Michele Mancini interviews Antonioni
Mancini: You create a space in which unexpected reactions can occur.
Antonioni: Yes, they are always different. I rely a lot on chance.
Mancini: You challenge the actors to bring them to a certain «simplicity»…
Antonioni: This also happened to me with Jack Nicholson, who is a very experienced actor with an extraordinary technique.
Mancini: I noticed how Nicholson changes his way of acting, his attitude during the film: for example at the beginning, when he nervously tries to shovel the sand off the wheel of the landrover, it seems that he is not yet under its influence as instead in following.
Antonioni: I would say the opposite. I mean, it's true that he's not under my influence, but the opposite is also true. Now I'll explain. In that scene, I wanted him to have a crisis. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm not the type of director who explains much to the actors, that is, I obviously explain what I think of the film, of the character, but I try to prevent the actor from feeling he is the master of the scene itself, the director of himself. The actor, I will never get tired of repeating it, is just one of the elements of the image, often not even the most important, and I need to give the shot a certain value through the elements that make it up. The actor ignores it, this value, and why I put it on one side or the other, are my business. I'm the one who has to see the film in its unity. Now, to refer to that scene of the landrover cover-up, to get to the Nicholson crisis I tried to make our relationship a little tense. He didn't even notice. It was a bit of a hard time in the desert. With all that wind and sand, it was terrible standing there without being covered up like the Arabs and other crew members. When we shot, the crisis came naturally. The crying was natural. It was true.
Mancini: This happens throughout the film; Nicholson does not appear to "act," as opposed to Chinatown; the character is integrated into the actor and directly recalls the image of an average American.
Antonioni: In fact, I really tried to control it in order to have this kind of effect. After all, this character is not that he has exceptional skills. Not even as an intellectual is he very cultured, he doesn't even know Gaudí. He is a strong man, let's say, as are these reporters who are used to seeing all sorts of things and therefore not reacting with much emotion to the events they are witnessing. I've lived long enough in the US, there's no better way to get to know a country than to work there. My reporter is an American who immigrated from England, so he has undergone certain transformations, also in terms of language, and for this reason the English edition of Professione: reporter, has nuances that are lost with the Italian dubbing. This reporter speaks with a… post-XNUMX cadence. In other words, he is one of those young people who have assimilated the language of student protest and then put it aside as they have entered the system. So his wife, Rachel, has a slightly snobbish tone in English, so you can also understand why he was fascinated by her and married this kind of neurotic, quite out of the ordinary for women he could date.
Mancini: And did he make the actors understand any of this?
Antonioni: No. Nicholson once pointed out to me that Rachel had this tone, we discussed it and we agreed together that basically it was okay.
Mancini: Regarding the length of the different editions….
Antonioni: This is a curious discourse: that is, not the discourse, but what happened is curious. The first cut was very long, over four hours. But this happens often.
Mancini: Do you mount while shooting?
Antonioni: No, I've never done that. For me, editing is a creative phase of the film and therefore I have to finish the other phase, that is shooting, before starting to edit. I then found myself faced with all this material, also because I prepared the film very quickly, practically a month and a half of preparation, including the screenplay, location scouting, etc. and the problem was cutting. It was the first time I had made a film from a subject that was not mine. Mark Peploe is my friend, he had told me about it when the story was still three folders and then, little by little, he gave a treatment. We worked together on the script, always correcting and modifying it in view of a film that he was supposed to make. But when the project came to me, I found a material in my hands that needed modifications for me. I had to do this work quickly, always with Mark, because I had Nicholson's dates and couldn't go far. But all this forced me to continue writing the screenplay during filming and, to solve certain problems that I still didn't see as a solution, I had to shoot some extra material. I say this because I've never had four and a half hours of material before.
Mancini: I had the impression that you mainly carried out a work of subtraction compared to a thriller, adventure film on which you worked by stripping, essentializing…
Antonioni: I couldn't even say exactly what I changed.
Mancini: Yes, but precisely with respect to an imaginary film rather than a screenplay; a yellow film, of chases…
Antonioni: There were some curious scenes, dialogues that had no other purpose than to create a particular relationship between two characters, that of him and the girl. For me, however, this relationship had a completely different reason for being, and therefore it also had to have another economy in the length of the film. Then I arrived at an almost normal length of footage, two hours and twenty, and it seemed to me the perfect size, the film I wanted to make with that script. However, the producers insisted that the film be shorter, in the USA they are very rigorous in this: either the film lasts three and a half hours, as Bertolucci's will last, or it must have the normal length. To reduce it I had to practically redo the editing, changing the place of certain sequences. It was exhausting work. Once the assembly was finished, I realized that the previous version was wrong and that this one, lasting hours and four minutes, is the right one. I wonder what would happen to a film if we could continue to work on it, after it's finished, twenty years, like D'Arrigo on his book.
Mancini: In the film you can see many movies, documentaries, television footage; I think perhaps that all these means are seen from a critical angle, that is, after all, one tries to find the character of David through these films and I think it is precisely at this moment that he is lost instead. Is there a critical attitude towards these television and recording media in general?
Antonioni: I would not say. I didn't think about it, it wasn't an intentional attitude, even if it may have that impression. You never know what comes out of what you do. There are many interpretative keys which are evidently the result of that elaboration that everyone does within themselves. I inserted those sequences to give an idea of how the character on the one hand was looking for a sense of himself, even politically, through his work, and on the other to grasp a specific aspect of reality, even spectacular. In that material there is perhaps a certain ambivalence, even a certain ambiguity, as in the sequence of the shooting, a sequence which, precisely on the basis of what I have just said, can be interpreted as one wishes. It seems to me that the effect it produces is always the same, that is chilling. And it is by being such that the sequence raises the political problem. Regarding your question, I admit that it might be logical to think of a critical attitude towards the television image, but it was not intentional.
Mancini: Critical at least in the illusion of having a means of reproducing the «real».
Antonioni: Sure, that of objectivity is always an illusory fact, it seems obvious to me. Especially for a «current affairs» director like a reporter. As far as I'm concerned, I've never believed in the Truth cinema, because I don't see what truth it can reach. The moment we aim our target, there is a choice on our part. Even if we continue to shoot without taking a break, or without changing axis, which might seem like the most…
Mancini: We would say more: even if «we don't choose», there is a sense that is not that…
Antonioni: …which is not that. Not to mention the editing, when a cut is enough to bring down all illusions. (…)
Da film criticism, March 1975
Tullio Kezich
The English title of the film, The Passenger, relates him to The stranger by Camus: not to mention that Pirandellian Mattia Pascal, «foreigner of life» and father of all existential heroes, to whom Mark Peploe's subject owes its initial shot: the temptation, for an individual in crisis, to assume the identity of a dead.
Here is a TV reporter, Jack Nicholson, who takes the place of an arms dealer struck by heartache in an African hotel. Up to a certain point, one expects the revelation of the motive that pushes the protagonist further and further into the life of the dead man (does he do it because he is a reporter?) Then it turns out that the passenger is not so much headed forward as fleeing from everything that is behind him.
"What are you running from?" asks Maria Schneider, the anonymous girl who joined him. "Turn around and look behind you," replies Nicholson; and the image, from the speeding car, is that of an empty road, between two rows of trees that are rapidly moving away. But the itinerary of the protagonist, when it is discovered that the dead man was in solidarity with the liberation movements of the Third World, alludes to the search for a cause for living, for a secret for flying (it is another wonderful moment when the hero leans out, almost hovering in the air, from the cable car cabin), of a way to die (and it is the long sequence shot of the subfinale, seven minutes of very high cinematic virtuosity).
In this "intimate adventure film" (the definition is the author's) the exotic backgrounds (the desert) merge with the fantastic environments (Antoni Gaudi's palaces in Barcelona) as in a meeting between Flaherty and Borges; reticence and ambiguity match the coincidences and the famous eye of Michelangelo Antonioni proposes the inscrutable puzzle of reality to the characters and the show.
From Tullio Kezich, The Thousand Movies. Ten years at the cinema 1967-1977, Il Anteater Editions
Lorenza Cuccu
Principles of vision Francis Vanoye asks himself, prompted by the enigmatic gaze that accompanies David Locke on his journey towards death: «What is it to look? What do you do when you look?”
Antonioni had already said, many years before: «For us, seeing is a necessity. Even for a painter the problem is to see. But while for the painter it is a question of discovering a static reality, or even a rhythm if you like, but a rhythm that has stopped in the sign, for a director the problem is to grasp a reality that is maturing and consuming, and to propose this movement , this arrival and continuation, as a new perception. It is not sound: word, noise, music. It is not an image: landscape, attitude, gesture. But an indecomposable whole spread out in a duration that penetrates it and determines its very essence. This is where the time dimension comes into play, in its most modern conception. It is in this order of intuitions that cinema can acquire a new physiognomy, no longer just figurative. The people we meet, the places we visit, the events we witness: it is the spatial and temporal relationships of all these things that make sense to us today, it is the tension that forms between them».
Here is a first principle: «to propose this movement, this arrival and continuation as a new perception..».
Lacan:
«In our relationship with things as it is constituted through vision, and ordered in the figures of representation, something slips, passes, is transmitted from level to level, to always be elided to some extent - this is what is called the gaze» .
And Starobinski:
"The deed of Regard it does not end in an instant, as it involves a momentum that lasts, a stubborn recovery, as if he were animated by the hope of increasing his discovery or of reconquering what seems on the verge of escaping him... spying on the immobility of the moving figure, ready to grasp the slightest startle in the figure at rest, with the aspiration to reach the face behind the mask, or in an attempt to abandon oneself to the dizzying fascination of the depths to rediscover, on the surface of the water, the play of reflections».
How can we forget, but they are only examples among the many possible ones, the sequence of the island ne THEaadventure (or in Back to Lisca Bianca), or the waiting sequence in Osuna in Professione: reporter.
Let's go back to following in Antonioni's footsteps along the road of this theory of vision, direct or immersed in films: «It's something that all directors have in common, I think, this habit of keeping one eye open inside and one outside out of them. At a certain moment, the two visions approach each other and, like two images that come into focus, overlap. It is from this agreement between the eye and the brain, between the eye and instinct, between the eye and conscience that the drive to speak, to show people comes".
Deleuze says:
«There are two ways of overcoming figuration (that is, the whole, the illustrative and the narrative): towards the abstract form, or towards the Figure. This direction towards the Figure, Cézanne calls it very simply: the sensation. …The sensation has a face turned towards the subject (the nervous system, the vital movement…), and a face turned towards the object (“the fact”, the place, the event). Or perhaps it has no face, because it is inextricably both, it is, as the phenomenologists say, being-in-the-world: I become in sensation and, at the same time, something happens through sensation, one in the other, one for the other".
Therefore, if we follow Antonioni in his objective concordance with Deleuze, the vision - as well as movement, passage from plane to plane, momentum that lasts, in an incessant passage from depth to surface - is Figure/sensation, overcoming of the illustrative or the narrative, pure visibility as pure aisthesistherefore, but full of meaning in its apparent void.
Antonioni recounts:
“The sky is white. The deserted waterfront. The sea empty and without heat. The semi-closed and white hotels. The lifeguard is sitting on one of the chairs on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, a black man in a white T-shirt. It is early. The sun struggles to come out through the light layer of fog, the same as every day. There is nobody on the beach, except a swimmer playing dead a few meters from the shore. You only hear the sound of the sea, you only notice the rocking of that body. The lifeguard goes down to the beach and enters the establishment. A girl comes out and heads towards the sea. She has a skin colored costume. She is; her scream is dry, short, pungent. It is enough to look at the bather to understand that he is dead… [follows the description of the corpse, of the gathering, of the cruel dialogue between a child and his girlfriend, then…] …Suppose we have to script a piece of film, based on this event, this state of mind. First of all, I would try to remove the 'fact' from the scene, to leave only the image described in the first four lines... the real emptiness, the malaise, the anguish, the nausea... I felt them when, after leaving the Negresco, I I found in that white, in that nothingness that took shape around a black dot.»
«…in that white, in that nothingness that took shape around a black dot…»:
Let's review Le amiche, Rosetta's suicide sequence:
From above, from afar, angled to the line of the river bank. On the low end, the crowd of onlookers; on the left the ambulance with the doors open is waiting for the nurses to carry the stretcher with the girl's body, recovered from the boat that is moored at the quay. But almost in the center of the picture, isolated against the white of the stone, the black spot of Rosetta's coat stands out…
Let's review Reporter, again the Osuna sequence: Locke sitting at the foot of a very white wall, picking up an insect, then, suddenly in very close-up, all to the left of the picture, a grimace that deforms his face, he turns abruptly and presses the insect against the wall, then gets up quickly and goes out, but the camera stays there for a long time, observing that very small dark spot, right in the center of that white that occupies the whole picture.
Antonioni once said:
«Beginning to understand the world through the image, I understood the image, its strength, its mystery».
And Alain Robbe-Grillet:
«I was thinking… about the difference between perceiving and understanding. In Antonioni's films, perception is evident. There is evidence of the image… the world is born under the gaze of the camera in an evident way, but the sense remains enigmatic: that is, much is perceived, little is understood… in Antonioni's films, understanding remains eternally suspended and the the very meaning of the film lies in the suspension of meaning… and the suspension of meaning which is the very meaning of the world.»
Antonioni again:
«…we know that under the revealed image there is another more faithful to reality, and under this still another, and again another under this last one. Up to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that no one will ever see. Or perhaps up to the decomposition of any image, of any reality. Abstract cinema would therefore have its own raison d'être».
Here is the second principle of vision:
«the strength of the image, its mystery», the Figure/sensation and «the meaning that resides precisely in the suspension of meaning»: all this is, is still there, in many sequences of Professione: reporter, certainly not only in those just mentioned: the camera that "apathetically" follows the thread of light in the inn in the desert, the very long shot from below of Locke and the girl at the window of the Hotel La Fortaleza, the penultimate shot...
But, in the meantime, we must ask ourselves: how does vision establish the enigmatic relationship between the "fact" and the "image", between appearing and being, between the Figure/sensation and meaning?
Could it be because the aesthetic image that the gaze produces, stops and contemplates is placed, precisely as such, as the very epiphany of being, of meaning?
Or, on the other hand, is the image, the fragment of Figure/sensation, the black hole into which meaning sinks, vainly pursued by the gaze, in an endless vertigo?
Or is it rather that Antonioni's gaze fluctuates between the two poles, between the abyss of meaning and the play of reflections on the surface, in a continuous vacillation, in a tireless coming and going in which his very essence resides?
Who is watching?
But this is not the only riddle that the look of Professione: reporter opens and leaves unsolved.
Also for Locke "seeing is a necessity", watching, a voracious attitude: it is a "profession" supine (the interview with the dictator), or rapacious (the shooting of the hero), or defeated (the interview with the witch doctor) ; then it is, even more voracious, the vis a vis with Robertson, with the "double discovery", when looking into the eyes means jumping into the "world of doing"; Then…
Starobinski:
«Seeing is a mortal act… Myths and legends here are extraordinarily in accord. Orpheus, Narcissus, Oedipus, Psyche, the Medusa teach us that, by dint of wanting to extend the range of the gaze, the soul offers itself to blindness and night».
Professione: reporter, the penultimate sequence: Locke lay down on the bed. The Girl goes to the window and looks through the grille at the dusty courtyard. Locke wants to know what he sees, the Girl replies: «A man scratching his shoulder, a boy throwing stones. It's dust." Then she goes back to the bed.
"It would be terrible to be blind," she now says to Locke, placing a hand over his eyes: he then tells her the story of the man who was born blind, then regained his sight, and then killed himself because he couldn't bear to see the ugliness and squalor of the world.
The girl lay down next to Locke and embraces him, while the camera rises to frame the thread of light, which it follows until it stops on a small dark painting that represents a character with a river, and further away, a castle: she feels a gloomy, mysterious tolling of a bell.
«... by dint of wanting to extend the range of the gaze, the soul offers itself to blindness and to the night...": here is the new principle of vision: the "death in the eyes" of Jean Paul Vernant, the gaze of the Medusa, which kills because it looks and is looked at.
But this discovery does not only concern Locke, it also concerns "Another", an enigmatic presence, an entity without a visible body, but capable of looking and, by us, of "being seen looking". It is, technically, the autonomous room mentioned by Rifkin and others; it is the freedom conquered by the camera through the game of markings and splitting of the point of view that many, but Delavaud best of all, have described, he is the "reporter of my reporter" of whom Antonioni spoke, a second, invisible witness, who accompanies the witness-Locke, but distinct from him, autonomous, in fact, the bearer of a wise and thoughtful gaze, the one who, in the Bloomsbury Center sequence, in Locke's last fleeting passage through London, first "discovers" the Girl and approaches foreboding, to look at her, while she offers herself to the sun with her eyes closed.
It is not really, as has been said, a novelty in Antonioni's cinema, we find visible traces of it in the sequence of the abandoned town of The adventure (that movement of gaze forward on the facade of the church in the deserted square, which made Robbe-Grillet and Deleuze suspect Anna's presence), and then in Blow-Up, in the procedures of doubling of gaze that Ropars, more than anyone else, has highlighted so well. It cannot be, as has been said, neither a pure manifestation of "reflexivity", nor, by now, only a manifestation of the availability of the camera to record the "existence" of the visible world: the movements of the autonomous camera organize themselves in a heavy presence , continuous, unitary which gives them the identity of a sort of actantial instance, of a quasi-person, albeit invisible, but capable of looking, and, through the look, bearer of a knowledge and a will, or a do not want to.
It is this "Other Gaze" which, we were saying, discovers, together with Locke, its own nature of "Medusa's gaze", in the penultimate shot, when it abandons its traveling companion, now offered to die: of course, also as an incarnation of his Leopardian "boredom", of the inexhaustible tension towards the "something else" of which Arrowsmith speaks, but then above all by tracing, in the inert, "endless" wanderings in the dusty courtyard, the substantial, mortal apathy (observes Trebbi), and coming finally, in the contemplation of Locke dead through the grating - true duplication of vis a vis of Locke with Robertson - to the reflection, and the recognition of one's own deadly nature: "seeing is a mortal act ... by dint of wanting to extend the range of the gaze, the soul offers itself to blindness and to the night ...".
But all this is still not enough to define the enigmatic nature of the gaze of the "my reporter's reporter", to complete its characteristics.
Who is this "quasi-person", this entity who looks, and shows that he looks, but escapes sight, who accompanies the viewer in the film, Locke, and whoever watches the film, us, but without letting us look …
Of course, it can be "the third who always walks beside you" (Antonioni writes: «Who is that third who always walks beside you? When a verse becomes a feeling it is not difficult to put it in a film. This one by Eliot has tempted me several times That third party who always walks beside you does not give me peace"), but why does he hide from sight? Starobinski says, ne Poppaea's Veil:
«What is hidden, the occult, fascinates. 'Why Poppea thought to hide the beauty of her face, if not to make it more precious to her lovers?' (Montaigne)».
Robbe-Grillet says:
«In Antonioni's films, you were all struck by the fact that the camera (that is, the director and the spectator who occupy the position of the camera in relation to the screen), looks at someone who is looking elsewhere. And when there are several characters, everything gets complicated, because each of them looks elsewhere! And the elsewhere in question is by no means a reverse shot that could be given to you later, to show what this gaze looks at. No, it is the gaze that is directed towards something that is off-screen, which you therefore do not see, but which one can suppose the same character sees no more than you. He is simply, himself, like the representation of his own imagination».
Bodiless gazes, like those of those who withdraw from sight "to make their beauties more precious to their lovers".
Gazes without an object, which are projected "off screen" as if onto a mirror, to reflect back on the beholder not to look, but to "look at themselves": these gazes without a visible body or object would seem to be the most subtle incarnation of Narcissus, built from within the vision processes themselves.
Lacan says:
«I could see myself, says the young Parca at one point. This statement certainly has its full and complex sense at the same time, when it comes to the theme developed by Valery's Young Parka, that of femininity..."
But he continues:
«And yet, I perceive the world with a perception that seems to derive from the immanence of 'I see myself seeing myself'. It seems here that the subject's privilege is established in this bipolar reflexive relationship..."
Who, then, is that third party who always walks beside you? Now maybe we know it, and that look without a body - or without an object, if not itself, a manifestation of "I see myself seeing myself" that Lacan suggests to us.
But what is "I see myself seeing myself": the foundation of the Subject or, or even, the deadly gaze of Narcissus and the Medusa?
I think it is here, in this new enigma, that the enigma of the reporter's gaze is enclosed again in the circle of its mystery: but Antonioni's greatness lies in having explored it completely from within the filmic discourse, the very logic of “look-that-makes-the-movie”.
Or, at least, this appeared to my eyes.
From Lorenzo Cuccu, Antonioni. The discourse of the gaze and other essays, and. ETS, Pisa, 2014
Fernando Trebbi
Author's look or protagonist's look?
The question, we said when it was presented to us, asks to be formulated in a different way. What appears here does not look like someone's gaze, or, at least, the problem of his belong to it remains completely marginal, it adds nothing, it does not increase our ability to understand the nature of this gaze.
Nonetheless, the question of the author-character relationship, i.e. the question of knowing if, and to what extent, the author recognizes himself, hides or blends in, under the guise of his character, is far from unusual: asking it according to a certain point of view, it means clarity, the will to discover the truth, the prefiguration of a critical itinerary conveniently prepared according to criteria of concreteness and objectivity. In short, it means establishing the identity of the speaker in order to understand what is being spoken about.
Except that the same idea of the hide underneath implies, in some way, an operation against the identity of the ego, an act of concealment or substitution (either of the author's ego which hides and descends into the protagonist's ego, or of the protagonist who hides and gets confused in the author's ego); while the undress, under which one would like to hide, seems to be here specifically, and again, to indicate the côté mournful and funerary of this operation.
Posing the question of the author-character relationship, and posing it in the manner of the alternative, therefore means denouncing a disappearance, signaling the death of an ego, celebrating a funeral office.
But in whose name? In the name of which deceased?
Of the protagonist, in whose place the author puts himself, or of the author, who dies in the protagonist and gets lost in it?
"Between us and them - says Antonioni, alluding to the author's relationship with his characters - there is always the film, there is this concrete, precise, lucid fact, this act of will and strength…", if not were «... a director's way of life would coincide with his way of making a film... Instead, however autobiographical it may be, there is always an intervention... that translates and alters the material».
«However autobiographical one may be…». that is, however much one claims to appropriate the ego of the character, to hide in it, to stealthily slip in and to manage it, to animate it and to replace it, to rob it of the soul and invade it, to speak through its words and to see through the his gaze, although it is difficult to deny the charm of this temptation and its appeal, there is always something that intervenes to separate the author from the protagonist, something that is arranged between one and the other to prevent their identity .
Between the gaze of the author and the gaze of the character inevitably lies the gaze of the film. Again the sign of the slash that governs the figure of the antithesis appears here to divide the author from the character.
The author and the character are therefore configured as the two terms of an opposition between which the film is placed. Between the two institutional subjectivities (that of the author and that of the character), there is another, a third, which does not aspire to be confused with either of the two, which both obscure and eclipse .
So who is this look in the film that Antonioni tells us about and which divides the author from the character?
Once again, it seems to us, nobody's gaze. That is, not the gaze of a subject but a gaze that is machined and produced, precisely at the intersection of the two, so to speak, opposing subjectivities.
Lucidity, the precision, concreteness that define the film, the film's strikethrough, are the same ones that lend themselves to defining the nature of the gaze that unfolds in the concluding sequence.
The fact then that there is some will and force in the act that erects the bar, that builds the film, it fits perfectly with the determination and energy that emanate from what we have said, the obstinacy of this gaze, its ability to work and machinic, that technique which is the same one Antonioni talks about, for example:
“When I don't know what to do, I start looking. There's a technique in that too." And it is a technique, that of seeing, which is configured at the same time as research and reverie, imaginative creation and analytical deduction, operation and desiring production.
But let's go back, to understand, the scene of Locke's interview with the sorcerer. That scene which is the same as the reversal, the reversal, as we have said, of the author's function into the character's function. Here it is difficult to establish the identity of the gaze.
Locke's Surprise and Confusion in face to face who opposes it to Robertson's corpse, are the same ones who recover here in front of the about-turn of the camera.
The moment the sorcerer reverses the situation and transforms him from a watcher into a watched, the confusion and disorientation of the ego are inevitable, finding oneself again becomes impossible.
The I that sees itself becomes the scene to be seen. The one who is outside the scene and who observes it becomes the one who is inside and who produces it. The one who stages (the director, in fact, and the author), becomes the staged. The gazer becomes the gazer. The inside becomes the outside and the outside becomes the inside.
Where is the author's gaze to be found here? And where that of the protagonist?
How to establish exactly where someone who plays a role and its opposite at the same time really is?
What matters then is not so much deciding the identity of the beholder, landing thanks to the gaze and through the gaze to a reality (for example that of the author) that lies behind the gaze and governs it; what matters is rather to reach the gaze in person, simply to arrive at the reality of the gaze within the reality of its anonymous existence.
After Robertson's death, starting from the room where Locke is making up the passports, we witness the lines of a long conversation between Locke and Robertson, which naturally dates back to before the latter's death. And everything suggests that we are dealing here with a subjective flashback, a return in which Locke relives and revises some moments of his meeting with Robertson. But at a certain point Locke's arm enters the field and suddenly turns off the recorder from which only then do we realize that the jokes came from.
The dialogue is interrupted, the memory is broken. What this memory affects is not the mind of a subject, but the tape of a reel: a tape that stands between the present and the past just as the film stands between the author and the character. What appeared to us as someone's memory is actually the memory of the film.
Whose then is this going backwards?
Not of Robertson of course, who is dead. But neither does Locke, who is present as this memory unfolds and whose mind is not remembering at all.
This gaze that sees again is not the gaze of a subject nor is it the gaze of a character: it is rather the gaze of the film. The flashback we see is not subjective but objective: it is, paradoxically, the flashback of the film.
In this regard, let us take up the passage in which Antonioni, speaking of the distinction, still antithetical, between external eye e inner eye ("eye - he says - open inside" and eye "open outside") supports the need for a rapprochement of the two visions, for an overlapping of images, for their reciprocal focus.
What is manifested in this statement is therefore, above all, the hypothesis of a work of vision, which discards the principle of the passivity of seeing to take up, on the contrary, the motif of the productivity of the gaze.
But the idea that is taken up here, together with the reasons for work and the productivity of the gaze, is also, how can we deny it?, that of a other eye, of an eye that unrolls and rolls up along the pins of the reel, step by step, accompanying the movement of the film itself: of a third Eye which looks between the first two.
An eye that looks back in time, in a flashback that is not of the subject, of the protagonist, but rather of the film itself.
Movie eye. Of a film that looks at itself and which, looking at itself, watches.
Again, between the author's gaze and the character's gaze, it is the film's gaze that finally manifests itself.
There is no author's ego that guides the gaze from the outside and supports it: the author is himself this new gaze that builds and unfolds itself; that is, this new gaze that builds and unfolds itself is itself the author.
“Seeing is a necessity for us. Even for the painter the problem is to see. But while for the painter it is a question of discovering a static reality, or even a rhythm if you like but a rhythm that has stopped in the sign, for a director the problem is to grasp a reality that is maturing and consuming, and to propose this movement, this arrival and continuation, as a new perception».
Let's think back to the figures of circularity and of the gaze: the movement, the arrival and the continuation, the grasping within one's circle of a new reality that matures, the formation of a new perception within the reality - which we have just mentioned - of this new gaze that builds and unfolds, here seem to anticipate in terms of punctual feedback some of the reasons on which we have centered the device of research and analysis.
The idea, in particular, of a reality that matures, which becomes pregnant as with itself and which is gradually produced, totally agrees with that periscopy of the gaze, which we described at the beginning, and which is at the same time an operation within which the new one gradually matures reality on which in the end the gaze is pinned and fixed.
However, what interests us most is, in Antonioni's statement, the analogy he proposes between directorial vision and pictorial vision, that is, the idea of the same eye in which the painter's work is elaborated and expressed director's work.
It is precisely starting from this analogy, we believe, and from this identity, that Antonioni's work understands and incorporates references of a figurative nature.
It includes, let's say, and incorporates because Antonioni's work in this case goes beyond the quotation and tends to integrate it closely into the text, thus making it a moment that participates directly in the general mechanism of the production of meaning rather than a reference and an allusion.
Let's go back to this and review a particular moment of the film, a fragment, again, or something less: the equivalent, if you like, of a letter, a clipping, a gesture cut short even before its conclusion.
Locke has now almost reached the end of his adventure, the Hotel de la Gloria is waiting to welcome him soon for the unfolding of the final sequence.
Now he is sitting on the step of a sidewalk and begins to play with something very small (an insect? a small red petal?) which he takes, examines curiously, sticks into the crack of a wall dazzled by the sun and then strikes violently with palm of the hand taking away a piece of plaster and leaving on the wall, in addition to the trace of the violence, as well as the sign of the blow, also a small reddish smear.
“The hand withdraws, and for two seconds all that can be seen is the dehydrated wall, almost immaculate in splendour, crumbling in its impassive, chilling anonymity from the violence that man wanted to inflict on it… Antonioni — with full conscience — first has each living presence (the hand), and then pauses for that brief instant on the painting "placed in brackets" in the narrative rhythm. Let's see again a painting by Antonio Tapies, the Spanish artist (coincidentally the action took place in Spain) who since the XNUMXs has sung, with a sober and austere sense of death, the parched and inhospitable expanses, the matter stripped of any pulsating life ”.
The dehydrated wall, anonymity, retreating life, death.
But above all the impassive splendor, the almost immaculate white of the wall.
The reference to Tapies could have remained a simple reference.
But the white against which it stands out introduces this reference into a vital circuit, grafts it onto the marrow of the work, transplants it into its fabric, makes it into a precise stitching that binds with the white of the mime, with the white of the dead , with white on the page. With the white of writing that not even the violent gesture of the hand that imprints it manages to vary or transform, leaving at most the imprint of a chipping from which the receptivity which in itself defines the nature of white, its ability to collect and absorb, the willingness to allow himself to be engraved and marked by his uncontainable desire to receive the trace, the scratch or the seal, of the writing, to let himself be traversed and penetrated by it, is further dilated, he composes the surface of this wall according to the template of the blank page itself.
But it is not only through this white thread, this thread of white, that the reference to Tapies is innervated and linked, finally lost and confused, to the general texture of the work.
The matter of his paintings which from time to time, and repeatedly, is configured as wall, barred door, lowered shutter, the sign that is imprinted and nailed on this material as bar, cross, lock, clearly take up the motif of the strikethrough that works throughout Antonioni's text. While the motif of the cross undoubtedly announces that of the X, of the large one lame, which crosses and holds in tension the Great squaring, for example, which Tapies painted in '62.
A theme, this of the squaring, in which he resumes, if we want to look closely, not only that of thecrossing, but also and even more so, the colossal demiurgic operation that traces the gigantic X of the Timaeus: also large squaring, architecture within which the Platonic universe is ordered and organized not differently from the text of Antonioni and from the material, from the painting of Tàpies; stitching that mends the opus and that, by weaving it, designs it.
The white of the thread that runs through the weft of the work, which unites the white of the Spanish wall with the white of the page and the mime, the dead and the writing, is the same that leads to Mondrian's white (the white that Mondrian preferred among colors), to the white of the letters (FA and the V) which stand out enormously against the red, behind Locke, during the stop at the AVIS offices.
To Mondrian, and especially to Dune, which he composed around 1910 arranging them precisely within monochrome backgrounds invaded by light, seem very likely to redo the initial sequences in which "the acid pink, dried up in an intact and mortal beauty, of the desert and the incinerated blue of the sky" enclose in a violent opposition, yet perfectly tuned, the sunny and luminescent harshness of the extraordinary Saharan landscape where Locke curses and begs, scatters and fatigues, silts up and despairs.
What the letters lead to, which lose their value of letters, of parts of a word, to take on a purely timbral value of violent contrast with the color of the background, very closely recalls certain operations of American pop-art, which we have taken up in the work by Schifano, which translate the advertising text through the fragment of an abstract blow-up (think, for example, of the word Coca Cola) entirely played on the punctuated and sparkling meeting of two colors expressed at their maximum intensity.
If the thread of white seems to be the one that reaches and connects the presences of Mondrian, Tapies (but also Burri) and Schifano together within the plot of the text, the thread of the mask, the ghost, the disappearance and the simulacrum, of an enigmatic, elusive, bizarre reality (Girl: «The man who built it died under a tram». Locke: «And who was he?» Girl: «Gaudí». Locke: «Do you think he was crazy?» , which cannot be exactly defined, which always withdraws, which gives the impression of having abandoned only its rest, its limp and twisted remains, seems to be the one which most probably leads to the presence of Gaudí and which is most manifested in the appearance of those strange chimneys — ghosts, in fact, armours, masks of masks that do not suggest any presence, no subject beyond themselves, simulacra that appear instead of faces, ghosts of a subject who masks himself at the beginning and which disappears between which Antonioni consciously makes the two protagonists move.
Then there is in the finale, in the last scene, something unusual compared to the rest of the film whose figurative presences vary, as we have seen, from pre-abstract art, to the informal, to pop-art, with the tone always of a particular measure and sobriety.
The late sunset, the cloudy sky stained with pink, the profile of the hotel, the silhouette of the owner who moves away towards the village, the woman who sits on the steps knitting, are immersed in a light, arranged according to an order and a intention in which it seems to notice something exaggeratedly realistic, objective, photographic, banal, everyday, natural, obvious: something, one could say, hyper-realistic.
If this is true, if what we witness within the excessive naturalness of these ultimate images really has something to do with the absolute objectivity of hyperrealism, that is, with Antonioni's resumption of an artistic operation which contrasts the practice, or poetics, of an object without a subject with that, instead, of a subject without an object, what we find here is, then, a further confirmation of that disappearance of the subject, of that barring, of that burial of the ego, of which the text and the gaze, from the beginning, have begun to speak to us.
From Fernando Trebbi The look and the textPatron Editions, Bologna, 1976
Hugh Casiraghi
Mistake. The file name is not specified.
It's been eleven years since Il deserto rosso of 1964, that Michelangelo Antonioni does not make a film in Italy. Eleven years made up of foreign parentheses: first in Great Britain for Blow-Up, then in the US: for Zabriskie Point, then the television documentary in China, and finally this Professione: reporter set in Africa, in London, in Munich and in various places in Spain, from Barcelona to Almeria. It can well be said that his intimate adventure has "internationalized".
On the other hand if Chung-Kuo. China confirmed in him still the eye of the documentarian of People of the Po (1943–47), it does not seem improper to view the last work of fiction as a geographical expansion and a deluxe modernized edition of his finest and loftiest work, which was precisely The adventure in 1960; while the structural importance that the suspense, also refers to the first work, or a Chronicle of a love of 1950.
All this to note the author's persistent fidelity to himself, which does not fail on the contrary is exalted from a formal point of view, and incessantly resumes the same existential paths. If the charm of his language is further refined and sophisticated, his discourse on reality and man, or rather on the inscrutability of the former despite the ever more perfect mechanical means challenged by the latter, has decidedly become more interior, bordering on 'enigma.
There is no one who does not see a close relationship between the photographer Blow-Up, also implicated in a mystery to be solved, and the television journalist of Professione: reporter who feels first of all the dissatisfaction of his job, the insufficiency of it to fill the empty spaces of his being. It is a question of a philosophical, moral and class inadequacy, which in the other films was revealed at the bottom of a parable, while in the last one it is assumed, self-critically, as a starting point. The protagonist in crisis is emptied, drained from the very beginning.
Here he is, this David Locke, with his unused instruments over his shoulder, lost and exhausted in the African sand, hysterically screaming his estrangement and impotence, crying his loneliness. What about THEaadventure it was a seal, a leave of mercy, here is the firm and definitive debut: man in the absolute desert.
But what man if not the Eurocentric and civilized, the colonizing white intellectual, born in Great Britain and raised in America, like the reporter in the film? Everything has already been burned behind him: his work, his family, his passions. Behind him is nothingness, and he wants to escape from this nothingness, changing his identity.
The occasion is provided by the first coincidence of this story full of coincidences: in his hotel lies, struck down by a heart attack, a certain Robertson who is called David like him and moreover looks like a double. The temptation to shed one's skin, to get out of one's past is such that the reporter does not hesitate to exchange with the dead. A man with no family, no friends, a heart patient and a drinker. But he is not an "animal of habit", like one who is always equal to himself. And who knows if he works with goods, concrete things, and no longer with words and images, vague things, communication with others will be better.
Robertson's wares were weapons, and he supplied them to the African liberation movement. So he believed in something, he had taken sides with something. By inheriting his surname and documents, the reporter inherits his mission but is unprepared to face it, because his job, his lifelong profession, has taught him objectivity. His observation was extraordinary, yes, but detached.
Here are his interviews and his reportages, which his wife and his producer are rehearsing in a television studio to remember him (since they believe him dead). That objectivity is chilling, its impartiality monstrous: because the words full of lies of an African president who persecutes guerrillas like bandits, have the same value as a document and testimony of the shooting of a fighter, of the various discharges that break down, of his “real” sacrifice. The camera makes everything true and false alike.
But there is a third passage, among those exhumed, which gives better than any other the key to the impossible relationship between him and reality, from which the protagonist's identity crisis was born. And it is when, in complete good faith on his part, he questions a young and alleged African sorcerer, who has also known Europe, about the reasons for his "tribal reconversion", about why his "witchcraft" is reborn as soon as he sets foot on the its continent. And he turns the question on him, noting how it says about the white man who asks it, much more than the answer, even the most exhaustive, of a Negro who possesses a radically different measure of things, would say to the latter. because it belongs not to a dying civilization, but to a developing civilization, open to the future.
While the future, for the interviewer, does not exist, all taken as he is in fleeing not only his own past, but also that of the "other", who are equally chasing and threatening him. His wife takes more interest in him "dead" than she showed in him alive, and she pursues him under the belief that she is pursuing Robertson, from whom she has news of the other David. As for the man who sold weapons to the guerrillas, the assassins of the presidential power are hunting him down, who want to annihilate him for the activity he carried out, while the reporter does not have the temper or the desire to continue it in his name.
However, an anonymous and available girl, met for that game of coincidences, urges him to this, as to the only vital commitment, who helps him and accompanies him, even though she knows him only from his denials. It is to her that the first David, reincarnated in her second, shows the nothingness of a past from which he is running away, like an endless tunnel framed by white-edged plane trees, as if in mourning. And for the rest, throughout the film, white is a color of death: the waxy pallor of the deceased double, the anachronistic carriage with the coachman in a top hat who introduces a wedding in a mortuary chapel in Munich, the architectures calcined by the sun that the "passenger ” (this will be the English title) meets in the Spanish odyssey, in his flight to the south, up to the wall on which he will crush an insect, as a symbol of self-destruction. In this blinding or dusty whiteness, his destiny is consummated.
Professione: reporter it is a work that contrasts glimpses and inconsistencies of the narrative fabric with the sinuous and fascinating compactness of Antonioni's unique style; gets the suspense with images, and denies it with dialogues. It has always been a director's not too hidden vice, of wanting to explain himself by translating into explicit and unnatural words what his angles and his long shots render with an immensely more fertile ambiguity, with a much more intense approximation and concrete to his tragic conception of the world. When we see Nicholson outstretching his arms to the sea from the cable car, like a bird in a cage, or when his life is sucked into the speeding car, slipping by like that line of trees, we know about him, that is to say about his emblematic character. , much more and better than through the heavy parable of the blind man who, having regained his sight at the age of forty, initially rejoiced in it (faces, colors, landscapes) and then fell back into despair, closed himself in darkness and eliminated himself with suicide , once you discover the squalor and filth of life.
Instead, it is through the window-rail, which opens and closes the final eight-minute shot-sequence, that the vision of the world of the filmmaker and his reporter is most crystallized. Reality fits perfectly and with maniacal elegance in his objective eye, and at the same time remains extraneous and distant from him; a grate divides like an abyss the reporter who awaits a death that is the result of coincidences that give him no respite, and that humanity that agitates far away, elusive and senseless.
Read as a thriller, Antonioni's film is unreliable and naïve, also because the character who guides it seems to have traveled the world in vain, and when he puts himself in someone else's shoes he already accomplishes the irremediable, since even in he was there with all possible discomfort. And then the cinematic thriller needs to give substance to the shadows through the actors: now Antonioni, as is universally known, uses the actor in his legitimate way, which is not to enhance him, but rather to "turn him off" in the metaphorical atmosphere that creates around him.
So don't expect from Jack Nicholson what wisdom and enthusiasm he offered in Five easy pieces, an "Antonio" film shot in the USA, or in The last corve and in Chinatown which are, among other things, posterior; but exactly the opposite. Thus Maria Schneider does not have the grim animality of Ultimo tango a Parigi, but only the presence of a modern and even ungainly little animal, which however has inherited pain, does not ignore the hesitations of solidarity and expresses to the companion of a short trip who has just been killed the recognition, which instead his wife of many years denies him.
Professione: reporter on the contrary, it should be read as an autobiography or, more exactly, as a self-criticism. In the autobiography certainly not wanted, but unconsciously pursued, in the partial incapacity of the author to objectify his protagonist so as to make him autonomous and to concern him, yes, with the necessary detachment, it seems to us to lie the substantial weakness of the film, which rightly undermines , given the coherence of the filmmaker, also the form. The wandering through Spain, although dotted with old men, cripples and policemen in a discreet but recurring choral background, concedes to the eccentricity of the landscapes and architectures (the encounter in Barcelona in Gaudí's palaces, the large hotels, the abstract compositions and taken from the landscape, the orange in the foreground to introduce a dialogue of abrupt vulgarity, etc.) an overriding and not always functional role. Without renouncing the delights of the frame, which for his style is the only way to penetrate the painting, Antonioni sometimes gets lost, almost like a tourist; and it is enough, to give us the sense of a loss of rigor, the memory of the deserted Sicilian town of The adventure, no less splendid, candid and Mediterranean, yet there tragically deprived of inhabitants due to a bankruptcy political will, which overlooked the landscape and from it drew energy of denunciation and force of expression.
But the film stands up when viewed as self-criticism. At the hands of a professional reporter, Antonioni touches the African third world, relating those existences to himself. But this globetrotting professional has, quite lucidly, the awareness of possessing a poor and limited perspective, of having at his disposal nothing but an improper and distorted mental structure, incapable of expressing and revealing the reasons and actions of that new universe and unknown to him. This awareness inevitably puts him in a self-critical position: not only and not so much on the camera that he doesn't know how to film the truth, as was already stated in Blow-Up, but on the mindset who is behind the car. In the man who wanders in the desert asking for help and guidance to penetrate the heart of the action of men in guerrilla warfare, there is an angry will to break through his own limit, to get rid of bloodless feelings and relationships, to detach himself from a routine uselessness professional. But this is not allowed. The few natives he meets are for him an impenetrable wall of silence. For him they are not men but landscape, dune, foreign rock. Only, he has to go back; and annihilating is the only way out and the only hope. He takes the identity of the other, changes legal status, but the skin, the thoughts, the emptiness remain his. And unequivocally of him is the race to renunciation, impotence and death.
The film disappoints, at least to a certain extent, because this awareness of oneself and of one's role, as well as of the limits of one's class, one's spiritual world and one's language, is not carried to the end with the rigor of the beginning. This would have ensured a Professione: reporter a completely new dimension also in the Antonionian landscape. The landscape once again becomes ancient, and suddenly deaf to expression, when the filmmaker is still enchanted by it, when the esthete still experiences it according to the old provincial custom, instead of taking advantage of the opening of horizons to dialogue with it from a 'unpublished and adult critical maturation.
Da Unity, March 5, 1995
Stefano Lo Verme
Mistake. The file name is not specified.
British reporter David Locke is sent to North Africa to report on local guerrilla warfare. One day the man who occupies the hotel room next to him, a certain David Robertson, dies of a heart attack; found the body, Locke decides to make a mistake assuming the identity of the deceased. But he soon discovers that Robertson was involved in a shady arms deal…
With Professione: reporter, Michelangelo Antonioni continues his exploration of the individual's sense of extraneousness in modern society and of the impenetrable and illusory nature of the reality that surrounds us. Presented at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival, Antonioni's film is based on a story by Mark Peploe, written by him together with the director and David Wollen, and stars the popular American actor Jack Nicholson and the young Maria Schneider. As in the previous one Blow-Up, Also in Professione: reporter the plot is built around an artificial thriller intrigue, which sees a character inexorably destined to fail at the center of the scene.
In the film Nicholson plays the role of David Locke, an English reporter who, in an attempt to escape his inner malaise and the bonds of a suffocating existence, decides to assume the identity of a dead man and start a new life, free from past and family ties. During his journey through Europe, this new Mattia Pascal (who has now "become" David Robertson) comes across a young unnamed student (Schneider), who agrees to accompany him on his adventure. The film focuses on the protagonist's attitude of perennial apathy, who seems unable to get involved in the events that occur around him, until he slips into a desire for abandonment and death that will materialize in the dramatic epilogue.
Although on a narrative level Antonioni's film is not free from a certain slowness of pace (especially in the first part), the film still retains an undoubted charm today, especially on a formal level, also thanks to the photography of Luciano Tovoli and the evocative atmosphere of the settings, ranging from the Sahara desert to the imaginative architecture of Antoni Gaudí. The finale is memorable, with a famous seven-minute long sequence in which all Antonioni's directorial virtuosity is expressed, and which summarizes the ambiguities of the story narrated in an exemplary way (the murder is committed off-stage, invisible to the viewer's gaze) and of the characters themselves (what is the role of the mysterious girl with no name? Is she perhaps the wife of the “real” Robertson?).
From MYMovies
Furious Columbus
Mistake. The file name is not specified.
“Interview” is a strange word. In the world of the press and mass communications it means questioning and seeking answers by confronting a person directly. The word warns that the act of interviewing is reciprocal. The characters are equal or agree to be so much so that the more powerful of the two is said to have "granted an interview". The roles are mutable, if one thinks of what an interviewer reveals about himself, as well as about the interviewee, and the recording is "perfect". The agreement, that is, is that whatever is said will be repeated in the text without changing a comma.
It may happen that the journalist complains about the reticence of someone who accepts the interview but then doesn't want to answer. Or that the interviewee denounces the "manipulation" of what he said, that he does not recognize his words in the text. In this case, the professional prestige of the journalist or the fidelity of the tool used, for example a television that does not know censorships, are the proof. Does it mean that this is the way to unambiguously tell what is happening, that there is a point of truth that can no longer be denied?
Antonioni has finished making a film (The passenger) which is based on the interview. Interviewing is the job of the protagonist, a television journalist who seeks the truth to the point of never leaving "his" trace of him. Or at least that's his desire, to drown in the sea of objectivity, arrange the instruments, turn on tape recorders and cameras and step back, so that life can go on. This effort pushes him towards a boundary. If I'm not an author, if I'm not a protagonist, if I have to stay outside and beside life, which is power, violence, triumph, defeat, death, where do I stand? And who are they? The irresistible and obscure desire to be perfect even in this is born: to disappear. And to be reborn as "nobody", to live like a shadow that leaves footprints when born.
Antonioni's character cautiously ascertains, with a long interview, that the man whose data and life he will take has no imprint, no qualities. The game succeeds but fate reveals his sly surprise: an "ordinary" life can be booked for terrible appointments. From now on we play between the sad awareness of sealed destiny and the tension of risk. Deadlines are the hole cards in this game: where, how, with whom will the things that I gradually discover happen to me? Now it's the others who question me, scrutinize me, evaluate me, judge me and finally decide. I participate in the broken part of a dialogue to which I lack the key. In short, I live. And I go to my appointment.
This is an interpretation, not the plot of Antonioni's film, it's just a thread in the mechanism that seemed complicated and perfect to me, and which appears like a great "mystery" not to be undermined in advance with incautious revelations. I am anxious to discuss this strange, new framework of storytelling which is confronted with the profession of reporting the truth, and is expressed, in the key points, with the technique of the interview. The story is dense and galloping, and perhaps it had never happened that the plot became so rich, in Antonioni's films. But the mastery of the tools is delicate and total. Therefore everything bends to this intuition.
Watching the film, one has the sensation that a documentary hand is following and recording the hand that is inventing the story and that a very strong tension is created between these two hands, which is the real tension of the film. That is, it seems that a documentary is shot alongside, in competition with or even above the film, as a kind of attempt to give us "more truth" than the plot can contain. In this way the director plays the opposite game with respect to his character, who wants to leave the documentary to enter the story of anyone, he wants a life drawn from the heap of all lives.
This film is therefore a crossroads in which various appointments take place. The tools for describing life - from the recorder to the filmed reportage - are confronted with the adventure of living. And the adventure of living loses clarity and grows in intensity as it moves away from the dispassionate and faithful recording. Saving yourself without living or living without saving yourself.
The protagonist (Jack Nicholson) is a man who moves forward first, as far forward as possible, to search and document, when he is a journalist and faithful servant of information. And then backwards, in a gesture of retreat into the unknown, where everything is destined to lose names, connotations and definitions. And he does it by trying to be "another", irresponsible and obscure.
In this way the tragedy that takes place every day in the world and which, with its captions, its labels, its justifications and its ideologies appears too cruel, can be tolerated when it returns primitive and unknown, conforming to a natural destiny of death. The anonymity of everything becomes the adventurous and tragic road to a sort of acceptance: I don't know who I am, I don't know who "they" are, I don't know why people shoot, kill, pay or save their lives.
Of the two women in the film, one, the wife, represents the logical, indefatigable and obtuse identity who believes in "proof" and believes that there is proof of everything. The other (Maria Schneider) is the refuge of non-identity, of adventure within a finite destiny, where someone drips the days and counts the movements, even if the protagonist doesn't know how many moves he has left. She represents an area of tenderness precisely because she is indefinable and anonymous, except for the form of beauty, and she crouches next to life, not passive but certainly the protagonist of nothing, as if through an intuition or an animal premonition.
The technique and language of the interview dispels any possibility that the mystery fades into some sort of mysticism. The interview shows us, like the documentary eye that watches over the scene, that it's not God, around the corner, who counts the moves, either for comfort or for condemnation. The whole game is mutual. The man-reporter is now stalked, monitored, interrogated and in the end played by the same world, almost by the same faces and people on whom, by profession, he was trained to shed light.
Unexpectedly, in the most "romantic" and poetic point of the story (which is also the most beautiful), when the protagonist has understood what the conclusion of the game will be, the political meaning of the speech sparks like a blade. It could also be the story of Allende's journalists who now wander around hunted down in the suburbs selling shoelaces and learning "underneath" the squalid life they wanted to redeem by writing.
But this, noble though it is, would be a bit too precise and a bit too reductive an interpretation of a film which, on the other hand, carries a mystery in the tense construction of a "whodunit". The mystery consists in letting oneself be seduced by the adventure of existing while knowing that this seduction only leads to death or failure. And that the end comes a little before the "truth". Like a prisoner who accepts an opportunity to escape even though he has every reason to suspect the trap.
I wonder if it wasn't also the experience of the documentary on China that pushed Antonioni towards this new path in which a film and a documentary follow each other and represent a passionate debate on the possibility of ascertaining reality.
In the most tense moments, I seem to catch the trace of those great Chinese silences in which Antonioni scrutinized and was scrutinized, judged and was judged, represented and was represented in the heads of millions of alternative characters, millions of radically different lives that they passed in front of the camera. Even the abrupt reversal of the situation between Antonioni and China, the strange fever that made a "great guest", a "master" an enemy attacked with mysterious brutality, perhaps marked Antonioni's experience and point of view . I believe that the setting up of two parallel stories in the film bears witness to this tension. On the one hand, the protagonist slips away from his role to no longer be on "this" side of the truth, on the side of the eye that he films and which he judges. On the other hand, his wife, an obstinate identifier of facts, searches the moviola for that part of the truth that she fears has escaped her. And she keeps coming back to see what was said and filmed in the missing man's interviews, sure to find a trace.
The girl who accompanies the fugitive is the only creature who has escaped the contagion of mass communication and its machines. She is the only one who can say, in the most tragic moment, when everyone has lost the thread, "I know". But she is a hopeless little saint. As in a radiological laboratory, the skeletons of the interviews and the findings of the documentaries remain hanging. There they are, saying everything and saying nothing. Or never enough. But morality is not Adorno's rage against the tools of communication. To him, the more complex, sensitive and almost autobiographical hero, Antonioni gave the interview as a tool for getting to know the world, and the camera as an "objective" eye. And she lets him go with two warnings: not to trust and not to give up, which is the highest level of secular morality. It is the message, or one of the messages, of an extraordinarily beautiful film.
Da The print, 11 July 1994
Giovanna Grassi
"Profession Reporter", intact again
Evening of honor for Michelangelo Antonioni. There was a moment of absolute silence last night in the Sala Umberto when the screening of Professione: reporter directed by Michelangelo Antonioni in 1974. And, before the very long and warm applause and embrace of the director, of the whole audience, many spectators remained still, imprisoned in the atmospheres of the film, in the borderless desert of Africa, in the architecture of Gaudi, in the dusty squares of Barcelona, in the mysterious, unique use that the director has made of the scenarios and of the identity of the characters.
No one seemed to want to leave that long final sequence in which the protagonist, Jack Nicholson, loses and rediscovers his double identity in the death of a hit man while his wife declares that she does not know him, as had happened in their life, and Maria Schneider, the girl who she had met him by chance, she says “yes”, she knew him. The evening, organized by Unità and Telepiù 1, on the occasion of the release of the videotape of the film on Saturday, was truly engaging because Enrico Magrelli, director of the network's newspapers, after the speeches by the Deputy Prime Minister Walter Veltroni and Furio Colombo, handed over the film rights to the director.
In fact, all the rights to the film, from home video to theatrical, were acquired in a joint operation by the Unit and Telepiù 1. The "pizza", closed in the silver box, was given to Enrica Fico, wife and partner by Antonioni, who in turn, in the audience, gave it to the visibly happy Michelangelo. Because in the past the film was often distributed in limited copies and yesterday evening it was returned in its entirety not only to the author, but to those who love and study cinema.
There were all those who had chosen to be there: Peter del Monte, "pupil" of Michelangelo, Giannini, Carlo Di Carlo, Tornatore, Angelo Barbagallo, D'Alatri, Chiara Caselli, Dario Argento, Mariangela Melato, Alessandro Haber, Jo Champa … And of course there were also the mayor Rutelli, Scola, Monicelli, the president of the Chamber of Deputies Luciano Violante, Borgna, Maselli…
Veltroni's words are beautiful and essential: "We bring back here, to the cinema, Professione: reporter and we give him back to his father." Acute, profound those of Furio Colombo: “With this story, Michelangelo saw well in advance the condition of chaos in which we live and asked us questions, sending them back to us with the character of the reporter. Isn't it, in the age of media power, illuminating the trajectory of a man who can disappear into his identity and assume another?”
When the screen went off, everyone found himself a prisoner of that fate that had tried to escape the conditioning of a lifetime by assuming the identity of another, met in an African hotel, an arms dealer. In every Antonioni shot last night there was a nugget-like thought for the audience. This was the meaning of the evening and of embracing our great director with the recovery of a film that is part of our cultural heritage, as well as cinematic.
Da The Corriere della Sera, October 17, 1996
Giovanna Grassi
The interview. Jack Nicholson: On the set I "defended" Schneider's whims
“If I close my eyes, I see Michelangelo in the desert sand during the filming breaks of Professione: reporter: he was always looking for a shot, the shot. It made us feel the silence in the oasis of the Sahara where the troupe ate food from Italy every evening while my director, a father, a friend, and above all a teacher for me, continued with his attentive eyes to see and make us " feel” his shots.
This is still the film I love most and consider the strongest adventure I've ever had,” says Jack Nicholson. And the memories crowd in, as if Antonioni were still by his side. The days of filming in Barcelona come to mind, when his director took him to see Gaudì's architecture making him lose and rediscover the identity of reporter David Locke: "on a journey towards life and, inevitably, towards death" . In his words, the evening at the Oscars becomes real again when it was he who gave him the statuette for his career "on March 27, 1995 and no one was, as usual, as elegant as him", and above all, he says it with immense and painful pride : “His joy is with me for an event, when in Los Angeles in 2005, my great teacher of life arrived, indomitable, vital as always, to attend the screening of Professione: reporter which I had purchased the rights since 1983 to protect and redistribute it in America.
It was his film, but now mine too, and it was a triumph that was repeated in New York and elsewhere”. He continues: “Michelangelo was, always will be, a witty man, with a unique and brilliant sense of irony. I knew I had to erase my ego, be a skilled actor at hiding myself in that reporter's portrayal, from Mark Peploe's script. I had to be part of his rigorous inner and outer landscape. I was also happy to act with my friend Maria Schneider whom I loved and whom I always justified to our director in her excesses, whispering to him: "Maria is like a James Dean of her generation".
I told him he had to understand it, he who had directed with Zabriskie Point theEasy Rider of another generation, he who was giving me the escape of a man hidden behind the identity of another to find his own”. He is passionate about the story: “Michelangelo could also have said ironically“ Actors are cows and you have to drive them through fences ”, but if you caught yourself in his visions, you could have been the most complete and creative actor in the world. Europe and the world owe a lot to my master, who loved art, painting, life, beauty, people. I've always been a cinephile and had studied, seen and re-watched all of his films. Basically, I've always looked after, in all my films, even those as an aspiring director, Michelangelo. I speak of his way of seeing things and people, images and creativity”.
There are also many personal memories in Nicholson's memory, but “of his presence, not of his absence”. “I don't know if he also chose me because he imagined and felt me as a man on the edge of many frontiers in life, but the time we spent together for the film in London, Barcelona and North Africa is part of my treasures. We should continue to seek our place in the world, as my reporter did in his journey through the landscapes of a square in London, in Palacio Guell in Spain, in dangerous territories and in others full of light. My director chose them one by one, giving me a place as an actor. And as a man."
SAND It was the strongest adventure of my career. If I close my eyes I see Michelangelo in the sand of the desert always looking for the right shot.
Da The Corriere della Sera, August 1, 2007
Alberto Ongaro
Mistake. The file name is not specified.
In Pirandello's novel The late Mattia Pascal the protagonist gives himself up for dead, changes his identity, but cannot get rid of himself because he finds his own life even in the shoes and life of another. In Michelangelo Antonioni's latest film Professione: reportersomething similar happens, but also something completely different, something even more cruel. An English television journalist tired of his life, his job, his wife is faced with the possibility of changing his life completely. In Africa, where he went to shoot a documentary, a man who vaguely resembles him dies next to him. The reporter exchanges his documents with those of the dead man and assumes his identity. He gets rid of himself and becomes another. He spends a short period of freedom wandering around Europe as weightless. Until, little by little, the story of the other, of the man whose place he has taken, strikes him like a disease, enters him, invades him, devours him, destroys him.
This is the meaning that one gets from seeing the splendid, shocking film by Michelangelo Antonioni. Now I'm talking about it with the director in a hotel in Milan. It's hot in the room and from the open window comes the great hubbub of the street. Antonioni behaves as if he were scarcely aware of himself. Maybe he doesn't know what we owe him or the idea that something is owed to him leaves him completely indifferent. The adventure, The night, The eclipse; Zabriskie Point they are distant experiences that he has forgotten. Perhaps the problem of the Pirandellian reporter who fails in the attempt to change his identity is also far away. “If I had thought of Mattia Pascal, Antonioni says, “I probably wouldn't have made the film. I confess that he didn't come to my mind either while I was writing it or while I was shooting it. I remembered it later, later, after the work was done. I went to re-read Pirandello's book and, honestly, I have to say that the two stories are very different, that they are two different ways of looking at a change of identity".
Ongaro: It seems to me that, beyond the anecdote, in your film you are looking above all for a new type of relationship with reality. What is behind this research?
Antonioni: You ask me to make a critical speech about myself, which I always find very difficult. Explaining myself in words is not my business. I make films and the films are there with their eventual contents available to anyone who wants to see them. Anyway, I'll try. At the bottom there is, perhaps, the suspicion that we, men I mean, are giving to things, to the facts that happen and of which we are the protagonists or witnesses, to social relationships or to sensations themselves, an interpretation different from that that we gave in the past. You can tell me that it is logical, natural that this happens since we live in a different time and that, compared to the past, we have accumulated experiences, notions that we didn't have before. But that's not all I mean. I believe that a great anthropological transformation is underway that will end up changing our nature.
Ongaro: You can already see the signs, some trivial, others disturbing, anguished. We no longer react as we once would have reacted, so to speak, to the ringing of bells or a revolver shot or a murder. Even certain atmospheres that once could have appeared serene, relaxed, conventional, commonplaces of a certain type of relationship with reality, can now be viewed tragically. The sun, for example. We look at it differently than in the past. We know too much about him. We know what the sun is, what happens in the sun, the scientific notions we have of it have ended up changing our relationship with it. I, for example, sometimes have the sensation that the sun hates us and the fact of attributing a feeling to something that is always the same means that a certain type of traditional relationship is no longer possible, it is no longer for me possible. I say sun as I could say the moon or the stars or the entire universe. A few months ago in New York I bought an extraordinary small telescope, the Questar, a thing of half a meter but which brings the stars in an impressive way. I can see the craters of the moon up close, the ring of Saturn and so on. Well, I get a physical perception of the universe so distressing that my relationship with the universe can not be what it used to be. This does not mean that it is no longer possible to enjoy a sunny day or take a walk under the moon. I just want to say that certain notions of a scientific nature have set in motion a process of transformation that will end up changing us too, which will lead us to act in a certain way no longer in another and therefore to change our psychology, the mechanisms that regulate our lives. It will not be only the economic and political structures that will change man, as Marxism maintains, but also man will be able to change himself and the structures as a result of a transformation process that involves him personally. I may be wrong, of course, in general terms, but I don't think I am wrong in my personal experience. So, to return to what you call my research, i.e. my profession, to my personal terrain, it is clear that, if this is true, I must look at the world with a different eye, I must try to penetrate it by paths that are not the usual ones, so everything changes for me, the narrative material I have in my hands changes, the stories change, the endings of the stories and it can only be like this if I want to anticipate, try to express what I believe is happening. I'm really making a big effort to look for certain narrative cores that are no longer those of the past. I don't know if I will succeed because if there is something that escapes our will it is the creative act.
In this film I would say that he succeeded. For even at times when the pattern may seem familiar, the resulting shock is of a new kind.
Antonioni: I do not know. I don't know if you agree, if the other viewers might agree, but in this film I instinctively looked for different narrative solutions from my usual ones. It's true, the underlying scheme may be familiar but every time I, while turning, realized that I was moving on an already known terrain, I tried to change direction, to deviate, to resolve certain moments of the story in another way. It was also curious how I noticed it. I felt a kind of sudden disinterest in what I was doing and lo and behold, that was the sign that I had to move in another direction. We are talking about a land sown with doubts, anguish, sudden illuminations. Surely there was only my need to reduce the suspense to a minimum, a suspense which nevertheless had to remain and which has remained, I believe, but as an indirect, mediated element. It would have been very easy to make a suspense film. I had the pursuers, the pursued, I didn't miss any element, but I would have fallen into banality, that wasn't what interested me. Now I don't know if I was able to actually create a cinematic story that evokes the emotions I felt. But when you've just finished a movie, the thing you're least sure about is the movie itself.
Ongaro: I'd say that you've managed to establish a new relationship with the viewer right from the start: this happened to me, for example: the first thing that struck me in your film is something that doesn't exist.
Antonioni: Oh yes? And what?
Ongaro: During the first few minutes I felt that something was missing and I could not pinpoint what it was. Then I understood that it was the music and I later realized that it couldn't be a random fact but that this lack of music was used by her in a musical function as a non-music that would introduce the spectator into a kind of emptiness and also leave a blank area in his feelings.
Antonioni: “Blank area”, as she defines it: it was intentional. In reality, I didn't share the opinion of those who use music to underline certain moments of the film in a dramatic, cheerful or persuasive way. Instead, I believe that in a film the images do not need musical support, but that they are sufficient to create a certain suggestion by themselves. The fact that she missed the music means two things to me. First, the image was strong enough to influence her, to give her this light, ambiguous sense of emptiness and anguish without the help of anything else. According to her ear accustomed to the music of other films was disconcerted and therefore favored in a certain way the development of the sense of emptiness that came from the images. But it is not that I clearly set out to achieve this effect. I rather followed my idea of cinema. I use very little music. Most of all I like that the music has a source in the film itself, a radio, someone playing or singing, what Americans call source music. That's what's in the movie. After all, the protagonist is a reporter, therefore. a character quite dry, adventurous, accustomed to emotions and also able to control them, not easily suggestible. Such a character certainly didn't need a musical commentary.
Ongaro: In a sense, yours is an adventure film, a fairly new and unpredictable choice on your part. What are the cultural reasons for this choice?
Antonioni: The adventurous element is not entirely foreign to me. It was already in there Zabriskie Point and there was, above all, in a film that I had written, scripted and prepared in all its details and which I was never able to shoot. A film that would have the title of Technically sweet. Now from Zabriskie Point a Professione: reporter passing through Technically sweet I felt a kind of obscure intolerance, the need to leave, through the protagonists of these films, the historical context in which I live and in which the characters also lived, that is, the urban, civilized context, to enter a different context , such as the desert or the jungle, where a freer and more personal life could at least be hypothesized and where this freedom could be verified. The adventurous character, the character of the reporter who changes identity to get rid of himself, arise from this need.
Ongaro: It can be said that this need is the need to free oneself from modern life and therefore from history…
Antonioni: From a certain type of story…
Ongaro: …and that essentially the theme of the film or, at least, one of the themes is the impossibility of freeing oneself from history because history always ends up capturing those who try to escape it?
Antonioni: Perhaps the film could also be interpreted this way. But there's another problem. Let's take a look at the character. He is a reporter, that is, a man who lives in the midst of words, images and in front of things, a man who is forced by his profession to always and only be the witness of the facts that happen before his eyes, witness and non-protagonist. The facts happen far from him, independently of him, and all he can do is reach the place where they happened, to tell them, report them. Or if he happens to be present, show them. According to the artificial obligation of the objectivity proper to the trade. I think this could be a disturbing, frustrating aspect of the reporter's profession and if a reporter, in addition to this basic frustration, has a failed marriage like the character in the film, a wrong relationship with an adopted son and many other personal problems , it can be understood that he may be moved to desire to take on another's identity when the opportunity presents itself. So it is of himself that the character frees himself, of his own history, not of history in a more global sense, so much so that when he discovers that the man whose identity he has assumed is a man of action, who operates within the facts and not a simple witness to the facts, tries to assume not only their identity, but also their role, their political role. But the story of the other, so concrete, so built on action, proves to be too heavy a burden for him. The action itself becomes problematic.
Ongaro: Generally in your films the political dimension is completely implicit. In this case however…
Antonioni: It seems to me that it is more implicit than explicit in this case too. In any case, I deal a lot with politics, I follow it closely. Today in particular it is everyone's moral duty to try to know how we are governed and how we should be governed, to check what the people who direct our existence are doing because there is no alternative, we have only this existence and therefore we must try to live it in the best and most just way possible for ourselves and for others. Of course, I am involved in politics in my own way, not as a professional politician, but as a man who makes films. I try to make my own little personal revolution with films, trying to focus on certain problems, certain contradictions, to arouse certain emotions in the audience, to make the audience have certain experiences rather than others. Sometimes it happens that the films are interpreted differently from the director's intentions, but perhaps this doesn't matter much, perhaps it isn't important that the films are understood and rationalized, as long as they are lived as a direct, personal experience.
Ongaro: You say that you don't need to understand films and that you just need to feel them. Does this discourse only apply to the artistic product or can it be extended to reality in general?
Antonioni: I could be wrong but I have the impression that people have stopped asking why things maybe because they know they won't be able to get an answer. People sense that there are no more reliable points of reference, there are no more values, there is nothing left to appeal to. It can no longer even rely on science because the results of science are never definitive, but provisional, temporary. It is a fact that computers cannot be sold but are rented because between ordering and delivery other more perfected computers are born which make the previous models age. This continuous progress of the machine which makes owning the machine useless since there is always another better one, pushes people not even to ask themselves what the machine is, what a computer is, how it works. The results of the machine are enough for him. And maybe that's all. Perhaps this pattern is repeated in everything in our lives, perhaps without us realizing it. It may seem contradictory to what I said before but it is not because if the knowledge of things changes us, the impossibility of understanding them also changes us. There is a certain distrust of reason in all of this. But perhaps people have realized that it is not true that reason is the fundamental element that governs individual life and society. So it tends to rely on instinct, on other centers of perception. I don't explain otherwise the unleashing of the instinct for violence, especially in the younger generations.
Ongaro: Speaking of technical means that can always be improved: you with Professione: reporter he obtained extraordinary results on a technical and expressive level. Are you totally satisfied with the medium you use?
Antonioni: Not at all. The medium is far from perfect. I feel a bit confined within the technical confines of cinema as it is today. I feel the need for more flexible and advanced means which allow, for example, a more immediate control of the colour. Now what can be obtained in the laboratory through film is no longer enough, we need to use color in a more functional, more expressive, more direct, more invented way. In this sense, the television cameras are certainly much richer than the film camera. With cameras you can, as it were, paint a film using electronic colors as you shoot. Neither Il deserto rosso I had made certain experiments by intervening directly on reality, that is, by coloring the roads, the trees, the water. With cameras, it doesn't need to go that far. Just press a button and color is added in the desired shade. The only problem is that of the transition from magnetic tape to film. But this is already done with quite satisfactory results.
Ongaro: Do you believe that the use of this new medium will also be able to condition the themes, suggest new themes?
It is probable. Today many topics are forbidden to us. Today's cinema manages to give certain metaphysical dimensions, certain sensations in a barely approximate way, precisely due to the limits of the technical medium. So it's not a question of using ever better tools to obtain ever more beautiful images, but to deepen the contents, to better grasp contradictions, changes and atmospheres. Cinema on magnetic tape is quite mature even if those who have used it up to now have looked for rather trivial, blatant effects. It can give extraordinary results if used with discretion, in a poetic function.
Ongaro: Will the cinema of the future be made with cameras?
Antonioni: I think so. And the next development will be that of laser cinema. The laser is truly something fantastic. In England I saw a hologram, that is a projection made with a laser, and I had an extraordinary impression. It was a small car projected onto a glass screen that didn't look like an image of a car, a representation of a car, but a real car, perfectly three-dimensional, just hanging there in space. So much so that I instinctively reached out to take it. The stereoscopic effect was amazing. Not only. But when the beam was moved, the image moved too and you could see the sides, the back. Many years will have to pass but it is clear that the laser in cinema will have developments. For now, holograms are projected onto a flat screen, but scientists experimenting with lasers are thinking of projecting them onto a transparent volume that can be placed in the center of a room and therefore the viewer can walk around it, choose his viewing angle.
Ongaro: Kind of Morel's invention. Do you believe, at least paradoxically, that in the distant future it will be possible to go that far? That is, projecting three-dimensional images next to us without the need for a screen, even of people, living next to people who don't exist?
Antonioni: This should be asked of a scientist or a science fiction writer. But as far as I'm concerned, I wouldn't put limits on this type of discovery because perhaps there aren't any limits. I believe that everything that has been imagined up to now by science fiction may even appear childish in the face of future discoveries. Now even science fiction is conditioned by the limited scientific knowledge we have. We can only make excursions into worlds that always have our point of reference. But in the future, who knows. It is useless to ask questions to which there is no answer. But from the "operational" point of view, isn't it already a significant statement to say that a certain question is meaningless? So let's take his as good as well. And let's have fun thinking that perhaps we will actually end up creating the situation hypothesized in the novel by Bioy Casares in the laboratory Morel's invention: a desert island inhabited only by images of people who do not exist. With all that mysterious, anguished, ambiguous such a thing entails. But perhaps the concepts of mystery, anguish and ambiguity will also have changed by then.
Da The European, December 18, 2008
