March’s recommended film - Professione: Reporter (1975)

Key words: Professione: Reporter (The Passanger), Michelangelo Antonioni, Jack Nicholson, cinematic codes, expectation, films.

I’ve just got this idea –quite obvious, isn’t it?- of writing a short review to each recommended film. So let’s get into this before the month is over.

This month’s film is Professione: Reporter [AKA The Passenger] (1975), by Michelangelo Antonioni, starring a 38 year-old Jack Nicholson as a journalist who changes the direction of his life by assuming the identity of a dead stranger.

To be honest, I chose this film because I had seen it for the first time and couldn’t believe I had been going through my cinephile life without having ever seen it (I’m a lazy cinephile I must admit –the film had been in my ‘to-be-seen’ list for almost a decade).

You know, many films have acted as turning points in the history of cinema (Citizen Kane, Breathless, The Idiots, just to mention a few). They have all introduced new elements to the language and grammar of films after which the ‘state of the art’ has never been the same. Well, Professione: Reporter is not the case. Not because there’s nothing new in it. On the contrary, the film is a beautiful bunch of narrative and cinematic reformulations. As Martin Walsh (1975)[1] put it, Antonioni tests “the limits of cinematic codes.” His strategy seems to be “a consistently varied deflection of the normative transitions from shot to shot.” That is, Antonioni subverts our logical expectations, and, in doing so, he questions most of the traditional narrative codes of cinema. All traditional ideas about continuity (spatial, temporal, narrative [2]) and even about the “diegetic centrality of the plot” (where the attention of the camera is –Walsh again) are put at risk.

At the very beginning of the film, after we see Locke (Nicholson) struggling with his language in the Sahara desert, we follow him through rocky hills in search of something. He seems to have found it -a pack of Bedouins at the foot of a mountain. Cut to Locke’s Landrover making its way through the desert, back to his hotel.

What has happened? Who were these men? That was not important. We, as traditional viewers, would expect some answers, but they will never come –not as answers at least; if anything, they’ll arrive later on, as personal inferences. Thus, Antonioni is violently submerging us in a world where the expected is never realized.

Antonioni’s narrative, however, could not incarnate in many later filmmakers –leaving aside the intentionally experimental ones. In consequence, Professione: Reporter remains, as much of his filmography, no more –and no less- than a profound cinematic experiment. A beautiful one I would say.

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[1] Walsh, Robert (1975) “The Passenger, Antonioni’s narrative design.” Jump Cut, no. 8 [on line]

[2] I’m already writing a post on Antonioni’s use of off-screen space. I hope it will be published soon.

Has liberty failed?

Key words: freedom, Modernity, humanism, slavery, Ilha das Flores (Isle of Flowers), Jorge Furtado.

We’ve just began our 2008 L&C III course in IPES Almafuerte. Our first meeting intended an eagle’s eye view on the three-century period we’ll be dealing with this year. Our focus was on the 18th century and how it became the converging point of different social and philosophical ideas that changed the direction of humanity. We noticed that many of the beliefs, ideologies and institutions we still hold dear nowadays had their origin as part of the great cultural, philosophical and technological movement that we now call Modernity.

When looking at the present, however, we were able to see that many modern structures and institutions are undergoing a crisis. Among other things, we referred to the crisis of some traditional modern values, within which we mentioned the possible failure of one particular modern principle –traceable to the French Revolution-, the principle of individual inborn freedom.

We agreed that there is nothing ‘natural’ in being free, just as there is nothing ‘natural’ in being a slave. Both are just social and cultural choices (or impositions). The important thing was to acknowledge that the discourse of humanist enlightenment –which still nowadays works as the basis for human rights- is just another historical construct, conceived by people who would see a personal benefit from it. Of course, humanism was supposedly designed for the benefit of all; nevertheless, it’s worth wondering –after two centuries of humanist philosophical rule- whether this change really benefited everyone. One of the questions we posed in class was thus -“Does everyone benefit from being free?” [1]

Brazilian filmmaker Jorge Furtado makes a point in his appalling and beautifully disheartening documentary Ilha das Flores (Isle of Flowers, 1989). With sincere irony, Furtado shows freedom is the problem of many people in a world in which only money and property count. When people don’t have money or property, how can they survive? Their problem seems to be they don’t have an owner. Just as dogs, or pigs, they wouldn’t die of hunger, nor live a life of the worst humiliation if they had somebody to provide them.

Does this mean we should revive slavery then? Reality is not that simple, and this we know. But perhaps it’s good to start acknowledging that abstract modern principles like ‘freedom’ or ‘equality’ were imaginations that –so far- have in very little solved people’s problems, guaranteed happiness or changed the world for the better.

This is, of course, a nice controversial issue to begin this school year with. So I’m inviting you all to see Furtado’s film (it’s only 13 minutes), and to write and exchange your ideas and impressions on the topic. In the end, when discussing freedom, we’re pondering what we are, what we want to be, and what we can be as human beings.

View the film here or at DailyMotion, or download it from this folder:

Ilha das Flores-sub Eng
Cargado por Simud

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[1] The other question was “Are we actually free?” (but let’s only deal with the first one today)

Biological determinism in Houyhnhnmland

Key words: Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift, Houyhnhnms, racism, colonialism, Plato.

After Tuesday’s final board I went back home thinking about Jonathan Swift. One of the student’s presentations dealt with Swift’s utopian society, incarnated in the Houyhnhnms (Gulliver’s Travels, Part IV). The Houyhnhnms are presented by Gulliver as a perfect and balanced society (of horses) ruled by reason, and opposed to the irrational and debased English society -far closer to the Yahoos, the other (human-like) inhabitants of Houyhnhnmland.

As we mentioned during the exam, among other ambiguities, the perfect Houyhnhnm society is based on a disturbing biological determinism. As Gulliver explains in the novel:

He [his Houyhnhnm master] made me observe, “that among the Houyhnhnms, the white, the sorrel, and the iron-gray, were not so exactly shaped as the bay, the dapple-gray, and the black; nor born with equal talents of mind, or a capacity to improve them; and therefore continued always in the condition of servants, without ever aspiring to match out of their own race, which in that country would be reckoned monstrous and unnatural.”

The Houyhnhnm social structure is thus fixed, with no place for social mobility. Each individual’s role in society is given by the intellectual talents with which he or she is born. However, these talents are determined by coat colour, by race. In the country of the Houyhnhms, each race is given a particular role.

Christine Rees [1] points at the similitude between this colour determination and the one present in Plato's Republic, “with its graded gold, silver, iron and brass for the different classes.” Rees acknowledges, however, that even Plato’s society gives place for certain social mobility. In The Republic, “a golden parent may have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son, and then there must be a change of rank; the son of the rich must descend, and the child of the artisan rise, in the social scale.[2]”

Gulliver’s perfect society, on the contrary, is racist and inflexible. And even so, it is presented as an ideal opposed to English (and western) society. Our question then would be: Could Swift be intending to apply this metaphor to humanity as a whole?

The answer to this question will depend on how we understand a yet unresolved problem. Some scholars (the so-called soft school) consider Swift is mocking at Gulliver’s admiration for the Houyhnhnms, while not really adhering to the character’s abhorrence of humankind. Others, however, (the hard school) feel Swift is really ‘meaning’ what he writes [3]. Whether we perceive Gulliver as Swift’s alter-ego or as an ironic persona will determine our interpretation of the Houyhnhnms’ rational social structure.

In any case, it’s worth remembering that the understanding of race in Swift’s time was different from the modern biological explanation. Race was in fact a historical and cultural factor. An example of this could be the English relationship with the Irish at the time, which bore most of the characteristics and racial connotations that would apply to European colonialism beyond Europe’s frontiers [4]: the Irish were considered inferior by the English –and even Swift couldn’t do away with this inherited perception (he was an Irishman, he wrote in favour of Irish freedom, but at the same time seemed to acknowledge English cultural superiority).

Also important is the fact that even when some people realized that all races were equally human and had all the same origin, the notion of hierarchy was something that most thinkers didn’t seem to question. Most people in the seventeenth and eighteenth century took hierarchy and racial domination for granted [5]. Leaving aside Swift’s interpretation then, there’s no doubt that his Houyhnhnms comply with that way of thinking: in their balanced society, a fixed hierarchy based on racial determination is necessary to keep order and peace.

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[1]Rees, Christine (1996) Utopian Imagination and Eighteenth-Century Fiction. New York: Longman.

[2] Plato (427? BC-347? BC) The Republic. On line: Project Gutenberg.

[3] Stock, R. D. (2003) “God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492-1945.” [review] Christianity and Literature Journal, vol.52, issue 3. Gale Group.

[4] Mahony, Robert (2002) “Swift, Postcolonialism, and Irish Studies: The Valence of Ambivalence.” Representations of Swift. Connery, Brian (ed.) Newark: University of Delaware Press.

[5] Thomson, Ann (2003) Issues at stake in eighteenth-century racial classification. On line: Cromohs.