher tape recorder running. The dialogue has not been in Locke's mind at all--it is not in voice--over but comes from a perfectly natural source. (The original scenario obviated the surprise by beginning the scene with a shot of Locke turning the tape recorder on and locating the spot: we hear him in voice-over saying, "Wild track. Testing, one, two, three, four. Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb." Antonioni dispensed with this explanatory stuff, presumably in the interest of sustaining the general mystery of the doppelgänglich situation.) The naturalism of the tape recorder makes us all the less prepared for the panning flashback that occurs just at this moment. Locke's face in profile looks up as if he were reliving the conversation; the camera pans left as Robertson's voice on the recorder says, "I'm here on business"; the camera moves to the window as Robertson's voice says, "I've been in so many places the last few years. It doesn't make any difference any more." We assume that we are still in Locke's point of view, that he is looking reflectively out the window. But no, for Robertson emerges in a blue shirt, followed by Locke in a plaid shirt. The flashback ends in a similar way: inside the room, Locke walks off frame left to get drinks, leaving the camera on Robertson, whose eyes follow him to the left. Then the camera leaves him and pans right until it finds Locke, in the present moment again, at the table, preparing the passports and listening to Robertson's voice on the tape recorder. The apparent discrepancy, of movement right rather than left, turns out to signal the glideback to the present. The camera is moving through time as well as through space. This transformation of the meaning of camera movements calls into question the nature of space, time, and, for that matter, mortality.

A second flashback in the film is quite different in conception but no less remarkable in effect. It goes from a shot of Locke in the Munich church to Locke " back then" burning leaves in his own front yard in London. It is marked conventionally, by a straight cut, but its meaning is more obscure. Locke is observing the wedding--then suddenly he is burning leaves with gusto, what seems to be a destructive smile playing on his lips. (In the scenario, not just leaves but other 11 old things" are burned--cartons, clothes, even a chair.) The flashback seems to function as Locke's commentary on marriage in general and on his own marriage in particular. In the next shot, Rachel rushes outdoors in her slip, puzzled by Locke's behavior. Then, to make the effect all the odder, the film cuts to a shot of Rachel standing fully dressed, looking out the window at the yard, where neither fire nor Locke are to be seen. We infer that the present story moment has been resumed and that, whether by accident or by telepathy, Rachel in London has recalled an old incident at precisely the moment when it crosses Locke's mind in Munich. She has no reason as yet to believe that he is still alive.

THE WANDERING CAMERA AND THE MISLEADING CUT

As in Antonioni's previous films, many camera movements in The Passenger wander from the subject at hand. But the reason now seems to be different. In an earlier film like It deserto rosso, the wandering was generally associated with a character's point of view, becoming typically a mark of his or her distraction. In contrast, in ThePassenger, and from theoutset, the camera seems to wanderon its own, in an objective, not a subjective, manner. In an interview in 1975, Antonioni said, "I no longer want to employ the subjective camera, in other words the camera that represents the viewpoint of the character."(4)

At the plot level, the effect is not distraction but spatial disorientation, both for the character and for the audience. In the desert, for example, a shot will typically start with a broad pan from left to right. The camera seems to be looking for something. The effect is strangely tense, as if the camera itself did not know what to expect. Locke is often picked up accidentally and contingently, as if diegesis (or at least this diegesis) were not the camera's real responsibility. And it is just as likely to leave him again in mid shot as it moves on. True, Locke himself is looking for something, for a meeting with the rebels. But the camera seems to be conducting its own inquiry, one not quite at the service of the character.(5) It remains aloof, alert to independent inquiry, even to the possibilities of a completely different story. What is the story, it asks, of the enigmatic dromedary and rider at the beginning of the film or of the driver-training car at the end? What is the story of the passengers in the cars racing back and forth on the highway, which it momentarily follows instead of staying with Locke and the Girl in the hotel restaurant?

Even the central event of the film, Locke's donning of Robertson's blue shirt, takes place offscreen. Locke, smoking a cigarette, has been pondering Robertson's corpse: he takes the cigarette out of his mouth and looks up. The camera wants to see, too: it tilts upthe wire to view the ceiling fan whirling about. Then it moves left and down to Locke, who is already dressed in the blue shirt: the act takes place almost gratuitously, offscreen. The camera avoids drama, as a Greek tragedy avoids the show of violence. Temps mort has won out over temps vivant.

Why? Antonioni tells a story that perhaps sheds some light on his camera's wandering.(6)

One morning last November I was flying over Soviet Central Asia. I was looking down at the vast desert bounded on the east by the Aral Sea, whitish and inert, and thinking-- about The Kite, the film that I hope to make in those parts in spring: a story, a world that was never mine, and for that very reason pleasing to me. And thus it was, while preoccupied with this story and watching it fix itself docilely to the landscape below, I felt my mind wandering to other, faroff thoughts. It's always like that. Every time I'm ready to begin a film, another one comes to mind.

Antonioni is so fascinated by the diversity of the world that he has to guard himself against distraction, against allowing his camera to be led away from its present purposes. He pulls it back to the main subject, but reluctantly, as if it were loath to leave the trace of stories that might have been. Pascal Bonitzer finds in this attitude a "fascination with chance, and, on the screen, the effects of chance, erratic traces, unclear trajectories, vague gestures, which are inscribed, as by a lapse, a falling asleep of the camera, on the lens, the film, the screen, the retina. Few cineastes have ... been so sensitive to the inertia of filmmaking."(7)

One might speculate that, by exchanging identities with Robertson, the fictional Locke satisfies the real Antonioni's desire to "see what the next story is like," a satisfaction that the camera cannot permit itself. It is as if the story had more courage than the discourse. Antonioni does not allow himself to go all the way, as Buñuel did in The Phantom of Liberty, literally dumping the first story for an intruding second one, the second one for a third, and so forth. But perhaps the amazing penultimate shot of The Passenger bears, in addition to its other meanings, the suggestion that the camera is liberating itself--of this story, Locke's story--to go off in search of others.(8)

Even where Locke remains in the frame, the camera, as Martin Walsh notes, "pushes him to the edge ... discovers him 'accidentally' (as at the [Munich] airport), relegates him to the rear of a composition (Nicholson on the phone, in the rear, while foreground is dominated by a waiter filling beermugs.with engrossing efficiency ... )."(9) Walsh feels that "the choice of camera position, its axis of orientation toward the events it records, is [often] deliberately 'inadequate,' as far as direct, transparent communication of the plot is concerned," for example, when Achebe and the German aide are abducted by loyalist thugs behind a charming Spanish fountain that partially conceals what is going on.

The editing of the film is often no less perplexing than the camera movements. There are several examples of an odd match that Noël Burch has called "retroactive" or "retrospective": "Something in shot B or some other subsequent shot might retrospectively reveal that the transition actually belongs in an altogether different temporal or spatial category, or perhaps even both."(10) Typically, in the desert sequence, the context sets us up for an eye-line match with something from Locke's point of view, since he is the stranger trying to find his way. He looks offscreen, and we expect to see the object of his gaze in the next shot. But the next shot, after wandering about, picks him up in a completely unexpected position within the frame, showing us that we were mistaken to assume that we would continue to see things through his eyes. For instance, shot A begins looking over Locke's shoulder through the windshield; shot B cuts to a long pan right across the desert, which our conventional movie sense tells us imitates the movement of his eyes scanning the horizon. But suddenly, still in shot B, the back of his Land Rover appears from screen left, and we see it barrel into the center of the frame in a cloud of sand.

The confusion can also entail a question of scale. In the sequence in which Locke meets his guide, the first shot effects a mismatch of the kind that Noël Burch discovered in La notte, in which "the 'real' dimensions (and, hence, distances) of whatever is visible on the empty screen are impossible to determine until the appearance of a human figure makes the scale obvious."(11) The camera scans a broken desert horizon. How far away is it? Are we seeing small hills close up or mountains far away? Suddenly, at the extreme right of the frame we see a bit of roof thatch under which the guide appears in a medium-close shot. We are jolted: we assumed that, if anyone were to appear, it would be at a distance appropriate to Locke's point of view, that is, relatively far off. But here is the object of his search under our very noses, and we now see that the hills, whose distance had been indeterminate, are much closer, and hence much smaller, than we had thought. One source of our confusion is that the guide lives on higher ground. We follow his glance and are surprised to see the tiny figure of Locke standing far below on the desert floor. There follows a shot of Locke looking up curiously, then a shot of the guide looking back. This seems to establish reliable eye-line matches at last, much to our perceptual relief. We expect, by conventional rhythms, that the next shot, another pan of the desert, will resume Locke's point of view. Wrong again, for at the end of the pan Locke is discovered once more at a completely arbitrary middle distance accompanied by the guide: laden with equipment, they are struggling up still another mountain.(12)

The strategy of the camera shots is constantly to undermine any sense that Locke's point of view is central and constantly adhered to. Antonioni plays on the absence of landmarks in the desert. It is only the natives who can find you; you can never find them. Everything comes out of the desert: one is a fool to think that one can find anything in it.

The various kinds of confusion created by the camera's wandering and the surprise editing correspond to deliberate confusions in the story. Locke's (and our) perceptual bewilderment confirms his disorientation, in a land without visible boundaries, where he does not speak the language, where dark-skinned men snap their fingers contemptuously at him for cigarettes and make no effort to respond to his questions. But we do not experience a traditional identification with the hero. Just as Locke himself suffers from a kind of detachment from the world, the camera keeps us detached from him. The question then becomes less one of sympathy or empathy than of meditation--a rare mood in a commercial film that is ostensibly a thriller.

A quite separate issue, of course, is the sheer beauty of the barren scenery, depicted in something of the spirit of a photographer like Ansel Adams. The camera achieves the same impossible task that it had taken upon itself in L'avventura and Il deserto rosso: it manages to make the landscape at once functional to plot and the characters' moods and "irrelevantly" beautiful, worthy of esthetic contemplation in its own right. It remains a positive visual force, not ironic to the story events, just disinterested in them.

It is an exaggeration, I think, to argue (as Martin Walsh does in an important article)(13) that the whole point of The Passenger is to undermine cinema's basic conventions. Walsh makes much of a line addressed by Locke to Robertson that ostensibly expresses Locke's world-weariness: "We translate every experience into the same old codes." We have seen how that line informs the theme of changing identity. No matter what sorts of excitement an adopted life can give him, Locke discovers that he will render them banal by his detached and passive attitude. That is one of the bad habits that stay with him. But, Walsh points out, the "old codes" may also refer to the conventional cinematic codes with which Antonioni toys: "the narrative codes at points are placed against the meanings we infer." He reminds us that the semiotician Peter Wollen was one of the coauthors of the scenario, so that the word codes surely bears its modern serniotic sense: 11 even as it tells its story," writes Walsh, the film "simultaneously engages in an ideologically self-aware examination of cinematic articulation."

Walsh's line of argument is interesting, but it should not be taken too far: The Passenger is not a "metafilm" in the vein of Michael Snow or even Godard. The illusion of story and character is still strong.(14) But it is obvious that it is much concerned with the reality of images and the ethics of image making, with the nature of the strange "truth" that we derive from visual records. Not only the task of reconstructing the personality behind the footage but the very meaning of that--or of any--footage becomes a central issue in this film.

The Passenger is an unqualified success. Indeed, it is probably the best film of Antonioni's third period. Like Blow-Up, its thematic is serious enough to support the technical splendors of Antonioni's craft. Unlike Zabriskie Point, it is superbly acted: despite the bizarreries of the plot, the characters seem very genuine, and the action of the film is convincing (with an occasional exception, like the roughhouse scene in which Achebe is beaten up by the African ruler's hooligans).

What is perhaps most impressive is the smooth internationalism of the film. Antonioni's evocation of the desert hamlet seems flawless documentary, and the quick-cut transitions to European cities are no less convincing. With few exceptions, there is nothing touristic about the views of the locations, particularly in Africa and Spain. The Ramblas of Barcelona, the hotels and restaurants of the southern coast, the town of Osuna--all were excellently chosen to illustrate the stages of Locke's passing. Spain of all countries provides a convincing relay of stations of the cross.

Each place has its own kind of light and color. Like Locke, we are overwhelmed by the glaring intensity of the Sahara's hues and the scorching blue of its sky. The muted grays and browns of London come as a relief; Locke's springy gait as he walks through Bloomsbury and Dawson Place reflects not only his change of identity but the relief provided by the climate; he is like a man renewed by the coming of autumn after a particularly hot summer. The transition is reversed in Spain, as Locke moves from the cool urbanity of Barcelona to the hot dustiness of the southern countryside. But that is as it should be--he must return to the desert to meet the fate of his double. After the pyrotechnics of Zabriskie Point, The Passenger is visually a more sober film, but its very sobriety reflects its greater thematic maturity.

The same is true of the sound. It is a relief to hear Antonioni return to the spare dialogue of the tetralogy. (There is too much talk in Zabriskie Point--perhaps a mark of Antonioni's uncertain grasp of the characters.) In the first desert sequence, Locke's lines can be counted on the fingers of one hand. His reticence, of course, results from his difficulty in communicating with the natives. The sole verbal exposition is a single line, which he shouts as he whacks the tires of his stalled vehicle with a shovel: "All right, I don't care." Antonioni uses that one piece of behavior to motivate Locke's momentous decision; it epiphanizes the long series of frustrations and compromises of Locke's life; it is the straw that breaks the camel's back. The direction and acting are so good that the line needs little expository corroboration later in the film--mostly his admission to the Girl that he has "run out of everything," wife, house, adopted child, successful job. Though his discussions with the Girl are marked by extreme honesty, the phrase run out of is not totally unequivocal. Strictly speaking, he has relinquished--run out on--his old self, because, for unstated reasons, it no longer satisfies him. Antonioni asks us to take the decision on pure faith~ But then he has always asked us to accept his characters on faith. We know even less about the early doings of Claudia or Vittoria or Thomas. His characters come to us already fully formed, already totally in their situation. That is why the dialogue can afford to be so spare, so oracular.

The recording of nondialogue sound is also unusually effective in this film, especially in the desert sequence. Two sounds particularly evoke the heat and desolation of the scene --the buzzing of flies and the constant high-pitched whipping of the wind. And the sounds of the streets and public places in England, Germany, and Spain are no less convincing.

For the first time since L'avventura, Antonioni introduces a bit of commentative music, serene and romantic Spanish melodies played on a solo guitar (a critic guesses the compositions to be by Tárrega and Llobet).(15) But the music is first established noncominentatively in the restaurant on the Costa del Sol where Locke and the Girl stop for lunch. On that occasion, the source of the music seems to be just offscreen, perhaps from a guitarist playing dinner music. The same sort of music is repeated over the final shot of the Hotel de la Gloria after Locke's death, where it takes on great poignancy. Along with the gentle sunset, the music insists on the serenity of the scene. Antonioni was clearly trying to downplay the sensationalism or shock effect of Locke's murder. Silence would sound too mysterious or ominous if extended to the aftermath of Locke's passing, and it would detract from the sense that he wished to convey of the world simply ,oing about its business. Locke's death must not strike us as tragic or even alarming

In this most philosophical of Antonioni's films, death must seem as much a state of mind as of the body. For all intents and purposes, Locke has been dying throughout the movie. The process is gradual, as gradual as the penultimate seven-minute tracking shot. And the music celebrates his passing, gently and lyrically and with only the slightest trace of melancholy.

______

Notes

1. Martin Walsh, "The Passenger: Antonioni's Narrative Design," Jump Cut 8 (August -September 1975): 9, the best article on the film.

2. Anachrony is G6rard Genette's term for any disparity between the time order of the events of the story and the time order in which they are told by the discourse. Hence "prolepsis" (flashforward) and "analepsis" (flashback). See (36rard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane Lewin (Ithaca, 1980).

3. The only similar shot I have seen occurs in Bufiuel's Diary of a Chambermaid. The passage of a night is summarized by a slow pan from the bed in dead of night to the window, where the morning light is already streaming in.

4. Gideon Bachmann, "Antonioni After China: Art Versus Science," Film Quarterly 28 (Summer 1975): 28.

5. Furio Colombo, "Visual Structure in a Film by Antonioni," trans. Patrizio Rossi and Garrett Stewart, Quarterly Journal of Film Studies 2 (1977): 427, writes: "It seems that a documentary is being shot concurrently with the film as a kind of tentative commentary, affording 'more truth' than plot alone could contain. In this way the director reverses the game of his character, who wants to escape from documentaries and enter into the story of anyman, who wants a life picked up from the pile of every life." Colombo, who was the producer of the China documentary, also feels that The Passenger shows the influence of Antonioni's Chinese experience, "the trace of those immense Chinese silences into which Anionioni was peering and by which he was at the same time scrutinized" (p. 429).

Ted Perry, "Men and Landscapes: Antonioni's The Passenger," Film Comment 11 (1975): 4, feels that because of the camera's self- assertiveness and autonomy "the area off-screen becomes dynamized. Through The Passenger the viewer is led to anticipate that something surely must exist off-screen which, when it finally appears, will restore the narrative focus of the film."

6. In "Un filmdafare o danon fare" ("A FilmThatMayorMay Not Be Made"), Quel bowling sul Tevere (Turin, 1983), pp. 191-95.

7. Pascal Bonitzer, "D6sir d6sert (Profession: Reporter)," Cahiers du cin~ma, nos. 262-63 (1976), p. 98.

8. Colombo thinks so (p. 431): "a perfect and very slow tracking shot that consents to leave behind the zone of death, to explore the world . .

9. Walsh, pp. 8-9.

10. Burch, p. 12.

11. Burch, p. 28. The example he cites is of the masonry block whose size, and hence meaning, is unclear until a very small Lidia steps into frame to establish it as the facade of a building (see Frame 64 above). I was reminded of Burch's discussion by Ned Rifkin, Antonioni's Visual Language (Ann Arbor, 1982), p. 89. There is a useful discussion of the problem of scale in E. H. Gombrich, "Standards of Truth: The Arrested Image and the Moving Eye," The Language of Images, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago, 1980), pp. 181-90.

12. It would be an interesting classroom exercise to re-edit these sequences in conventional Hollywood terms (shot-countershot, reversal angles, clearly marked matches, and so on). These would surely make the film the ordinary thriller that some people take it to be.

13. Walsh, pp. 8-9.

14. And, indeed, there are more traditional shots in this than in earlier films, for instance, inserts -close-ups on the Land Rover's wheels spinning in the sand and on Robertson's tickets and diary, as well as on pregnant objects, such as Robertson's gun.

15. Edward Stanton, "Antonioni's The Passenger: A Parabola of Light," Literaturel Film Quarterly 5 (Winter 1977): 63; film credits for musical consultation are given to Ivan Vandor.