After failing to realize what was probably his most ambitious project, Techically Sweet (when they asked Oppenheimer why he worked on the atomic bomb, he replied that it was because of the 'technically sweet' theoretical problems it posed), michelangelo antonioni while retaining and building on the author's obsessions, he focused on Professione: reporter (1975), which was shown in English-speaking countries under the name The PassengerThe film follows television reporter David Locke (Jack Nicholson) who assumes the identity of a dead man, and Antonioni organizes the narrative as an exceptionally pregnant study of the double where the Gothic and supernatural perspective is transformed into an existential and allegorical one, continuing the author's in-depth exploration of the modern human condition. If it is said that Professione: reporter Antonioni's final masterpiece, then it is not only because in the rest of his career the director did not make a single work of that visionary quality, but also because the film, in fact, sublimates the most important tendencies within the author's manuscript.
In other words, in order to adequately contextualize Professione: reporter, we must emphasize one of the author's tendencies that is as much (auto)poetic as it is worldview. Namely, Antonioni is a director of absence, and thus - not at all paradoxically - of abstract concreteness: emptiness as a vacuum, gravitational force, a space of falling into the world, a metaphor for nothingness. What in other films would be the very center of narrative interest, in Antonioni's work is dispersed, dissolved, and rearranged. This is not just a matter of rejecting conventional narrative procedures (the critic Martin Walsh stated that the whole point Professione: reporter in undermining basic film conventions), about the author's unwillingness to conform to the established parameters of diegetic orientation: it is about a more intense connection of form and theme, about a more radical chaining of film technique and visual motifs. Ultimately, mise-en-scène will always record itself, its own trace that it will leave on the protagonists, its own sign, whatever the anthropological content.
In Antonioni's work, there is no resolution: the enigma is revealed in The adventure (1960) suppresses, ignores, throughout the film, in order to provide a new kind of focus in the narrative towards which the typical viewer still shows some interest, still seeks answers. The director tries in The adventure to check to what extent - in a world where the main determinant is the alienated subject - it is still possible to establish emotions, even at the cost of human loss: when Anna (Leah Massari) loses sight of her boyfriend Sandro (Gabrielle Ferzetti) and her friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) are getting in touch.
U Blow-Up (1966), however, we can see where this solution leads, because the narrative movement or turn that began with is complemented with multiple ironies. The adventure: the disappearance of the human being is replaced - with major structural consequences - by the disappearance of the corpse: the erasure of even the last humanistic discourse. Because of this Blow-Up is a paradigmatic metatextual film: what is the status of the object in and on the image, what can actually be captured by photography, what is subject to filming in general? In the structure of the gaze, what is it that escapes us and what remains, in our fragile possession, after the object has escaped us? Fear, melancholy, perhaps even sadness? In Blow-Up Antonioni questions the scope of his own artistic representation, his own cinematic language: the director suggests that in the act of filming, of photographing, there is always a dimension of pantomime, of mimicry that is meant to replace reality, to frame the existential void, that missing, To nothing which occasionally appears.
But, in order to see the full cinematic power of Antonioni's insight from Blow-Up about the representational adequacy of the cinematic apparatus to capture not the appearance, but check-out (modern) man - the text written in the white margin - it is worth returning to the last seven minutes of the director's masterpiece The eclipse (1963). Ljubavnici Vittoria (Vitti) i Piero (Alain Delon) they arranged a meeting. If both of them come, we have a happy ending, if only one of them comes, we have a melodrama. However, in Antonioni there is no confirmation of stereotypes, no recourse to genre: at the end of the film, various shots are arranged, but in them there are no lovers who have not fulfilled their own promises. The climax The eclipse It is not in incarnation, nor in halving, but in the inscription of emptiness.
In place of man, therefore, stands his absence: and so formalist cinematography, in that privileged staging of Antonioni, has reached the furthest point of its elaboration. There is nothing left, there is only the mechanism of representation: everything is lacking, but the inscription remains.
Antonioni's focus on the relationship between space and character created a metonymic connection, so that - if this is not the world in totality sought - the inner and outer lives were indicatively crossed. Therefore, no matter how confused the sensibility of his characters was, the director was able to summarize it in geometrically inspired camera movements and architecturally solid shots: the aim was not synthesis, but rather disproportion, in the author's interesting interpretation of mimesis.
Just as his characters are most often alienated from each other, so too do Antonioni's works intentionally seek to alienate the viewer: if one really wants to show reality, does that not also imply a refusal to reproduce existing clichés of representation? On the one hand, such an approach by Antonioni led to formalistic precision, on the other, we are at the heart of the director's polyvalent game, the implications of which are completely unexpected. In this process, life is not much more than a mere mimicry, an imitation of something that was real and concrete: once again, by emptying his film image, Antonioni produces rich semantic results.
And so, in the precise development of the author's aesthetics, we arrive again at Professione: reporter which, in fact, represents the deserved climax of the director's opus, drawing the ultimate conclusion from the poetic setting and the narrative situations treated. The theme of the double, in fact, reflects the director's most subtle implications. If the climax and conclusion in Zabriskie Point (1970) found in assembly sequence that identified the hopeless beauty of the region in the destruction of material boundaries, then a similar role in Professione: reporter belongs to a long, seven-minute shot that again gives the camera - its continuity, its complete closure of the time-space complex - the power to surpass physical landmarks, to 'escape' spatial confinement, and this precisely at the moment when it indexes and indicates the death of the protagonist.
The camera thus, in the same domain, became a reflection of the departing soul, an 'objective' representation of the end of a quest and identity game, as well as an agent through which the fatalistic narrative is finally embodied. Professione: reporter is in another sense a summary of Antonioni's pessimistic metaphysics: the hero is already so alienated that he is alienated even from himself and needs a fictional supplement, a double to continue his life. But the place subsequently occupied in the symbolic network can lead nowhere else than to a repetition of fate, to a reenactment of death.
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