Michelangelo Antonioni has a perversion concerning ellipses - (…)
that is, the segments of time or speech where something merely trails off, descends into nonaction, non-thought. (In German poetry, there’s an even more potent equivalent, “gedankenschlag” -- a “thought-dash“.) In Antonioni’s films, often these elliptical periods are laboriously sustained, dragging the viewer through fields of tedium with the conscience of a documentarist; other periods of time are vaulted without care. What moves Antonioni to show one sequence of events that’s of no particular importance to the narrative, and not another of approximately equal importance? Perhaps he’d crawl through them all if he had the time. The impression one gets that Antonioni’s films are “all interstice” - that is, “all made of parts that would have been cut from another movie” comes from the fact that, in a film like The Passenger, the ‘interludes’ of relative inaction don’t allow the viewer to disengage, as most movies permit briefly between things that “happen”. Instead, we’re dragged through the itchy tedium that Nicholson’s character experiences for what feels like days on end...
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