[Thor Joachim Haga]

PART V:

Professione: Reporter

My personal Antonioni favourite has always been Professione: Reporter (1975), especially because it combines a thriller element (a genre I would have liked to see him in more often) with the director’s usual storytelling around the influence of places.

If identity transfer has been a recurring theme in Antonioni’s filmography, it has never been formulated more literally than in Professione: Reporter: Journalist David Locke (Jack Nicholson) is on assignment in the Sahara Desert and at one point decides to take over the identity of his deceased hotel neighbor Robertson (Charles Mulvehill). However, he soon becomes entangled in a dangerous network of arms smugglers.

Antonioni’s social anthropological eye is introduced early in the film when Locke arrives in a small village in a jeep. The camera is at a good distance, silently observing. It is an inhospitable environment: sand, flies, sweat and wind swirl in the scorching sun, in open desert landscapes where Locke becomes terribly small – as alienating as the valley of death in Zabriskie Point. He tries to communicate with the locals, but he can’t; it’s almost as if he doesn’t exist. Here lies the whole motivation for his later identity takeover.

Locke’s situation eventually takes us to Barcelona and Spain. Here, too, there is fertile ground for significant surfaces. At one point, he meets a mysterious, untitled girl (Maria Schneider) in Antonio Gaudi’s distinctive Casa Milà. As they move through the building’s protruding, corpulent roof decorations, their relationship is also defined. On a ledge below, an established couple is arguing, but Locke and the girl are still in the initial phase of their fleeting relationship; an exploration of each other that is manifested physically in the winding architecture.

Later, Locke will somewhat reluctantly meet Robertson’s contacts in a disused hotel complex outside the city: No people. Large, open spaces. White, monochromatic brickwork. Strongly perspectived lines that encapsulate the character, alienate and signal an uncertain future. A true “Noto city”, in other words.

The famous closing scene nevertheless remains the clearest staging of both Antonioni’s documentary gaze and the places that are heavy with personality. We are in a hotel in Osuna outside Seville. In one and the same seven-minute take, the camera drives from the hotel room where Locke is, through the narrow window bars and out into the square outside, before turning and returning to the hotel room. In the meantime, action is taking place both in front of and behind the camera, signaled only by sound. A whole series of cars, people, animals and groups pass through the square, as well as a restless Maria Schneider. In line with the director’s occupation/reconquest theme, the surroundings have taken back “life” just as Locke himself is leaving it.

Professione: Reporter marks the end of Antonioni’s golden age, in my opinion, but it is by no means the end of his career, even though he loses some of his relevance in the last three decades of his life – partly due to failing health.

Transition and self-reflexivity

Five years after Professione: Reporter, Antonioni returns with a curiosity of a film: Il mistero di Oberwald (1980), an adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s play L’Aigle á deux têtes (1946). Like Chung Kuo – Cina, this one is also hard to come by, existing only as grainy television footage from the decade it was made. The film is a theatrical and stilted affair – on the one hand a return (or perhaps even regression) to the director’s dialogue-heavy films of the fifties, on the other a strangely experimental exercise in style.

The action is set in the 19th century, in a castle in the Swiss Oberwald, and is a kind of chamber drama about a queen’s relationship with her assassin; in itself an unusual historical epic from a director who has always been concerned with the present and modernity. But the strangest thing is the choice to shoot on video, and to color the images in red, green and yellow tones. According to Antonioni himself, the electronic recording method was a move that gave him both more immediate control over the cut and the opportunity to use color to create a kind of melodramatic, poetic work. iv

Well, it doesn’t really work. Even Monica Vitti as the Queen (in what would be their last collaboration) gives only a faint whiff of former grandeur. There’s really no exploitation of the castle’s many nooks and crannies; the atmospheric storm at the film’s beginning remains a parenthesis and the progression is both dusty and tenuous.

Then Antonioni returns to more familiar territory with Identificazione di una donna (1982). This too cannot be considered a masterpiece, but has many recognizable stagings of existential crisis and weathered relationships. The filmmaker Niccolò (Thomás Milán) struggles with a meaningless existence – illustrated by constantly positioning him against large, white walls. When he finally finds a potential partner in the mysterious Mavi (Daniela Silverio), this too remains an unattainable ideal. The fog has probably never been thicker in Antonioni’s films than when Niccolò and Mavi drift apart on the country road. He attempts an ‘identity takeover’ with the young and cheerful actress Ida, but it is never the same.

In the closing scene, Niccoló and Mavis’ final break is illustrated by the molding in a glass door. On one side of the molding stands Niccoló, on the other Mavi. At one point, even Mavi turns her back, so that the gap between them becomes irrevocable. As in La notte and L’eclisse, Antonioni uses architecture and furnishings as relational markers.

From here begins what can roughly be called Antonioni’s “self-reflexive period”, in which he looks back on his career and his themes through a kind of meta-perspective – visible in both documentary and fiction films. First up is the short documentary Ritorno a Lisca Bianca (1983) in which Antonioni returns to the island that was so significant in L’avventura. There is no narration, but the music and soundtrack from L’avventura indirectly comment on the locations from the film. In this variant of the occupation/reconquest theme, it is not only life that has reclaimed the island that once held so much meaning, but equally a nostalgic look back to the time when the director himself “broke up” from the gnarled earth and shaped a new film landscape. The soundtrack from L’avventura thus takes on the role of the phantom ghost from the original film; the whiff of a spiritual, past presence.

In 1985, at the age of 73, Antonioni suffered a stroke that not only rendered him speechless but left deep scars on his entire body. However, this did not stop him from making more films, with the help of his new wife Enrica.

The first film after the stroke comes four years later, in the anthology film 12 registi per 12 cittá (1989), a commission for the 1990 World Cup in Italy (of all things), in which important directors such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Mauro Bolognini and Franco Zefirelli are asked to create a portrait of a chosen Italian city. Antonioni’s part is (naturally) about Rome, and is entirely devoted to the city’s art – static observations of statues and murals, sometimes brought to life with 3D-like camera movements around the objects. Now it is the gaze itself that will be thematized; the creative force that once lay behind the ancient works of art.

Two more short documentaries are released shortly after. In Noto, mandorli, Vulcano, Stromboli, carnevale (1992), the places and phenomena are allowed to comment entirely on their own, without narration or action. He revisits the actual “city of Noto” that has meant so much to him; in this case via the city’s monastery, surrounded by insidious gargoyles. Helicopter sweeps over an active volcano signal a seething local temperament; a gateway to hell, before he lingers on the moonlike landscape of Stromboli – buried in ash and coal like the industrial landscape of Il deserto rosso. The film ends with a carnival sequence, but observational and from a distance. People are strictly speaking just pieces shaped by their surroundings.

The second documentary, Kumba Melha (1992), is a delayed release of footage that Antonioni shot as early as 1977, from the Hindu pilgrimage to the Ganges. Most of the film is a slow pan filmed from a boat – a sober display of the enormous crowds bathing in and drinking(!) from the sacred but undoubtedly bacteria-infested river. As in his first documentary Gente del Po, the camera searches for and captures interesting objects and people along the riverbank – an almost spiritual or hypnotic progression that in a way stages the spirituality of the phenomenon.

…to be continued