How I love thee – let me count the ways. I enjoyed this film so much more than Blow-Up, which I recently re-watched (though I hardly dislike Blow-Up, just in comparison).
That last scene; the camera somehow leaving the bars on the hotel room window and turning around to show the hotel; that long, long shot… It is as astounding as (if not actually directly influenced by) the opening shot of Touch of Evil, but of course in Antonioni’s style; not a single word by the characters can be overheard. Even Maria Schneider’s last line, which is so key to the film, is barely perceptible.
I didn’t listen to the commentary by Nicholson, except for that last shot, in which he does indeed explain one of the most famous and puzzling shots ever put down, supposing that Anonioni wouldn’t mind. So it’d be worth renting just for that I think. He also says that it was shot that way because Antonioni “didn’t want to film a death scene.”
Great, though the colors seem dim; washed out. I wonder if they were originally that way? It’s particularly noticeable when looking at the Gaudi buildings in Barcelona, which in my mind always brings up the beautifully shot, color-drenched, Japanese documentary, Gaudi from a few years back.
And it’s worth noting that this performance was in the middle of a string of astounding Nicholson performances (though there were likely clinkers in there as well). I’ve never seen The Fortune, which was released the same year. But after my recent viewing of Reds, I’m curious to see Beatty and Nicholson together on film again.
Mr Frisoli, lover of existential 1970s fare; any insight or observations on this one?
I’m pretty drained of insight these days. but The Passenger is one of my favorite Antonioni films. I will even advocate Zabriskie Point, long regarded as one of the most pretentious bombs of all time. however, I think it has a very nice sense of American landscape and its portrayal of youth values in conflict with the mainstream is more nuanced than a classic like Easy Rider. Plus it has a lovely shot of a home being blown up and a single loaf of Wonder Bread floating down amid the fragments. Mark–I saw The Passenger quite a while ago but I remember it being fairly vivid in terms of the cinematography–one of the things I like about it is how everything seems to be played out in bright sunlight. perhaps just your copy was dim? and, yes, Nicholson does a great world-weary existential performance, right up there with Five Easy Pieces.
Haven’t seen it but am curious now that everyone’s making a fuss. The reveiws I’ve read are always glowing but it sounds so ponderous and European (southern Europe at that). Still, I have watched a couple of golden oldies in the last few days. First, Peter Weir’s The Last Wave. I love Weir’s work–particularly Fearless–even his commercial films are entertaining and always impeccably assembled. And I very much admired the subliminally erotic lyricism of Picnic at Hanging Rock. The Last Wave‘s uneasy mixture of new age mysticism and post-colonial critique feels dated, though there are some haunting images. Much more fun was Yasujiro Ozu’s Good Morning. This 1959 comedy of manners about about a handful of suburban families confronting cultural shifts that will transform Japan in ways they cannot even begin to articulate is very charming. A gaggle of gossiping housewives (I don’t know much about Ozu but his portraits of women in the film are problematic at best), drunken door to door salesmen, a sweet love story to root for, and, at the center of the action, two little boys who stop talking until their family buys them a television set. Ozu is a master of composition and while other films of his have been hard work, this one had me laughing out loud. And Reynolds will like it because it is chock full of fart jokes! Take that Antonioni!
I believe Marcello Mastroianni farts vigorously into the face of Monica Vitti in one of Antonioni’s masterpieces La Notte. and, yes, The Passenger is ponderous and European..but it seems to me it doesn’t come close to the ponderousness of Picnic at Hanging Rock, so you should be able to get through it, Jeff. for sheer will power I defy anyone to do a double bill of L’Avventura and Last Year at Marienbad with a full bladder, as I did during my early days when I had more endurance and a greater attention span. I was afraid to get up to use the bathroom for fear that, at that very precise moment, the BIG SOMETHING would happen. Now I bring an empty Mountain Dew gallon bottle and a length of rubber hose to long european movies. At Andrei Rublev, I filled the damn thing up!
i like la notte a lot, and am pained to think i may have forgotten a farting sequence. michael, you’re joking, right? i have the passenger in my netflix queue.
we should have a separate discussion of masterpieces of the various european new waves that seem very hard to take now. but i will not countenance the placement of the sublime andrei rublev in any such discussion.
I am a big fan of Andrei Rublev too and sorry to have profaned it. I am for the most part a fan of Tarkovsky, though Nostalgia is hard even for me to take. I have to say these days that I am finding Godard overrated–am I wrong??
I watched The Passenger this weekend and while I didn’t think it to be so terribly artsy or pretentious, I must admit the film felt a bit empty to me (as empty as the African desert so prominantly displayed in the film’s opening–and somewhat tedious–thirty minutes). Yes, it’s all very pomo about the fluidity of identity and the conflation of an existentially bored documentary filmmaker with a radically decadent British gun-runner supplying arms to some unnamed group of insurgents in some unnamed post-colonial African country was an intriguing premise. Ultimately, I didn’t think Antonioni was really interested in any of this geopolitical subtext. To be honest, he (and Mark Peploe and Peter Wollen) seemed mostly interested in landscapes, avant-garde Western architecture and Maria Schneider (who recently voiced the role of Phil Cabinet’s wife in an episode of “Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” but I digress). Nicholson appears to have been cast adrift and never manages to actually generate an interesting character(s). His commentary track is kinda funny though I don’t think it was intended to be so. As for the famous long shot at the end, how can you possibly compare this to Welles tracking shot in Touch of Evil? Antonioni was obviously upset with Americans like myself and my need for narrative:
All hail the Europeans with their love of ambiguity and butter and their colonial pasts. Me, I liked X-Men: The Last Stand.
How can you NOT compare it Touch of Evil?!
Agh – well, I’m certainly not surprised that there are people who don’t like this film (Yet the pants do travel here!) And as Arnab has pointed out to me on many occasions, I’m happily oblivious to geopolitical subtext.
Nothing you say though shakes my faith in this one. I don’t care what African country gets the guns. Neither did Antonioni. It certianly doesn’t matter in the film.
But – really? Maria Schneider was in ATHF?
I guess I can’t compare the long shot to Welles (or P.T.A.’s long take in Boggie Nights or Scorsese’s use of this device in numerous films) because there is not a lot of there there. Basically, the camera treats the barred window as a frame, and we see people artfully move in and out of this frame (quite theatrically with red being a key color motif) until the camera manages to escape the bars which have locked Locke inside his own personal prison cell (or should I spell it gaol) and move out into the courtyard as various cars move in from multiple directions. Locke/Armstrong’s assasins arrive, some police arrive, MAria Schneider wanders about (did she turn him in?), an ambulance drives around (waiting for a body to materialize?), Locke’s ex-wife arrives with Marty Knight. What makes this long shot interesting is the way it moves through the barred window and that just didn’t seem so remarkable.
um, spoiler warnings?
This film benefits from spoilers as it alerts the viewer to the fact that something will eventually happen.
define “happen.”
How’s this for a definition of “happen”: I think Jeff is referring to a general lack of “action images” in this and other so-called ponderous European films. Deleuze uses the term in his book on cinema, and I think it’s pretty useful. The action image is a form of movement image (movement images are images linked by rational cuts and continuity), it is an image that carries the narrative forward, and it’s the bread and butter of Classic Hollywood film. Deleuze prefers European films because they are ponderous. In a film like The Passenger, the time image dominates. The time image lingers on pure optical situations, “which are are no longer sensory motor and which bring the emancipated senses into direct relation with time and thought. This is the very special extension of the [time image]: to make time and thought perceptible, to make them visible and of sound.”
I’m probably simplifiying Deleuze’s argument, but the time image emancipates our senses. Because of the repetitive “situation-action-situation-action-situation” pattern of Classic Hollywood cinema, the spectator’s perception is extended always into action (if you get up to go the bathroom during a Classic Hollywood film, the first thing you ask when you return to your seat is “what did I miss”?). In the “nothing-happens-in-this-movie” movie, the time image dominates. The time image (which developed after WWII, especially with neo-realism) is “a new breed of signs…And clearly these new signs refer to very varied images–sometimes everyday banality, sometimes exceptional or limited circumstances–but above all, subjective images, memories of childhood, sound and visual dreams or fantasies.” The time image prevents our perception from being extended into action so that it instead is extended into thought. In other words, these ponderous European films put our perceptions into contact with thought.
That’s his argument, anyway. Pam Cook and Mieke Bernink call it a “non-nostalgic case for a cinema of greater demands”–which I think is a nice way of describing it.
I feel the need to defend myself, somehow, as I am the one who champions films like Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Jonathan Glazer’s Birth; Gus Van Sant’s Last Days and Elephant, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s gorgeous Tropical Malady or anything by Terrence Davies (to name a few). All wallow in “time images” and all have provoked a great amount of thought on my part. Now I like “action images” myself, though I am a bit more of a deep focus, long take kind of a fellow (not that such an approach denies action). That being said, The Passenger did not prevent my perception from being extended into action so that it instead was extended into thought. Well, that’s not true, I did some thinking but ultimately what I thought about seemed to be at odds with what I was watching. So maybe I’ll create a new category and suggest that The Passenger offers up “aphasic images.”
goodbye dragon inn did not excite any thoughts of action in me. it did the reverse, in fact: i was not able to stir myself to reach for the remote and turn it off after 15 minutes.
i haven’t seen all the other films jeff names but surely the experience of time in antonioni or tarkovsky is nothing at all like watching elephant which is all sequential movement.
That’s my point. Based upon Deleuze’s argument, Goodbye, Dragon Inn would be an exemplary example of a film driven by “time images.” Wong Kar Wai’s (who cites Antonioni as an influence) In the Mood for Love is another fine example.
thank you john for the excellent summary.
jeff, i agree that goodbye dragon inn is comparable to antonioni or tarkovsky in this regard, but i really can’t say the same about either elephant or in the mood for love. to look at it negatively, i can see how someone might find both these films as boring as, say, sacrifice or l’avventura but it would be a different kind of boring. in the latter pair, especially in tarkovsky, an experience/awareness of time is what the film induces in the viewer (watching nostalghia or even solaris you might think time had actually stopped); while elephant and in the mood for love are also elliptical films in which not a lot happens they are far more dynamic, driven by time rather than shot through with it. i don’t think it is an accident that these european films are so much longer as well. i’m not actually sure if i’m making any sense here. i guess i’m saying some films are “slow”, some are about time in an experiential/structural way. to clump them all together because they’re all films that call for patience from the viewer and are not plot driven is a little inexact.
I think Arnab’s making sense.
I might disagree that Elephant is about sequential time as we see many of the same sequences repeated over and over from different perspectives . . . time is fractured, the overall narrative is linear to a point but the film’s structure is non-linear. I can’t speak for Tarkovsky but, having not read Deleuze and operating with John’s summary:
I have to believe that van Sant’s later films do fall under this theoretical paradigmn (as does Wong Kar Wai’s work).