The film considers death in another aspect — as disappearance. In the first of the two Gaudí houses they visit in Barcelona, the architecture student (known in the screenplay as “the Girl”) who accompanies him says to Locke, “People disappear all the time.” Locke replies: “Every time they leave the room.” This curious exchange has several resonances. In being thought of as disappearing, people are considered as present-at-hand or as ready-to-hand, as perceptual objects whose ending takes the form of the mere lack of visibility. In the context of the film’s political plot, we will probably hear “disappear” as a reference to authoritarian regimes’ assassination or imprisonment of dissidents. We even see such a “disappearance” in action during the film, in the sudden abduction of Achebe in an outdoor café. Antonioni shows the event in long shot, obstructing our view by a fountain, to indicate the indistinct, flickering nature of a presence that can so readily be swallowed up by absence and to imply the absence of interest that will follow (the people around are startled, but do nothing to intervene — it’s obvious that in a few moments, they’ll merely continue their conversations as if nothing had happened; Achebe will be missed as little as if he had never been there).

Locke’s death is another such disappearance. The event is represented as the disappearance of Locke’s body from the camera’s field of visibility, as the camera tracks forward toward the window. Antonioni refuses to show the actual death — a reticence that can certainly not be interpreted as squeamishness, since, earlier in the film, he has shown actual death: the documentary footage of the execution of a partisan. (Antonioni’s refusal to show Locke’s death, or for that matter Robertson’s, can be understood as a sign of respect for the nameless martyr: the staging of death would implicitly claim that the fictional death and the real death have the same value, thereby cheapening the real death and indicting the film’s use of it as exploitative.) Rather, he “shows” Locke’s death as something that happens to the frame — a change in perception by which the frame itself is taken as the boundary of what can be seen and known, and in which the modification of this boundary also modifies the world, in the flowing-together of the film frame and the frames created by the window and, within the window, by the bars through which the camera leaves the hotel room and emerges into the courtyard, and in the gradual circular movement that turns around toward the building and rediscovers the window from the reverse point of view. In the world bounded by the frame, the events are all emergences into the frame or disappearances from it, confirming both the letter of the Girl’s observation (“People disappear all the time”) and the spirit of Locke’s reply (“Every time they leave the room”): disappearance happens whenever something as common as leaving the room occurs, and thus would seem unworthy of notice, yet it is part of what defines the world.

-Reporting on The Passenger
by Larysa Smirnova and Chris Fujiwara

2 months ago  /  0 notes

As irrigators guide water to their fields
As archers aim arrows
As carpenters carve wood
The wise shape their lives

2 months ago  /  4 notes

Yamantaka gives the forces of the Shadow a symbol that hooks their energy and provides a channel and direction for their expression and transformation…he is able to harness their energy and embody their power consciously. The archetypal forces of the instincts and emotions held in the Shadow are given a channel through Yamantaka so that they can be brought into consciousness, transformed, and integrated…as the Shadow forces are transformed, their energy is not lost, but integrated into personal power.

2 months ago  /  0 notes

Rain boots are kind of kinky

3 months ago  /  0 notes