Quite a few of them were exhibited in the Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937 in Munich (when some of the reviewers would have liked the artists to be present, so that they might spit in their faces). On July 19, the day of the opening, Beckmann left Germany, never to return. He and Quappi spent the war years in Amsterdam. Their life together is told with brilliant laconism in the Journals: a minimal, but vastly expressive record of work, reading, drinking. In 1947, there was an opening in the United States, as artist in residence at Washington University in St. Louis. Beckmann died in December 1950, on the pavement outside his New York apartment.
His abundant late work can only be understood as the product of the compacting process of exile. Beckmann was deep inside his own phantasmagoria, his obsessive personal imagery, his lexicon of forms, his palette of black, steel, bronze, lemon, jade, cobalt, coral red, sky blue, purple-brown, orange, lilac, and flesh tones. The paintings are airless and lightless, drawing and painting have been driven together, they have a rough, jagged, blackened lucidity like stained glass. Even the seas and mountains look like studio. Dominant, tubular women, winged things, masks and blindfolds, fishes, mutilation, musical instruments, ladders and candles, swords and spears, spiky flowers and leaves like agave and narcissus, playing cards, upside-down or falling creatures populate and overpopulate these paintings. There is a late-classical or neobarbarian feeling of discord to many of the scenes. A pessimistic plenitude, shading into surfeit. It is painting as wisdom, as cultural commentary, not easy to like but too easily dismissed. The pain and caricature and distortion and claustrophobia of the early paintings are less glaringly evident now, but they are all-pervasive. The satirical infantilism of the early twenties has grown up. The big man who drew the little figures has shrunk into the almost unbearably sad Self-Portrait in Blue Jacket whose preposterous padded American shoulders hang off him, whose new industrial, electric blue (most disturbing, a color that shows for the first time in Beckmann) turns his face the color of clay, and whose once vauntingly glum mouth is eclipsed by his long, reduced fingers. Even his trademark cigarette looks thinner. On January 26, 1950, he wrote in his journal: “Twice went out op straat, painted the first of the blue jackets in the new self-portrait, I fear there’ll be many more.” In the event, it saw him off.
THE PASSENGER
Dearth of action is the mother of the motion picture.
—Joseph Brodsky
I saw my first Antonioni films in the mid-1960s, when I was eight and nine years old, L’ Eclisse, La Notte, L’ Avventura, when I was in America, and my father, here on a Harkness, didn’t seem to have anything better to do than take me to classic European films at college film clubs. Other attributes of other movies seemed to pale in my memory, grandeur, beauty, drama, mirth (Eisenstein, Fellini, Lang, Keaton) but the etiolated atmosphere of those films—further etiolated, no doubt, in my memory—survived like nothing. The sense of an unhappy couple crawling out of a party at daybreak and crawling unhappily into a bunker on an adjacent golf course (the end of La Notte, written with Cesare Pavese) has been with me since then. The “sound” of Antonioni, a little quieter, more composed, and more incident-packed than that of Tarkovsky, likewise. Certain feelings of rain, wind, gloom, and other conditions, also. Some of these films I waited thirty years to see again, mostly in London. (I’m not remotely technically minded, I don’t have a television, and I don’t really like the idea of seeing films except in cinemas.) I would look up the listings every week, under L, E, N, and A. As far as I could see, they weren’t played in decades. When I read Pavese’s great short novel, Among Women Only, I had a sense of having seen the film of that (I had, too: Le Amiche). The decorous social gatherings, music, and bleak intimacies of Antonioni further remind me of the German painter Max Beckmann. It seems safe to say that my sense of what a film is—and probably what life is—was substantially formed by these early experiences.
I don’t remember when I first saw The Passenger, or where. Perhaps in 1974 or 1975, around the time it first came out, with my father again, in Austria? Most Fridays we would walk to a little downtown vitrine and see what the five cinemas (later three) in Klagenfurt were showing, with reviews from the church paper. It was called “going to see what the Catholics had to say.” Perhaps I had already seen Last Tango in Paris (which they can’t have liked very much) because Maria Schneider meant something to me, and I know I preferred her here, in that very contemporary—seventies!—unisex helmet of hair, to those Louis XIV poodle curls in Last Tango. Iggy Pop’s great record (and song) of that name was later. 1978 or 1979. The Passenger, made—ha, well—mainly in English, newer and in color, seemed to be shown more often than the early Antonioni. I saw it perhaps two or three times later on. Maybe I knew it a little better than those others, which to me became almost mythical. For whatever reason, I had a sense of it as “my” film. It is the only film I can think of that occasionally “happens” to me. Not in the sense that I am pursued by an ex-wife and the operatives of some African state, but that its strange mixtures of inner and outer, boredom and tension, reveries of sound, of indeterminate things happening, are something I encounter fairly frequently.
The Passenger is either a mystery or a mystification, depending partly on your inclinations. People, it proposes, are by their nature rootless. Rootless and doomed. Locke (Jack Nicholson) is an English TV journalist who grew up in America. His neighbor in a hotel somewhere perhaps in Morocco or Mauritania (remember Polisario?), David Robertson, has no wife or family but “commitments”: a list of girls’ names in a diary weeks ahead that cloak commercial transactions. The girl (Schneider) he sees once in London, then in Barcelona; she is an architecture student, presumably she can go anywhere there are buildings: her small bag moves in on the backseat of his car before you can say David Robertson. The settings are old meubles luisants (think of Baudelaire’s “L’Invitation au voyage,” luxe, calme et volupté) interiors of paradores in Spain, some incredibly new-looking roads (the steamrollers barely off them), and tight white towns in North Africa. Flashbacks and simultaneous goings-on in England are sprinkled in, in an often hard to follow way. The story and the feeling and the geography of the whole are very like Paul Bowles.
There is something quite desultory (I think, wonderfully desultory) about the film. The whole thing is a sort of Nachspiel, an epilogue. It takes Locke two hours in the film, and maybe a week or two in real time, to reach the condition of his neighbor, whom he finds dead of a sudden heart attack. Probably it was never going anywhere else. It begins with a sudden end, and ends with Locke having shot his bolt—or perhaps someone has shot his fox. Locke has come out on the other side of being a serviceable human being. His wife is carrying on with Steven Berkoff; an adopted daughter is referred to but not, I think, seen. He asks questions—of others, it seems, not to himself—as a journalist. He is probably not far from saying, with Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Axël, a hero of decadence (if that’s not too much of a contradiction in terms): “Living—let our servants do that for us!” Or he’s going the other way, the way of Axël’s near contemporary, Arthur Rimbaud, poet turned gunrunner. Curiously, there’s very little in it. Stories like this ask us to take a certain amount on trust. We don’t know—in The Sheltering Sky—what has made America such an intolerable proposition to Port Moresby, but he is in Africa now, and we had better get on with it. It is a little like that with Locke. A few encounters with Africans that are more enigmatic and emblematic than expressive—they make cigarette gestures to him, he gives them cigarettes, they run off somewhere—leave him banging his hand on the rocks and smashing the side of his sanded-up jeep with the shovel he could probably dig himself out with without too much bother. But his story is that of a man past digging. This part of things one could justifiably call self-indulgent—if one were of a censorious cast of mind.
Probably one is supposed to take Locke’s decision as one arrived at seriously. A dignified and honorable life choice. Du musst dein Leben ändern—or maybe Du musst dein L
eben enden. He goes next door to borrow soap from his white neighbor, the man he surreptitiously interrogated the day before, over whiskey, and finds him dead on his bed. The fan is whirring, the water in his own room is running, but Robertson’s heart is no longer beating. Locke sits with the body, goes through the dead man’s effects. Perhaps he is struck by the fact that he wears clean, pressed clothes; perhaps that they’re roughly the same size; perhaps that their passport pictures are fairly alike. (It puzzled me when I saw the film first that he works with razor blade and glue on exchanging the passport pictures. Why bother?) The exchange seems to me unprepared for, whimsical, opportunistic. A plane doesn’t leave for another three days. What does he do in them; what happens to the body? The film makes a show of being in the hard world—there is a car rental, a false mustache, and a scene around a left-luggage locker, which is about as hard as the world gets in the movies—but really it only pretends. So it is more whimsy. Presumably Locke envies Robertson’s condition more than he covets his life. He wants simplification rather than a fresh set of complications. He really isn’t Rimbaud, turning in words and images, to do something of greater consequence and carry in the world. But Antonioni has to get Nicholson to the point where anything he does and sees must be interesting. (It is the point, I would say, where Bruno Ganz becomes human in Wings of Desire; in a much more general way, the point from which—if you’ll excuse the generalization—Chinese poems got written. Someone has died, someone banished or abandoned, at the very least got drunk, and anything subsequent is ennobled, expressive, worthy of recording. “By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses, / Too deep to clear them away!” from Pound’s version of Li Po.)
That’s the donnée. A little elaborate, a little crude, a little superfluous. In a film, if someone proposes themselves to you, and invites you into their life, you go. In fact, it doesn’t happen enough. There’s really no need for them to become somebody else first. A film about the journalist David Locke, his wife, and their adopted child, in London, is a perfectly respectable proposition. Or again, it could have happened the other way round: if Locke had died, and Robertson had slipped into his unpressed combats and madras plaid shirt, and gone to talk to the next dictator on his list. But the way this has permed out, it is Locke who is in a borrowed state, an altered state, a temporary and a terminal state.
Everything thereafter is aleatory and somehow doesn’t claim to be the whole story. Locke is living on the edge of his—or rather someone else’s—life. His condition is exemplary rather than literal or exhaustive. He is like a crab or a snail who has moved into new premises. Not only does he not have the stamina or the curiosity to make a go of this over time—we don’t see him poring over a copy of Teach Yourself Gunrunning—he also finds (it comes with the territory) that he has involuntarily acquired a fresh set of enemies. He has to keep on the move, but even that is no guarantee of anything. The film is an interval. It is only a longer version of one shot of the rearview mirror, looking down a long tree-lined avenue, waiting for the police car to come into view. Watching it, we feel an equal threat from Locke’s wife and boss, hunting for him, as from the African government’s heavies. There is no difference between hostile and benign. It is less like suspense than waiting. He has stepped into another life, from which, one way or another, he is certain to be expelled. The film is called The Passenger—which is strange in itself, as Locke is mostly at the wheel, and one can’t seriously claim it’s about Schneider, the passenger therefore already is a sort of metaphor and a metaphysical label—but anyway, it might as well have been called The Lodger (but there’s another claimant for that one).
The film, then, is just something of a certain length. A piece of string. Scenes are knots along it. It is easy to imagine other ones, or different ones, much easier than it is with most films. Equally, finding fault with them doesn’t seem to be the point. They aren’t load bearing. Other cafés, other roads, other hotels. Other dialogues. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the limited time, the threat against it, the foreign ambience, the brief Aufleben of two strangers. You make up your own film, with yourself, in your own time. It’s not so much The Passenger as Passaggerismo, so to speak. Not a tiptoeing, but a whole field and set of atmospheres. It’s rare to see a film that appears so touristic. Set abroad—for a long time, for some reason, I supposed it was Portugal, but it’s largely Spain, Barcelona, and points south—no subtitles, hotels and cafés, amours de voyage. It’s a limited structure—call it a lean-to—but all the more durable for that.
When Bruno Ganz “falls” and becomes human in Wings of Desire, he is subjected to intense scrutiny by Wim Wenders. He shows us it. He is passionately, rapturously human, a kind of grown-up child. He is thrilled by everything, he is transfigured, he shines. Nicholson and Antonioni don’t do anything of the kind. There is nothing coming from the inside to the outside, or the outside to the inside, for that matter. I don’t know what happened to Locke’s journalist’s gift of observation; he doesn’t show many signs of it. Everything is external and oddly impercipient or affectless. There is no “Robertson moment,” where he shows us his new self and his pleasure or panic at finding himself in it. Nicholson and Schneider must be two of the more sour-looking actors around. They range from petulant cool to cool petulance. Antonioni doesn’t investigate them or produce them in any striking way. Nor does Nicholson acquire any new optics. He is as deep as his pile of dollars, as wide as his eau de nil—or is it greenback?—car. He is neither competent nor incompetent. Nothing, then, attaches itself to the basic predicament, or detracts or distracts from it, the idea is just to be a globetrotter, and for a time. It remains a pure and almost unembodied idea. There is no particular intensity, no particularity.
Perhaps the best ways to characterize the film are negative. It is neutral, without anguish, without any voiced despair or hope, without any gravity or clinging. A tiny shot shows Nicholson and Schneider sitting at an outdoor table. Cars pass in front of them, from the left, from the right. The conversation isn’t particularly scintillating or revealing. They talk throughout like strangers on a train, in a mixture of reckless banality, occasional posturing, and reckless confession. It’s the tiny, shallow space—not especially well used—for the human in among the mechanical and the functional that speaks from the scene, and perhaps from the whole film. It’s the macrocosm from the microcosm.
When we get to the celebrated last shot, that’s another microcosm. It’s another hotel room. Like the first, back in Africa, it’s ground level (which in this film becomes associated with death). There has been another desultory, unimpressive conversation between the principals, this time about blindness. Nicholson is telling a story, very woodenly, the way people only ever tell stories in films—one feels sure it’s about him, but it isn’t even that—about a blind friend of his who regained his sight and who noticed ugliness everywhere. “What can you see?” Nicholson asks Schneider. A little boy and an old woman. A man scratching his shoulder. A kid throwing stones. Dust. “It’s very dusty here.” It’s true. He tells her to go. She leaves. The shot begins—I think—with his chinos. (There is a wonderful disregard for the integral or the important in this film.) He’s suddenly lain facedown on the bed, to sleep. The camera then moves, terribly slowly toward the metal grille in front of the French windows, which are open. (It’s an echo of the corridor of the African hotel, which is similarly open.) It pushes through, sliding and zooming. Someone is having a driving lesson on the plaza outside. A boy throws a stone at an old man, who shouts at him. There’s a large closed structure, a bullring perhaps. Schneider appears, mooching and moody. A gaggle of children. A Vespa, or perhaps I’ve added that. Trumpet music, in Spanish semitones, gallant and fading. A car stops. A black Citroën. A black man gets out. The driver, meanwhile, gets into conversation with Schneider, moves her away toward the bullring, and then on to the old man. The camera all the time moving forward, perhaps beginning to pan right. Nicholson forgotten. A backfire from the Fiat, and
another noise. The Citroën leaves. Another car, a police car, comes to a dusty stop. Policemen get out of it, Locke’s flame-haired wife too. The camera, having already turned 180 degrees, shows them entering the hotel, tracks them past the open windows. Schneider, back in her adjacent room. Nicholson flat on his bed, dead. The camera noses back into the room. Hotel manager, policeman, Rachel Locke, and Schneider, standing in a line behind the body, facing forward, like last respects blocking at the end of Hamlet. “We have never lived so long, nor known so much.” “Did you know him?” The last word is Schneider’s “Yes.” A cut, an hour or two later, and a still camera observes the hotel manager step outside, his wife sit down on the stoop with her knitting, the L-Fiat, driving off into the sunset, and the low hotel frontage beside the dying sun. Something of New Mexico, perhaps. New Spain. Credits roll.
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