The desert appears for the third time—after ‘Red Desert’ and ‘Zabriskie Point’—in ‘The Passenger’ (1974). This passage from desert to desert also proceeds in tandem with Antonioni’s evolving as a painter of faces to painter of shapes, expressions, expanding stains, to hues and colours. Earlier to ‘Red Desert’, his ‘doodles’ (as he put it) and markings were almost always faces. ‘Red Desert’ caused the big shift. And by the mid-70s, when into making ‘The Passenger’, his new ‘faces’ of painting had become—as Walter Veltroni notes—an indispensable form of experiments to coordinate and coagulate with his film projects. The joy and tranquility that this activity brought him, Antonioni assiduously guarded till the end.
‘The Passenger’ was entirely shot on location. As opposed to ‘Red Desert’, he has nowhere tampered with reality in it. There was painting of the grass and colouring of the sea in ‘Red Desert’, whereas in ‘The Passenger’ he is looking at reality through the eyes of the hero, a reporter, who, incidentally, is surveying events he has to report on. Objectivity, Antonioni had pointed out, was one of the terms of the film. “If you look closely, there are two documentaries in the film, Locke’s documentary on Africa and mine on him.”

The colour in ‘The Passenger’ is the colour of the desert. Antonioni used a filter, but not to alter it. On the contrary, in order not to alter it. The exact warmth of the colour was obtained in the laboratory by the usual process.
We meet the protagonist David Locke, played by Jack Nicholson, in the initial sequences of the film, against the background of a north African Town. He is a reporter making efforts to establish contacts with groups uprising against the government. Overall, it is a postcolonial scenario necessitating a redefined investigative journalism. A profession that tosses Locke into a bundle of roles—reporter, soldier, detective, spy. Robert S. C. Gordon makes a lucid and elegant case on these often incestuous and occasionally internecine roles in his essay “Watching the Passenger”. His role draws into the same frame the 1960s conception of ‘cinema verité’ and the 1970s ideas of the New Journalism.
Locke’s involvement with the role and then falling victim to its weird demands provides the basis for his tragedy.
His role begins as an investigative journalist, a war correspondent and documentary filmmaker who also nurtures a political commitment. Antonioni leaves no trace of doubt in his audience that his hero is tired and disillusioned. Before we actually get to read a brief of the journey in ‘The Passenger’ we would do well to know how he himself had envisioned the role and the character. To a question whether Locke is bored with life he replies…
“Yes, in a way. But it’s also a very cynical career. Also, his problem is that he is a journalist—he can’t get involved in everything he reports because he is filter. His job is always to talk about and show something or someone else, but he himself is not involved. He’s a witness, not a protagonist. And that’s the problem.”

The problem, then, of ‘The Passenger’ is the witness turning into the protagonist. The process is as follows…
As earlier mentioned, Locke is holed up in a desert town. On returning to his hotel, he finds his newly made acquaintance Robertson lying dead. Soon enough he takes a fateful and mysterious decision to swap places with the dead man. He quietly moves into Robertson’s rooms, switches passports, clothes and changes his own looks, as far as possible, into Robertson’s. His destination then is Europe, wandering around to imitate and inhabit the persona of Robertson
Robertson’s diary, with its code of girls names, comes handy. Locke keeps his commitments and appointments, takes on his cause of supplying arms to the rebels and in the end also meets a near similar destiny.
If Locke is obsessed with who Robertson indeed was, we the audiences of ‘The Passenger’ are thrown into a game of working out the mystery of his escape from himself.
As also his asking of himself what it means to be a reporter by profession. Antonioni’s assigned title to the film ‘Profession: Reporter’ carries this freight of enigma.
By making himself over as Robertson, Locke is destined to live two lives parallelly: his own life, which his wife and friend searches through enquiries about his life and death, through trekking about and around his professional film work and so on; and then the life he enters into, of which the world has no clue to and he himself barely knows interestingly, as his wife and friend are looking for reason and proof of his death his assassins find their target Robertson in him, lying in a bed in a desert town hotel. With the same gunshot they sort of fuse two identities. Locke almost vicariously suffers Robertson’s death.
Also Read: Antonioni’s Doctrine of Cinematic Photography
One may choose to extend this ‘search’ motif to the other ‘execution’, i.e. the filming of the death scene. By the enduring, climactic shot at the end, Antonioni is thought to have set Locke against a landscape that he had failed to come to terms with. Like much of his mission as a journalist, the desert too stays a mystery till the end for Locke. His death closes what Charles Derry in his book The Suspense Thriller has categorised as the ‘thriller of acquired identity.’
It took Antonioni eleven days to shoot the final seven-minute sequence. But it was not because of him or the unit or the nature of the shoot, but because of the wind. It was very windy, the weather making it difficult to keep the camera steady. This is how Antonioni explains how it came to be conceived …
“I had the idea for the final sequence as soon as I started shooting. I knew, naturally, that my protagonist must die. But the idea of seeing him die bored me. So, I thought of a window and what was outside, the afternoon sun. For a second, just for a fraction—Hemingway crossed my mind, and I thought of Death in the Afternoon. And the arena. We found the arena and immediately realized this was the place. But I didn’t yet know how to realize such a long shot…

A zoom was mounted on the camera. But it was only used when the camera was about to pass through the gate…
Well, he (Locke/Nicholson) is part of the landscape. And everything is in focus—everything. But not specifically on him. I didn’t want to go closer to anybody. The surprise is the use of this long shot. You see the girls outside and you see her movements and you understand very well without going closer to her what she’s doing, maybe what her thoughts are. You see, I am using this very long shot like close-ups, the shot actually takes the place of close-ups. …
I had this idea of doing it in one take at the beginning of the shooting and I kept working on it all during the shooting.”
In this brilliantly silent sequence, there are two sounds to let the audience know that, firstly, someone has entered the room and secondly, that the hero has been killed.
The sound of the door opening and what could be a gunshot. Asked to comment on this use of sound, Antonioni had said in an interview to ‘Filmmaker’s Newsletter’ of 8 July 1975:
“A film is both image and sound. Which is the most important? I put them both on the same plane. Here I used sound because I could not avoid looking at my hero—I could only avoid hearing the sounds connected with the actual killing since Locke, the killer and the camera were in the same room.”
A little while ago haven’t we heard Antonioni speaking of the very long shot being like close-ups? The shot actually taking the place of close-ups?
The philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his book The Movement Image describes Antonioni as ‘one of the greatest colourists in cinema’ in the chapter on ‘The face’. In other words, the close-up shot.
The quality and intensity of the portrait or close-up can be dictated by colour itself. Deleuze noted these elements in Antonioni’s work where ‘colour transports space to emptiness, cancelling that which it has absorbed’ to reach the ‘non-figurative’ through ‘an adventure whose end is the eclipse of the face, the obliteration of characters’.
The end-scene of ‘The Passenger’ is a most elegant and articulate illustration of what Deleuze posits in his argument.

‘Antonioni: Painting Cinema’ affords the world a ringside view of ‘one of the greatest colourists in cinema’ in the act of applying colour to canvas. Photographs taken by Nemai Ghosh over those ‘blessed’ three days in Rome when spread over in an album such as this assume properties of a developing portrait– Portrait of an Auteur as an Artist.
It is again significant that the Master is back in the world of his admirers through studies by a Bengali lensman whose professional life began and continued thereafter studying the life and works of Satyajit Ray.
And could this be ever played down that the one and only award that the Master’s great discourse in colour on modern life and society— ‘Zabriskie Point’—received was from the Bengal Film Journalists’ Association?
I for one will never get over the thrill of belonging to the charmed and hungry generation reared up on ‘Red Desert’, “Blow Up’, ‘Zabriskie Point’ and ‘The Passenger’.
Thank you, Nemai Ghosh, for this magic realistic opportunity to install my humble self in the precincts of the Maestro’s studio and watch colours sing in silence.
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Shankarlal Bhattacharya
Born on 15th August, 1947 in Kolkata, Sankarlal Bhattacharya is a gold medallist in English Literature. He received his training in journalism from Paris, immediately after which be forayed into the world of writing. He has worked as a journalist in the Anandabajar group and has over 130 books to his credit. Aside from short stories and novels, he has written biographies for Ravishankar called "Raag Anurag", for Bilayat Khan called "Komal Gandhar" and has also been the co-writer for Hemanta Mukhopadhyay's memoir "Amar Gaan-er Sorolipi". He has translated widely from Shakti Chattopadhyay's poems to Satyajit Ray's screenplays