Changing Identities : The Passenger by Michelangelo Antonioni

Jenny Runacre had an uncanny experience when she saw herself in a 43-year-old film recently. The woman on screen was her, but the voice was not hers.

“Maybe the film had been dubbed into Italian and then dubbed back into English with another actor. Or maybe they didn’t like my voice and changed it to someone else’s,” she says in a voice of a more seductive, deeper timbre than the one I had heard on film.

If Runacre’s voice has been erased, that would be fitting. Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, which is now being revived in a digitally improved version, is about changing identities. It could have been called The Man Who Mistook Himself for a Corpse. Its protagonist, played by Jack Nicholson, is a TV journalist called David Locke who is covering a civil war in a nameless African republic. He is sick of himself, professionally burned out, and his marriage is on the rocks. Then he sees a way out. He swaps identities with a lookalike man whose body he finds in a hotel room. Little does he know that the man he has become is a rebel gun-runner whom government hitmen want to rub out. He becomes, unwittingly at first, a politically committed freedom fighter rather than the detached observer of a struggle that he was in his previous life.

Runacre plays Rachel, Locke’s estranged wife and a fellow journalist, whom we see in London with her lover, played by Steven Berkoff. Rachel and a colleague edit the footage her husband filmed in the desert, looking for clues as to why he died. “I’d just been in a fringe play with Steven called Hot Pants, but this was very different,” Runacre says. “And very different from the Hollywood villains Steven usually played.”

Runacre’s role as the estranged wife is key to Antonioni’s film. In flashback, we see Rachel observing her husband as he interviews the republic’s dictator. After the interview, she berates him. “You involve yourself in real situations, but you’ve got no real dialogue. Why didn’t you tell that man …”

“… that he’s a liar?” replies David.

“Yes.”

“I know, but those are the rules.”

“I don’t like to see you keep them.”

“He’s not true to his ideals. He’s lost his integrity,” explains Runacre over coffee at her flat in Chelsea, London. “He’s become a void, which is why she leaves him.”

What does Runacre remember of being directed by Antonioni, the auteur of Blow-Up, L’Avventura and Zabriskie Point, who had a reputation for being difficult for actors to work with?

“There was a very basic script [co-written by Antonioni, with film theorist Peter Wollen and Mark Peploe, who would go on to write Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor], but a lot of the time I was just staring out of a window. I was very good at that!”

The film is a masterpiece of enigmatic film-making from a virtuoso of silences.

“He loathed explanations and cut them wherever possible so the film is almost silent. You’d work not knowing what you were doing. I thought, if he’s unhappy with what I’m doing he will tell me. On set, though, he wouldn’t really talk to you directly, but would often send over another person who would say: ‘The maestro would like you to do this or that.’ How lovely to be called maestro!”

And what of Nicholson and Maria Schneider, credited only as the Girl, with whom Locke gallivants around Europe and Africa, all the while pursued by hitmen until the film’s tragic denouement?

“It was an unusually quiet performance that Antonioni got out of Jack – very different from those excitable performances he gave in Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Shining.”

Nicholson was accompanied during the 10-week shoot through Algeria, Spain and London by his then-girlfriend Anjelica Huston.

“He was notoriously promiscuous and, despite Anjelica being there, flirted with the girls on the set and they with him.” Including her? “No. I wasn’t interested. Instead, I formed a bond with Maria and her girlfriend Joey, an American photographer she was devoted to, and who was treated for psychosis soon after filming finished on The Passenger. Maria hated Hollywood and had had terrible experiences.”

Schneider was just 19 when she appeared in Bertolucci’s notorious Last Tango in Paris (1972). “She told me she didn’t know in advance there were going to be nude scenes.” In the film, Marlon Brando’s character, Paul, rapes Schneider’s character, Jeanne, using a stick of butter as lubricant. In a 2007 interview, Schneider said the scene wasn’t in the original script, and that Brando and Bertolucci had told her about it just before they began filming.

The director, who died earlier this year, later acknowledged that he had sprung the scene on Schneider at the last minute, because he wanted her onscreen humiliation and rage to be real. “I wanted Maria to feel, not to act,” he said.

Runacre says: “She told me that she wasn’t actually buggered but that she was utterly humiliated by the way Bertolucci treated her.”

After The Passenger was screened at Cannes in 1975, cast and director rose for the expected applause, only to be booed. “They were booing Maria for her scandalous performance in Last Tango. She got the blame, not Bertolucci.” It was in a sense a second violation.

The Passenger didn’t win that year’s Palme d’Or and has gone into relative obscurity since. “One reason for that is that Jack bought the rights to the film and it was little shown.” Why? “Maybe he didn’t like his performance. He should have, though.”

Runacre got the role in The Passenger because Antonioni had admired her debut performance in John Cassavetes’ 1970 film Husbands. She was a drama student when she auditioned to play a young English woman with whom Cassavetes’ character has a dalliance while on a trip to London with his pals, played by Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara, when the three of them are going through a collective midlife crisis after the death of a friend.

“I got the part, then forgot about it, graduated and went to Scarborough and played in rep – stuff like Agatha Christie and Pinocchio. While I was there, we were all drinking Guinness, so I put on a bit of weight. Then I got the call from Cassavetes saying I’d got the role. I went back to London and Ben Gazzara said to me: ‘You’ve put on weight – better lose it.’ People wouldn’t speak that way now. But I slimmed down very quickly.”

She loved working on the film, particularly an early scene of mostly improvised flirtation with Cassavetes. “It was a great introduction to film for me because I had been learning the Stanislavski method and here I was learning something very different from Cassavetes.”

Husbands proved such a critical success that Cassavetes advised her to hurry to Hollywood. Why didn’t you go? “I didn’t want Hollywood upending my life – or the humiliations that Maria was exposed to.”

Yet, while raising a family in London, Runacre worked with some of cinema’s leading directors. She appeared in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Canterbury Tales, Tony Richardson’s Joseph Andrews, Ridley Scott’s The Duellists, Nicolas Roeg’s The Witches, John Huston’s The MacKintosh Man and Derek Jarman’s Jubilee. In the last of these she played both Elizabeth I and Bod, a member of a roaming, murderous gang of anarchists that also included Toyah Willcox and punk icon Jordan.

Of those film-makers, who was the biggest monster? “I’ve got no complaints with any of them, apart from Derek. He once shouted at me that I was driving too fast when we drove to Cannes to show Jubilee in 1978. He was right – I did drive too fast, so the car broke down. When we arrived, everything was stolen from our hotel room. And the people at the festival hated our punk gear – they thought we were ugly.” She continues: “I loved working with Derek, because it was all DIY, making our costumes and sets. You’d never get that in Hollywood.”

Although she has acted throughout her career, on stage, film and TV (she was, for instance, Brenda Champion in Charles Sturridge’s 80s adaptation of Brideshead Revisited), Runacre reinvented herself as a visual artist in the 90s and later taught performance art in west London. Her installation At Least I’ve Got My Visual Stimulus is a Beckett-like piece featuring Runacre as a woman on stage talking unstoppably (the stimulant is telly), and her performance piece Bring Your Own Barbie involves the artist deconstructing a mannequin that looks a little like her. It is almost as if Runacre is erasing her body double – Antonioni would have appreciated its critique of identity. “You know what I learned from the film? We’re all passengers really.”

Runacre, now 72 and elegantly clad in skinny jeans and a boucle jacket, tells me her next role will be in Alexandre Dumas’s The Lady of the Camellias at Waterloo East theatre in London in March.

Does she wish she had become a Hollywood star? “Well, I certainly didn’t, did I? None of my films has gone on general release. Every one of them went straight to art houses. Not that I mind. I was in fringe theatre and then I had kids and then I got into making art. I’ve loved that life, and I still do.”

Jenny Runacre : I didn’t want Hollywood’s humiliations.  Interview by Stuart Jeffries. The Guardian, January 3, 2019. 

Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1975 film The Passenger has a new theatrical release starting this Friday, January 4, in select cinemas across the U.K. It was the Italian director’s third English-language film, and starred Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider.

 The Passenger is considered by some as Antonioni’s masterpiece, but each of his films is a masterpiece. Just take your pick from L’Avventura, La Notte, or Blow Up, and you’ll be confronted with what great cinema is. The Passenger is most known for its long take at the end of the film, in which the camera goes through a barred window, and smoothly turns on its axis, following the movement of people outside going into the building and back to look into the initial room it came out of. The long take is characteristic of Antonioni's cinematic style, and it usually leads the film away from the story or its characters to leave the spectators with something else. That something else is the space inhabited by the characters.

 Unlike his other films, which are mostly set in a particular city, The Passenger moves across cities and countries. The synopsis of the film is simple. A reporter named David Locke, played by Jack Nicholson, is working on a documentary in Africa. At his hotel, however, David Locke finds a man called Robertson, who Locke had befriended, dead. Seeing their physical resemblance, Locke decides to switch identities with him. The rest of the film shows Locke trying to lead his life as Robertson, which takes him to Barcelona. He meets a girl, played by Maria Schneider, tells her everything and she helps him be Robertson. However, Locke’s wife in London begins to have suspicions surrounding Locke’s death and seeks Robertson with the help of the authorities to uncover the truth.

 While the synopsis looks simple, the film is far more complex. Whether you know what this film is about is beside the point. The film does not explore why Locke decided to switch identities. It is not a chase film, in which a woman tries to uncover the truth behind her husband’s death. It is about life and the choices we make that force us to play a certain role. The original title of the film is Profession: Reporter, which suggests the notion of role-playing, that it is our profession that defines who we are. Once Locke becomes Robertson, he must play Robertson, become a gun dealer and keep up with Robertson’s appointments.

 In Antonioni’s film, time and place cohabit the same space. This is most apparent in the sequence at the beginning when Locke is replacing Robertson's passport photo with his own. Locke is listening to a conversation he had with Robertson that he recorded. As the conversation unfolds on the soundtrack, Locke turns to the window, the camera follows his gaze, and without cutting, Robertson and Locke appear on the small terrace having the conversation that is being recorded and that we are hearing in the soundtrack. Two different times share the same space. And now two different identities are about to share the same body. 

The conversation the two men are having is also significant. Robertson remarks on the beauty of the landscape, to which Locke replies that it is the people that interest him most. The two men have differing opinions on place and people. For Robertson, who has traveled a lot, places have become the same everywhere. Locke disagrees, saying that it is rather people who do not change as we translate every situation, every experience into the same codes. For Locke, no matter how one may try, it is difficult to stay away from one’s own habits. Through this conversation, the film announces what it will be exploring: a man who seeks to break with his own habits.

 In addition to the nationwide rerelease of The Passenger, there will also be a whole season at the BFI in London, January to February, devoted to the films of Antonioni.

Michelangelo Antonioni's 'The Passenger' Returns To U.K. Screens. By Sheena Scott. Forbes, January 7, 2019.

To leave architecture out of a conversation about Michelangelo Antonioni’s films would be like discussing Alfred Hitchcock’s form without acknowledging suspense. These frameworks are what govern the characters’ behavior and psychological state, forming a narrative through which we can see their personal worlds. For Antonioni, the setting and the background becomes the subject, or perhaps more accurately, the character that shapes the world of his films and gives the audience insight into the deeper meaning of Antonioni’s films. The Passenger (1975), starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider, is the first of Antonioni’s films to take place in multiple countries. Africa, England, Germany, and Spain are the subjects here, illuminated to reflect questions of mortality and the loss of individuation with the need to overcome oneself.

The observational camera allows characters to enter frame and dissolve or disappear so that the last frame holds on an empty space. At the same time, the camera seamlessly crosses between locations—from his past life in London to his filmed documentary footage and his present travels. The viewer becomes ‘a passenger’ in the surrealistic journey of Nicholson’s character, David Locke. Locke is a respected reporter known for his ‘objective views’ as he creates media related film documentaries, presently working on capturing post-colonial Africa. He hopes to come in contact with guerrilla fighters in Northern Africa oppressed by the current civil war, drawn to the same freedom they are fighting for. In the revolutionaries’ ‘tangible’ war, the enemy can be defeated, paradoxical to Locke’s internal battle against the intolerable monotonies of reality.

Internally, Locke is creeping on despair. Tired of being unable to rid himself of old habits, he begins his mission, already awaiting its end. Within the first ten minutes, the golden-pink sand of the Sahara swallows the tires of his light blue Land Rover in its vastness. As Locke falls to his knees, he stretches his arms as wide as the landscape, and yells, “I don’t care!” He surrenders his identity and his reality, finding autonomy and strength through resignation.

The camera moves from a medium side shot, then pans right to his gaze of never-ending sand and sky—nothingness. The notion for individual transcendence, “Not transcendence in the philosophical sense but rather as the ego’s passage beyond the limits of the self, its merging with, or dying into, the larger world, the ‘other’ that lies beyond the ego.”  Locke is not interested in passively participating in the commonplace world, which brings him to both boundless landscapes which he can not overcome and crowded, suffocating architecture of large cities.

The landscape–the space around him–becomes a direct reflection of this internal state. Locke’s hotel in Chad supports his feeling of insignificance by hinting at primitivism—the basic need for water parallel to interior sky blue walls and sand colored doors. Depleted, Locke finds a dead man in the adjacent room by the name of Robertson. He sits on the bed next to him, in shadow, discovering this chance to gain a new identity, to live out a ‘new’ destiny just by borrowing Robertson’s passport and planner. The ceiling fan blows above–time passing. Locke fades into the blue walls as he puts on Robertson’s blue coat.

Leaving behind his camera, tape recorder, and luggage, Locke is one step closer to freedom by escaping himself. Antonioni points to the fact that modern machinery and electronics of the present cannot negate the struggles of the past (history), which are reoccurring. Man is bound by his belongings—without them he has no identity to others or to himself, but with them he is boxed into an identity that does not fully encompass the vastness of his true self.

Following Robertson’s schedule, he finds himself in a new setting contrasted by sharp red and white architecture of the Munich Airport. Papers in a luggage locker that resemble a black hole show that Robertson was an arms dealer on behalf of a terrorist group. The next meeting is with gunrunners in Barcelona, where a majority of the film is located.

Antonioni frequently uses bars or birdcages–literal and metaphorical–emanating the restrictions of mankind that modernity tends to mask: history repeating itself, unable to break out of natural or cultural boundaries, or even how the physical architecture of buildings and streets create social habits limiting us to the space we can use. In a scene where Locke rides in a cable car over the port of Barcelona, he emerges his upper body out of the window. In the next frame, he is entirely surrounded by blue water. He flaps his arms like wings, feeling the unbounded freshness of his ‘new self’ if only for a moment. The next shot cuts to a low angle inside the Umbraculo located in Parc de la Ciutadella; we are deceived by the tall, vibrant, green palm trees and natural light which are entrapped under a roof. Panning down, children run around and Locke sits on a bench, arms stretching, looking up. The sites and architecture are deliberate but it is only through the sequences–the juxtaposition of characters within limited frames versus immense, natural landscapes–that visually express inner mentality, which words cannot.

In Barcelona, Locke’s destiny as Robertson becomes threatening and forces him to go on the run. Followed by his past and government officials, he unknowingly hides in a famous Gaudi building, Palau Guell, where he meets the Girl (Maria Schneider). Also a lost soul, she wears floral attire that blends in with nature while, ironically, studying manmade architecture. This inconsistency is at the center of both her and Locke’s discontent and creates the same longing for freedom that Locke is destined for. Palau Guell reflects the immediate anguish of Locke by its dark, neo-Gothic essence, medieval details, and heavy textures of stone and wood. A birdcage hangs over a sleeping guard while the bodies move through a grander cage: the mansion itself. The interior is an imprisonment of self: the dim light peaking through the slotted lateral windows gives little solace and instead of bringing in the outside world, only demonstrates to Locke how far removed one is from it, thus forcing him to exit the building in haste.

Naturally, his mentality craves the opposite of Palau Guell and brings him to the fantasy-like rooftop landscape of Gaudi’s Casa Mila. Wide shots of abstract sculptured chimneys form a deep horizon, echoing desert dunes with its dips and line curvature. This ‘imaginary’ world indeed projects Gaudi’s influence of the desert from his trip to Africa—the unleveled, mountainous rocks against sky blue and earth tones. The structure of Casa Mila is based in natural forms with its wave-like stair walkways accented with serpentine curved iron rails, however designed to be a functional apartment complex that provides shelter and seclusion from the exterior world, yet not fully closed off from it. Also mimicking curves of the human body, the work of Gaudi is an attempt to connect nature with manmade structures. Panning down, a couple fights below on a balcony, grounding us in a reality of incommunicability.

He sees the Girl here and when they find each other, they sit in a low shot with a background of triangular, monochrome tiles extending to the sky—hopefulness. This setting establishes a harmonious balance which Locke and the Girl share, at a moment where their relationship progresses. While the two find comfort in each other, The Passenger differs from earlier Antonioni films whereas here, neither relies on each other for ‘salvation.’ The Girl enjoys her solitude although she has become a passenger in Locke’s convertible, while his intent is to find ‘beyond.’ In Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time-Image, he analyzes the movement of body alongside the brain, maintaining that attitude is a result of thoughts; a concept that Antonioni visualizes through space and architecture.

They travel south further into rural Spain until trees become fewer, leaving only highway and dusty, desolate land. The sound of the sea grows louder as they reach the Hotel De La Inglesia, almost as if the closer one gets to civilization the more apparent it is how far we are from nature. The camera shows us the architecture of the hard, geometric lines of minimal white buildings spread out, then finally cuts to Locke and the Girl juxtaposed against a background of the empty land. Although a few people wander about, the buildings feel abandoned—again calling to mind a time in the past, present and maybe even future. Tired, Locke keeps moving to escape the past and present events in part of the Girl’s interest to not give up—she is balanced and adaptable in nature in contrast to his low spirits.

They are seen in several scenes after eating in cafes overly full of plush, green vegetation, yet the dialogue and body only support Locke’s weariness and admission that he lives one life—headed towards death. Here it appears that Antonioni is highlighting how the immortality of nature makes one realize their own mortality. To Deleuze, cinema requires this interaction between abstract and concreteness. On a road chase, their convertible breaks down in the middle of the earthy, empty land—a second instance where modern machinery fails.

Locke needs to proceed on his own, but arranges to meet the Girl at Hotel De La Gloria for the final scene and destination. By this time, he checks in with nothing other than his sunglasses, shielding him from the sunlight; he sits on the curb in front of a textured white wall, with one window covered by green blinds and a green hanging plant to the left. He squashes an innocent bug, smearing its blood on the white wall. Italian novelist Alberto Moravia wrote a piece in 1961, discussing how Antonioni’s visual world is static, “composed of objects bound together by no rationally perceptible links. For these reasons, the contemplation of a wall carries more weight than a carefully worked out dramatic action…oppressed by a nameless, formless anguish.” 

Locke lays face up—glasses off, fully aware, open to the natural world—and transcends reality. Meanwhile, the camera observes everyday life in the plaza through the gated window of his hotel room. Known for its seven minute tracking shot, the camera escapes through the bars out into the action of all those in search of Locke arriving at the hotel. With the sound of the ocean in the background, the arena is composed of a dirt ground and analogous towering, aged stonewall. Again we see the desolate, bleak emptiness of the land, like the desert, surrounding Hotel De La Gloria, which mirrors that interior void in Locke. A reddened, blue dusk overtakes the sky as the ordinary world continues in its tragic habits that one must either adapt or conform to. At the corner of the hotel entrance, a white light emanates from within. 

Place Echoes Being: Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger. By Leah Bordenga

Interiors.  August 28, 2018

Michelangelo Antonioni began his career, like many other filmmakers, as a keen observer. Best known for his languid monochrome portraits of middle-class ennui, as epitomised in classics such as L’Avventura and La Notte, this February the award-winning Italian director is a subject of the BFI’s spring season. Antonioni is the director many love to hate; his long, lingering shots, coupled with a disregard for plot and pacing, created films that were considered difficult or hard to digest. Although other aspects of his life are well documented, such as his complicated relationship with his muse Monica Vitti, a crucial time remains relatively unexplored. As a young man, rather directly, fascism changed the course of Antonioni’s life.

In 1940, the young Antonioni upped sticks from his hometown of Ferrara with a portfolio of film reviews to his name, and headed south to Rome to seek his fortune. Trading in his writings for local paper Il Corriere Padano, after working as a secretary and bank teller, he finally managed to get a job writing and later editing for the newly founded magazine Cinema. With an international circulation and wealthy backers it was a definitive step-up for the young film enthusiast. The only problem? The magazine’s director was none other than Vittorio Mussolini, the second son of Benito, Italy’s fascist dictator.

Although in some regards Vittorio was clearly not his father’s son – he loved Hollywood, rejected his father’s racism, and embraced many left-wing and Jewish directors, writers, and film critics – he remained a loyal supporter of the fascist regime. After only a few months of work at the magazine, Antonioni was fired. While the details surrounding his dismissal are vague, it is clear that it came after strong political disagreements between the left-wing future film director and higher management. No notice was given, the decision was effective immediately. It was a formative experience for Antonioni, a period he recalled as full of trauma: “When they fired me I was penniless for days. I even stole a steak from a restaurant.”

Antonioni only survived the following months by selling off the precious tennis trophies that he’d won as a young boy to finance his stay in the eternal city. He had already enrolled at Rome’s Experimental School for Cinematography, and now began collaborating with other up-and-coming talents such as Roberto Rossellini, writing screenplays and assisting established directors. In short, his dismissal forced him to confront his desires and push him into the practical world of film making over film watching and reviewing.

In 1942, he travelled to France to work with Marcel Carné, and would have stayed on to work with Cocteau but fate had other plans. Antonioni found himself back in his hometown when he was called back to Italy for military service. Here he set about raising funds to produce his first film. The project was based on an article he had written for Cinema in 1939 about the life and work of fishermen living alongside Italy’s longest river, the Po. Started in 1943, filming was disrupted by the war, during which time Antonioni refused to aid film work for Mussolini’s ‘Republic of Salò’ under the Nazis, choosing instead to join the underground network of the anti-fascist Action Party.

German forces destroyed much of his film footage but what remained was edited to produce a short documentary, Gente del Po (People of the Po Valley), which finally made its debut as a curtain-raiser for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound at the 1947 Venice Film Festival. Skip ahead to 1964, and it is Antonioni’s film Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert) which is being screened for audiences at the festival and wins the famous Golden Lion. “I have never thought of labelling what for me was always considered a necessity, i.e., to observe,” he noted in an essay for Film Culture two years previously. “I detest films that have a ‘message’. I simply try to tell, or, more precisely, show, certain vicissitudes that take place, then hope they will hold the viewer’s interest no matter how much bitterness they may reveal.”

For a man who lived, and for a time worked closely, under the fascist regime his words have weight: “Life is not always happy... one must have the courage to look at it from all sides.”

When Film Director Antonioni Worked Under Mussolini’s Son. By  Thea Hawlin. Another Magazine , February  13, 2019.

The films of Michelangelo Antonioni – certainly his most critically acclaimed pictures such as L’avventura (1960), Red Desert (1964) or Blowup (1966) – would seem to tick all the boxes when it comes to the clichéd view of so-called art(house) cinema. Slow rhythm, loose narratives, enigmatic characters, inconclusive endings – all these elements are here.

Antonioni is known for being the great chronicler of (bourgeois) ennui and while he has a strong interest in character psychology, it’s not the clearly delineated psychology familiar from Hollywood cinema. In an interview with Il Tempo from June 1962, Antonioni argues: “If man is today more alone, it’s because communication has become more difficult. In my opinion, this happens because we can’t find our bearings in this environment. Maybe this uneasiness rests in the fact that technology has progressed at such an alarming rate […]”

Of all the Italian filmmakers of the post-neorealist era, Antonioni is the most influential. His shadow – whether in terms of subject matter or style – looms large over the work of filmmakers as diverse as Wim Wenders, Dario Argento, Michael Haneke, Bruno Dumont, Sofia Coppola and Paolo Sorrentino. This might explain why he’s so well served by DVD/Blu-Ray. In the UK, 14 out of his 16 features are currently available, including lesser-known pictures such as La signora senza camelie (1953) and Le amiche (1955).

The temptation would be to plunge straight into the famous ‘alienation’ tetralogy, or the English-language features Blowup, Zabriskie Point (1970) and The Passenger (1975). But to get an idea of how Antonioni’s style began to take shape, I’d suggest starting at the beginning with his debut Story of a Love Affair (1950). It features Lucia Bosè in one of her earliest performances as Paola Fontana, a young wife whose husband hires a private detective to look into her past. Antonioni was interested in chronicling what, in a 1961 masterclass at Italian film school Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, he called “the moral coldness of certain elements of the Milanese haute bourgeoisie”.

We immediately get a sense of a filmmaker interested in mystery, in the ambiguous qualities of both character and landscape. In 1953, Antonioni would make another film with Bosè, self-reflexive drama La signora senza camelie, about a shop assistant who rises to become a movie star.

After sampling early period Antonioni, you’ll be ready to tackle the quartet for which he is best known. L’avventura, one of the cornerstones of European cinema, famously met with hostility upon its release during that incredible period which saw the release of films such as Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959), Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960), Rocco and His Brothers (Luchino Visconti, 1960) and La dolce vita (Federico Fellini 1960). Critics and audiences were bewildered by the film’s apparent longueurs, how it never resolved its central mystery.

It tells of a disaffected young woman, Anna (Lea Massari), who goes on a boating trip with her architect fiancé Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and a small group of friends including Claudia (Monica Vitti). When the group stops off on an island, Anna disappears. After this dramatic event, Antonioni toys with audience expectations, letting his narrative drift into surprising directions. L’avventura was the director’s first collaboration with Rome-born actress Monica Vitti. She would appear in all four films in the tetralogy, taking on the most substantial roles in L’eclisse and Red Desert.

La notte features Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau as Giovanni and Lidia Pontano, a couple going through a crisis in their marriage. The scene where Lidia walks the half-empty streets of Milan is one of several beautifully composed passages in what is a masterclass in monochrome photography by the great DoP Gianni Di Venanzo.

In L’eclisse, translator Vittoria (Vitti) meets Piero (Alain Delon), a brash, confident stock market trader but, like the earlier two couples, their relationship struggles to move forward. The disparity between material and emotional wellbeing is keenly felt in L’eclisse and we also have greater awareness of a world outside of the tribulations of the central characters (epitomised by the film’s masterful final sequence).

Red Desert was Antonioni’s first colour film and it’s in many ways his most abstract work. “I like the dynamism of colour, that’s why I like Jackson Pollock so much,” he told critic Aldo Tassone in 1979. “In Red Desert I wanted to change the face of reality, of water, of streets, of landscapes, to physically paint them.” Pier Paolo Pasolini praised Red Desert’s “free indirect subjectivity”; the way Antonioni allows the audience to experience the world (including the bleak, flat industrial landscapes of Ferrara and its surrounding areas) through the sensibility of protagonist Giuliana (Vitti). The film features more breathtaking, painterly compositions, not to mention a haunting experimental score by Giovanni Fusco.

Between 1966 and 1975, Antonioni made a trio of English-language pictures for producer Carlo Ponti and all three saw him engage closely with socio-cultural currents of the time. His collaboration with screenwriter-poet Tonino Guerra (which had begun with L’avventura) continued, but he brought through younger talent in the form of writers and theorists such as Sam Shepard and Clare Peploe for Zabriskie Point and Peter Wollen and Mark Peploe for The Passenger. The latter sees Jack Nicholson play David Locke, an American journalist filming in central Africa who assumes the identity of a dead man, unaware that the man, called Robertson, was an arms dealer.

It’s a towering (not to mention underrated) achievement in documentary, but the three-and-a-half-hour Chung Kuo Cina (1972) is probably not the best place to begin an exploration of Antonioni’s body of work. Commissioned by the Chinese government, it presented the director with another opportunity to explore a foreign culture. Faced with constraints as to what he could and couldn’t film, Antonioni was nonetheless determined to go beyond the rhetoric of the regime. The finished picture angered the authorities to such an extent that it was only screened in China more than three decades later.

Where to begin with Michelangelo Antonioni. By Pasquale Iannone. BFI , February 7 , 2019