Making the Audience Work

MANY NASTY THINGS have been written about Michelangelo Antonioni since his L'Avventura grabbed a legion of intellectuals and turned them into cultists in the early '60s--the backlash that follows movie cults is inevitably louder, bitchier and more memorable than the initial shockwave that turns a movie into a classic. For years, these two warning camps have made a lot of noise about Antonioni knowing that moviegoers themselves seldom rely on their own judgment but rather trust the deductions of those who are in a position to release periodic edicts.

The truths about Antonioni's work had been plotted out long before his current audience ever had a chance to come in contact with him. So much scorn was directed at his films that until The Passenger opened a couple of weeks ago in New York., he was remembered largely for his characteristically bad Zabriskie Point, instead of for the few artistically successful movies he had turned out before. The film critics had a lot of fun with that one; after all, what is better for dicing and discard than an ambitious, extravagant failure? If it is flamboyant enough, as was Zabriskie Point, it lends itself to equally flamboyant massacre. A really loud, silly disaster (one may remember John Bookman's Zardoz) by a minor (the microscope please) talent gives itself out to months of laughter and derisions simply on the basis of its dopiness. But a major director's failure demands hatchets around the table by the protectors of the cinema.

Antonioni must be considered a major director, at least for the moment. There simply are not that many filmmakers who have introduced new concepts and new styles in film. Even if he never makes a good film again, he has produced a set of questions which have to be asked about movies and haven't been asked before. Unlike most any other contemporary director he has completely refrained from imitation. His pictures get as much attention as they do because they don't deal with issues chewed up before he introduced them. He forces critics and audiences to encounter that rarity in the art, reorientation. A successful movie like Amarcord or Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore depends on preconceptions of society, asking the audience to consider its extraordinary perspective. These movies are not shallow, but neither are they active challengers of prescribed notions. They expand rather than disrupt, playing off what we already believe. Antonioni hopes he can make us forget, at least for the moment.

THE PASSENGER depends on our capacity for readjustment. From the beginning, it makes each images new, each person distinct and alone, throwing our soft store of working axioms out the window. Audiences are always comfortable watching social comedies because they can immediately grasp the values and understand what they are being ordered to respond to within each given frame. Antonioni puts it all up for re-examination. Some time ago, he said:

I want the audience to work. I ask them to see the film from the beginning and devote their full attention to it, treating it with the same respect they would give a painting, a symphony, or any work of art. I treat them with the same respect by inviting them to search for their own meanings instead of insulting their intelligence with obvious explanations.

So we get symbols, some of them easier to work with than others, most pliable and multi-facilitating. And for a home base, we get Antonioni's old favorite, that most accommodating of all vehicles, the desert.

The desert dominates The Passenger--it seems to sprawl everywhere except for the lush, over-cultivated scenes in England. A key to Antonioni's method, the desert offers no insights in the Eureka-gents-now-you-understand-the-movie sense. It serves, besides suggesting a million metaphorical possibilities, simply as a stage: anything Antonioni dots it with becomes the thing on which the audience must focus its attention. And so the film crawls along agonizingly, a slow methodical parade of pictures to be explored. The pace itself gives Antonioni's existential tendencies time to flower into unmistakable statements, momentary images which seem eternal. It is no accident that if one took The Passenger and cut it into 180,000 or however many frames, each one would somehow be complete in itself and quite beautiful. Antonioni attempts not only to please our eyes. He demands, just as he said, the respect for his frames that one "would give a painting."

Forced to stare at things it wouldn't normally waste its time on, an audience can, with no qualms, just walk out. Many people will no doubt walk out of The Passenger. So much of it is unpleasant, and more will simply be tedious for those who aren't geared to the director. Only Antonioni's vision of a decadent, uninvolved and overinformed western civilization and its own use of the camera eye corresponds easily to a conventional sense of social criticism. David Locke, the journalist, his wife and his news colleagues all lead prechanneled lives, never confronting nature or themselves. The newsmen chase facts which long since have stopped meaning anything real to them. Like the photographer in Blow-Up, they are observers, lying to themselves about the importance of their observations, as well as to the rest of their society. Locke's position as a transplanted European in Africa makes him something of an ambassador. All he has to offer are words and images from his culture, strange gifts to a civilization where the ten-year-old kids seem to have more self-knowledge than Locke has attained at 40.

AS THE ENERVATED journalist who takes the identity of a dead gunrunner, Nicholson at first seems all wrong. The most verbally charming of all American actors, he seems in a stasis. Using a monotone reminiscent of a robot's, he flaccidly interviews the only figures he can understand or even find, western-supported African fat cats. When he interviews a witch-doctor who turns the news camera on him. Nicholson has got to turn it off immediately, before it records the vacuity. It is a powerful statement by Antonioni, as his camera slaps down other film makers who have looked at the motion picture image as substitution for an exposition of the truth, synthesizing it with their small, willful, glib ways of portraying the world. Fittingly, Antonioni would have us see him in that witch doctor's role.

As usual, the hatchets are out for Antonioni. A lot has been written on The Passenger, especially on the last ten minutes. They are classic, rare moments on the screen. More than just stately choreography, they confront the key issues Antonioni has suggested ever since he first became an important force in the art. There is little use in even describing these moments, for they may strike almost everyone who sees them differently. They rely on the hope that the viewer cares about the problems Antonioni poses and cares to do the work he demands. Those who don't may end up giggling all through the movie, through its empty spots, through its stretches of desert. Those who do will be all the more rewarded by the fact that The Passenger doesn't come wrapped, bowed and ready for easy discard.