In The Passenger it is both a man, David Locke, and perhaps a woman, the Girl, who are are not what they seem. In typical Antonionian fashion, the car veers up the left side of the fork, only to stop after a short distance, go in reverse back to the initial fork-- changing course--and then inexplicably zip off to the right. Ceci n’est pas un signe. Early in the film there is a heart wrenching scene when Ben-Hur—while dying of thirst in Nazareth as a Jewish slave—invokes the name of God, asking for divine mercy. Remember, that on Piero’s night-table lies a small book, entitled “Eros.”  The episode opens with diegetic music, the lyrics a repetitive chant of “change, change, change . Perhaps a little frustrating for the actor. (The hands are not apparent in a freeze frame of the movie itself.) or they may simply lie. In the recent 2006 interview with Antonioni and his wife conducted by Alessandra Mattanza, Antonioni--in response to the question, “Who is your favorite actress?”--responded, “Ho avuto un’attrazione speciale e una relazione profonda con Monica Vitti, perché in fondo l’ho scoperta, amata e creata. . un brivido di vita It was horrific. (Vide infra, Endnote #8 for further information regarding the definitions of “screenplay,” “script,” “shooting script,” “cutting continuity,” and “release dialogue transcript.”)  The “original” screenplay in Italian is contained in Lane’s 1962 book, . These are all queries regarding identity. (Lidia actually looks up at the sky shielding her eyes against the Sun as she searches for the planes, creating a mini eclipse.) The letters—all of equal height—located in the far background, screen-left, were “LAS RAS.”  A tall vertical pole vaguely resembling the trunks of palm trees in the vicinity acted as a hyphen of sorts, interposed between “LAS” and “RAS.”  Employing the zoom function of the DVD it did not appear to me that the pole or tree trunk was occluding another letter. Vitti’s comments quoted above seem possibly at odds with the common, simplistic, and perhaps rosy view of Antonioni as a “woman’s director.” (Antonioni has himself expressed a preference to work with female leads in his films.) I ask, how should one live? Antonioni is a most painterly of movie directors. The sound track has exaggerated the three crescendoing train-whistles . As is the case with lovers, trees in movies tend to come in pairs. Dante Mezzanotte è vivo o morto? Both the lovers and ourselves are startled. Godard’s entire film bears striking similarities to L'eclisse, not the least of which is a curious emphasis on a construction site in a Paris that appears more modern and sterile than classically beautiful, as well as the image of a cheesecake photo of a woman--seen through a magnifying glass--whose clothes slide on and off. Had Antonioni any familiarity with the onerous Nürnberg Laws that had been promulgated in Germany in 1935? Zabriskie Point, for example, is replete with the billboards advertising the this-and-that which clutter Southern California. Aldo (Steve Cochran) in Il gridolife and art confronting one another. One response that some women might make would be:  “Who wouldn’t want to run off with a man who looks like Alain Delon or Gregory Peck!”  The Bergman character, in fact, expounds at some length in the film regarding the delusional nature of love: I think the greatest harm done the human race has been done by the poets. Domenico indietreggia. appartiene al paesaggio della mia infanzia. Ma attenzione perché il nostro Mimmo potrebbe tornare prepotentemente in auge. In the coda of, a difficult-to-identify white car both sounding like and resembling Piero’s Alfa Giulietta hurtles dangerously past two pedestrians crossing an Eur street at sunset. Niccolò then shuts his eyes and we the audience are then privileged to see with his own mind’s eye the final image of Identificazione di una donna, that of a fiery and majestic Sun, not unlike the luminescent orb at L'eclisse’s end. ), Cinema QuirinettaThe opening of Jud Süss in Rome . Sometimes I arrive at the place where the work is to be done and I do not even know what I am going to shoot. Such was the case in Vertigo when the James Stewart character pursues and pleads with the Kim Novak Doppelgänger character, “Judy Barton” (not “Madeleine”) while they are in Judy’s apartment: “I just want to know who you are!”  Easier asked than answered. This admission becomes mind-numbing when one flashes again backwards to Alain Delon’s early life and learns that after he returned from Indochina to France, Alain Delon was again imprisoned, this time in a military prison near Toulon for theft of a revolver (Violet. . Giacomini doe not write that the coda is, in fact, a requiem. . . Regardless, the shot is classic Antonioni and, again, resembles the slashed diagonal of a sign signifying the forbidden nature of the underlying image.) Someplace where I can forget . Other potential cinematic and literary references abound, but I cannot confirm that--despite the literal appearance of some specific books and magazines in L'eclisse--a single one ever had the slightest effect on Antonioni with regard to the further elaboration of the film itself. Antonioni is not, however, a photographer (as Kubrick had been prior to becoming a movie director). Directors and screenwriters place themselves in their films in various ways. The film continued outside though with an altered ton (sic) and script. To my knowledge, no direct transcription in English translation of the dialogue in any version of the completed film has ever been done. During World War II Roman Jews sought refuge in the Villa Giorgina—the proprietor of which, Isaia Giacobbe Giacomo Levi, was Jewish—and whose home resembled metaphorically the garden of the Finzi-Contini, a world within a world. Antonioni is apparently fond of a particular observation by Lucretius: Nothing appears as it should in a world where nothing is certain. Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—, T.S. Some 2 hours later in the final moments of the film, Sandro’s act of amorous folly is repeated when he is discovered by Claudia to be in the arms of a costly whore. I find this extremely difficult, if not impossible, to confirm on repeated viewing of the DVD version of the film on a conventional television set, even employing zoom and freeze-frame.      In several of Antonioni’s films Hemingway is either directly alluded to, or has some bearing (La notte, L'eclisse, The Passenger). Paolo Giacomini’s 45-page essay is dedicated almost exclusively to the use of music and sound in the approximately 7 minute coda of L'eclisse. For Antonioni, cinema was as if a child’s toy box, not dissimilar to the enthusiasm he displayed with puppetry as a child, perhaps not entirely dissimilar to the science and engineering toys that Giuliana’s son, Max, plays with in Il deserto rosso. . Then, in yet another dissolve with a superimposition and then substitution of one image by another, Mastroianni’s painting is substituted by a “real” Cézanne painting of Sainte-Victoire hanging in the lobby of an Aix-en-Provence hotel, the painting itself presumably a copy. .) Antonioni’s later attitude towards his actors appears much the same as his earlier attitude towards puppets. . That is, London is not always London. A vincere è adesso Umberto che, per festeggiare, vorrebbe portare a cena fuori Francesca Leoni, l'ispettore della Duomo. Indeed, the ending of, Paola’s husband, Enrico, has an auto accident while speeding in which his car skids off the road into a watery death in the Naviglio, a canal outside of Milano, adumbrating the watery death of the Drunkard. Beside the case in point, that of L'eclisse, Antonioni’s first film, Cronaca di un amore, ends with a failed rendezvous between Paola and Guido (as discussed in Endnote #31). We see the trees through the bars of the shop on Via Po as if we the audience were now inside the shop looking out (which implies that the “POV of the camera” and the “POV of Vittoria” are similar but not identical, a token of the “autonomous camera” that will figure much more prominently some 13 years later in The Passenger). A diagonal strut at the base of the tree is apparent on close inspection. Social mores and sexual fads come and go, but what evidence is there that the will to live, to love, to yearn for sex has changed in any fundamental way since time immemorial? In the past, Antonioni has expressed an interest in making a science fiction film. Had Freud ever mentioned that the degree of repression experienced by the tormented is proportional to the degree of torment experienced? There is even the sense that Antonioni’s Italian films are not particularly “Italian,” that the landscapes of his films--like the Eur--are modern, universal, elsewhere. In The Passenger the very title may refer in part to the human occupant of an auto. Not Hiroshima, but Roma, amore mio. . Such handfasting has ancient origins and concerns the intertwining of hands between two people as the central, symbolic act of a form of marriage that generally falls short of a complete, legally sanctioned contract recognized by the state. After glancing at the back cover of both  “Il Giornale d’Italia” and  “Paese Sera” (two newspapers that—like most things in Antonioni’s films—have “folded” and no longer exist), Piero then puts several drops of an apparent liquid medication into an empty glass that sits on the night table next to a small bottle of mineral water that is named—after all places—Acqua Santa. Minnelli was merely trying to faithfully recreate a lost Provence of the past for his film. However, Occam’s razor or “The Law of Parsimony” hold sway in both courts of law and cinemas. In the case of The Passenger, the film’s trajectory--from its beginning in Africa to its conclusion in Spain--cuts in a zig-zag manner, north by northwest, across at least 5 countries. The issue of causality aside, the old lovers of Falling in Love nonetheless keep a rendezvous that was ostensibly never made, whereas in L'eclisse Vittoria and Piero stand each other up for a rendezvous that was established in the hushed, almost hallowed tone of a sacrament. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.” - Hannah Arendt. (In Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), the anti-hero of the film played by William Holden has adopted the identity of a dead man, an act that in Antonioni’s The Passenger will drive the entire film.) The concepts, the themes, the world view embodied by, may have been so grounded in Antonioni’s mind that a specific detailed script was largely unnecessary. The title of the film, “L'eclisse,” with its astronomical implications, has puzzled many. They didn’t and we had an animated conversation about Jack Nicholson, “The Joker,” and the owners of the café were greatly impressed that a movie with Nicholson had been made here, right on this spot of blood on a white-washed wall, as was the case in nearby Sorbas. Abbiamo inventato soluzioni innovative e ad-hoc utilizzando tecnologie d'avanguardia. . Like L'eclisse and its barrel, there is a centripetal pull in all of The Passenger to only one place; in the case of the latter film, a bed in a small hotel in Vera in which to lie down and die. Than that I thus found lacking in your make . From this perspective, Vittoria appears shrunken, a veritable pygmy. This may not be surprising if one remembers that Godard himself interviewed Antonioni in 1964, and presumably was greatly influenced by him. A diagonal strut at the base of the tree is apparent on close inspection. the most comprehensive set of antisemitic rules, setting limitations on property and business ownership by Jews, barring them from mixed marriages, military service, and the employment of Christian domestic help and denying them positions in banks, insurance companies, or government offices . at the Hotel de la Gloria, we hear an apparent train passing by just as Locke turns away from the window minutes before he must die. 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I have tried to suggest that it is the small cinematic tokens of Antonioni that often posses the greatest valence, that the subtext may be more significant that the text itself, background more vital than foreground.