The Passenger Meets History

By Robert Koehler

Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, that cinematic Rip Van Winkle, is stirring from its rest. Thirty years after its controversial premiere in 1975, this anti-adventure, as slippery as an eel, has been let out of its vault for a limited North American theatrical release in late October. There is a story here (which we’ll get to), but the very curiousness of everything associated with the film’s public return—Why so long unseen? How is it that Jack Nicholson actually owns the film? Which version?—is somehow in fidelity to the curiousness of Antonioni’s achievement, which itself is in part the investigation of human phantoms. Only such a mysterious film deserves such mysterious treatment: out of nowhere, sometime in the middle of the 80s, it was gone; now, out of nowhere, it’s back.

I remember the feeling of first watching The Passenger at a screening room on the MGM lot before its initial release, and how it overwhelmed my attempts at analysis. It infected my brain. I lost all direction to my car afterwards, hopelessly lost in the studio’s parking garage; my mental compass had been switched off. It was as if, for the first time in cinema, a director had actually managed to film the unfilmable, capturing a physical reality in the process of receding, dissolving, from view. It had nothing to do, necessarily, with the TV reporter named David Locke (and played with dry complexity and quick instinct by Nicholson, in one of his very best performances), who exchanges his identity with a dead man in his neighboring hotel room in the Chadian desert; more to do perhaps with the rigorous distance of Antonioni’s camera from his people, which had been pulling progressively further back as evidenced by his Chung Kuo Cina documentary, which I had watched a couple of years earlier on ABC television. But with The Passenger, the sheer quiet of the soundtrack pulls you in to the images, which then take you out—not of the film, but to a disturbing, unsettling remove from your own consciousness, something close to an out-of-body experience.

The worst temptation with Antonioni is to immediately leap into analysis without pause. It’s an understandable impulse, since his cinema is naturally pregnant with ideas. He remains one of the few filmmakers to consider science as a serious adult rather than a paranoid child, and his artistic context as a rebel offspring of neo-realism, pulled towards a study of human beings’ interior reality in visual terms, makes him perhaps the intellectual film artist par excellence. But the radicality of The Passenger—the strangest film he has ever made, and he’s made some strange ones—demands pause.

Some critics stumble all over themselves with it, pounding their point into a wall that has just moved. (See the film twice, and you see two films. See it a third, and you see a third. And so it goes.) William Arrowsmith’s commentary in his book Antonioni: The Poet of Images can be suitable for some laughs at your next cinephile dinner party. A well-intentioned and highly literary Antonionian, Arrowsmith devotes Kael-like space and fervour to insisting that The Passenger can—no, must—be read in religious terms. Arrowsmith unconvincingly argues that as Locke takes on the body and life of Robertson, he takes on the modern version of a religious vocation toward transcendence, symbolized by such aspects as a business meeting in a Munich church. As usual, longtime Antonioni commentator Seymour Chatman resorts to banalities in his Taschen volume on the director, commending The Passenger for not being the miserable failure he deems Zabriskie Point (1970) to be because it has “a well-knit, if unusual, plot, convincing dialogue and fine acting,” and claiming that “the film works well because it follows—though in an off-beat way—the genre of the thriller.” Even the incisive and original critic Sam Rohdie confesses, after much analysis in his fascinating if occasionally opaque monograph, to a sense that the film is nearly beyond grasp: “The Passenger serialises doubles to an infinity, turning round each other, like a spiral around a void.”

The Passenger’s elusiveness stems from its tendency to elicit a tangle of contradictory feelings for the first-time viewer. If at first it resembles a Hitchcockian thriller, why does it feel like a walk through Alice’s Looking-Glass? Then a day, two days, a week later, it triggers a recurring resonance like a nagging dream, and only later does it begin to settle—but only partially. It resists comforting comparisons to such obvious touchstones as Paul Bowles, whose fictions of Europeans lost in the North African desert did mildly inspire screenwriter Mark Peploe, writer of the film’s core story. (Peploe had earlier co-written, with Antonioni, a script called Technically Sweet about a journalist who decides to lose his identity in the Amazon rainforest. Nearly filmed until escalating production costs compelled producer Carlo Ponti to pull the plug, the script was clearly the mainspring for Peploe’s script of The Passenger, which he wrote with author-critic Peter Wollen. This remains the only script of Antonioni’s career that he didn’t have an original hand in writing.)

Unlike Bowles’ bewildered exiles who sometimes have the habit of “going native” (a tendency which Antonioni spoofs in 1962’s L’eclisse), Locke finds himself with something less romantically remote than a Bowlesian hero might. He has the accidental opportunity to dispose of his dissatisfied self as a foreign correspondent covering war-torn Chad, as well as his self as a disinterested husband, and take on the entirely new identity of a man not of observation but action: David Robertson (Chuck Mulvehill), a gun-runner supplying arms to rebels battling the country’s arrogant dictator. Locke-turned-Robertson, however, can’t keep up with the dead man and his round of appointments. (Deep within the film’s crevices is a jet-black comedy.) Fairly soon into his cloak-and-dagger routines—which Nicholson slyly infers through his behaviour is like playing dress-up—the new Locke/Robertson realizes, if only silently, that he can never actually be “Robertson”: the role is beyond him. When he meets an unnamed architecture student (Maria Schneider, always listed under the noxious character name of “The Girl”) in Antonio Gaudi’s sepulchral Palacio Guell in Barcelona, Locke suggests that he may just disappear altogether; indeed, he does, gradually, in bits, as he drifts toward the film’s penultimate seven-minute shot.

Antonioni’s “thriller” is not merely dissimilar to Hitchcock: it can be read—and this is reinforced with every viewing—as the most elaborate critique of Hitchcock’s shallowness that any director has ever made. Even as the film “resolves” with the extended shot of Locke/Robertson’s murder in Osuna, Spain at the hands of government agents who had been pursuing him, the very form of this now-classic shot—moving imperceptibly past Locke/Robertson’s legs and feet on his hotel bed, looking out the hotel window toward a criss-crossing of darting bodies and cars and a stationary old man in the plaza of an adjacent bullring, through the window into the plaza itself, past the cars, past Schneider’s student, past Locke’s wife Rachel (Jenny Runacre) arriving with Spanish police, past the surrounding sky and parched landscape, past the front of the hotel until we realize that we are now looking in at where we had been, and looking at a strangely incomplete view of the dead Locke/Robertson lying face-up on the bed—describes openness and possibility; an ending which defies time and space, amenable to meanings from the metaphysical to the optical/epistemological. (As if to disarm critics, former film critic Antonioni has mischievously explained that the main purpose behind the long, gravity-defying camera movement was to avoid showing Locke/Robertson being murdered onscreen: “The idea of seeing him die bored me,” he stated in an interview in Filmmakers’ Newsletter, July 1975.) At the least, it’s this resistance to being defined—one that is embedded in its very form—that makes The Passenger a defiantly open work, even in the context of the formal and narrative experimentation of the time.

But time has shifted as much (or more so) as Locke, a man who wishes to escape from history. History—in the form of the forces of African counter-revolution—catches up with Locke, and it has caught up with the film in a bizarre way. Who knew that The Passenger, a film commonly seen in repertory houses from 1976 to 1986, would effectively disappear from view in cinemas for the subsequent 19 years? Who knew what effect a once-casual image from this once-familiar film would have on viewing it now, in 2005? The image appears in the midst of one of the director’s most elegant sequences, centered on one of his most sublime single shots: Locke, hulking over the dead Robertson on his bed, straddling him as a lover might, and gazing on his face in a deep and sustained way, absorbing the full weight of his new doppelgänger reality. As Locke later examines Robertson’s agenda book detailing his numerous upcoming business appointments, the camera closes in on the date of his fateful meeting at the Hotel de la Gloria in Osuna: September 11.

Pure accident, like Locke’s discovery, or perhaps an allusion to the date of the Chilean coup that saw Pinochet overthrow Allende, but the date alters our perception of The Passenger in the new century. The iconic calendar entry of Death is also Locke’s, and it is also wound up in the politics of lands and peoples so distant from the awareness of educated Westerners that they simply persist in what Locke tells Robertson are “the old habits,” relaying to the public the biases that they already hold. Thus, any thinking audience watching The Passenger now, an audience aware of itself in a new turn of history, will unavoidably see parallels between Robertson’s militarization of “democrats” in an Islamic country and the West’s current military involvement with “democrats” in the Middle East. On top of the layers of doubling, unstable identities, the dissolution of genre and the rigorous visualization of ideas comes the foregrounding of what was once the film’s background themes: the folly of running away from history (which, like nature, will always meet you), and the mysterious prevalence of hazard and chance, which allows a Locke to employ a corpse as the passport out of his dead-end life, or allows for a once-innocuous date to suddenly find itself freighted with associations.

What caused this unexpected, delayed timing to meet up with current events? According to Nicholson’s attorney Ken Kleinberg, the actor had long wanted to purchase the worldwide rights to a film he loved as an art collector might; if he wasn’t able to hang it on a wall, he could at least protect the film from potential corporate skullduggery and exercise some control over its proper exhibition. This is painfully ironic, since The Passenger had been mutilated to begin with. Antonioni had first made a four-hour cut of the film himself, and then brought in editor Franco Arcalli to trim it to JUST under two-and-a-half hours. This was still too long for MGM, which demanded a cut under two hours for the North American market, and required that it be titled The Passenger (certainly a more interesting title than the one it’s generally known by on other continents—Professione: Reporter.) At 118 minutes, the MGM version is shorter than Professione by approximately five minutes, and excludes two crucial scenes, one dealing with Locke’s surreptitious return visit to his London home, where he finds evidence of Rachel’s infidelities with her lover Stephen (played with feral intensity by the great Steven Berkoff, whose name is misspelled in the closing credits, and whose screen time was clearly greater in the nearly 150-minute version.). In one of the last interviews he conducted before his massive stroke in 1983, Antonioni publicly condemned the MGM version, and was so disturbed at the cuts forced on him that he considers the longer version mutilated as well.

Nevertheless, Nicholson, through his company Proteus Films, negotiated a purchase of the negative in 1983, and obtained global rights to all versions in 1986. As part of an asset sale of portions of the MGM library to Ted Turner, the film was licensed to video for Warner Home Video until 1992. (This video version, a poor, non-letterboxed, full-screen transfer, has been the format in which most have seen the film for the past two decades.) A new round of video licensing continued in the 90s, all involving tape transfers of Professione in various countries, except in Japan where the license was held long enough for a DVD edition. (It’s the only one to date, and, while a less than optimum transfer, it’s an instantly hot item for cinephiles with multiregion players. This version is now out of print.)

Nicholson was unhappy with all suitors for a theatrical and subsequent DVD release until discussions began with Sony Pictures Classics in early 2003, with a deal finalized in May 2004. In the meantime, Professione only rarely popped up on the special exhibition and festival circuit: in Canada, Cinematheque Ontario’s 1998 screening as part of its comprehensive Antonioni retrospective amounted to a sighting of Halley’s Comet. The new release print is culled from elements that have resided in reportedly excellent film vaults.

But nothing is ever simple with The Passenger. Sony Classics was originally intending to release Antonioni’s hated MGM edition. As part of the research for this essay for Cinema Scope, I came across Antonioni’s unqualified condemning statement (on page 218 of the edited compilation of the director’s writings and interviews, The Architecture of Vision) and passed it along to Michael Barker, co-President of Sony Classics and Richard Pena, director of the New York Film Film Festival, where the film is receiving a special presentation. The evidence, fortunately, was convincing enough for Sony Classics to pull the MGM version and instead release the longer version, which will retain the title of The Passenger. (These changes won’t affect the scheduled Los Angeles premiere in mid-September and the New York Film Festival screening prior to release.) That there has been no apparent effort to search for the 20-odd minutes’ worth of material (described vividly by Antonioni in The Architecture of Vision, in a chapter tellingly titled “The Passenger that you didn’t see”) which made up the longer version before the final excisions is clearly a tragedy—for the moment at least. Antonioni, turning 93 on September 29, remains vital and active, as does the work to restore and maintain his oeuvre—to say nothing of the vigorous movement in film archival restoration and (albeit sometimes controversial) projects to “reconstruct” previously trimmed films, from Touch of Evil (1958) to The Big Red One (1980). For a film about a man seeking to find another self, it should be possible to find this other Passenger, and bring its own history back full circle.

The Passenger

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