Michelangelo Antonioni
Professione: Reporter

The individual is a mouse in a cage. His identity hides a credit card running low, used to pay off past debts. In the present, the reporter and television journalist David Locke lives with an existential anguish that nullifies him in a black hole of fierce despair. The future will find answers to an existence that now drags on pale in death: the only and definitive solution to the impossible escape from oneself. Locke no longer recognizes his own face in the mirror, wants to open those damned bars and run away. But his is merely the gesture of a man slowly disintegrated by events.

 Reporter David Locke/Nicholson finds himself in the sandy Sahara to create a report. He meets the adventurer David Robertson, and when the latter dies of a heart attack, he decides to take his place. Believed to be dead in England, Locke/Robertson arrives in Munich, where he discovers his false alter ego was selling weapons to warriors and mercenaries. In Barcelona, he meets a girl (the young Maria Schneider) who helps him throw off his wife and producer looking for news about Locke. The journalist's odyssey ends in southern Spain. Leaving the girl, he is reached by two Africans who are enemies of Robertson, with a score to settle...

It's not enough to change name and surname, or the photo from the passport, to claim a life that does not belong to us. In Michelangelo Antonioni's last masterpiece, a testament to a highly personal and dazzling idea of Cinema, the protagonist played by Jack Nicholson seeks salvation in a fragile Pirandello-like reflection. An act of pretense that cannot fill Locke's emptiness, as he feigns another role avoiding assuming its personality; it is only the extreme attempt to escape his own life. The illusion that silence, the empty spaces of the mental and physical landscape in Saharan Africa (or in the small hotel room in the Spanish village of Osuna) belong to an "other," lost in time and parallel dimensions. Antonioni's eye follows the drama of David Locke, unable to perform a part he is not conscious of, and the objectivity of the camera wraps the figure of the impostor journalist with discreet and circular movements. Tragically on the margins of the historical period without reference points, and unable to interpret a reality (which he perhaps never managed to understand), Locke disappears into the deceased Robertson. Nicholson's lost gaze dissolves into an impotent cry for help in the desert, place and symbol of solitude. A "foreign" reporter in a world of men he does not understand. Estranged from the facts he recounts and renders impure, manipulated.

"Professione: reporter" is a central film in the career of the director from Ferrara. Incommunicability gains meaning in a cinema of absences, taking shape in the desolate image of vast backgrounds, in the dramatic silence of the environment where the protagonist's soul is confined. Antonioni films the man's thoughts, the doubt, and uncertainty that confuse authenticity and identification. There's an incredible scene, bold and technical, in the final part of "Professione: reporter". The camera moves into a ground-floor hotel room. A window opens onto the background. Beyond the bars, you notice the unpaved square and a distant wall. Locked in the dimly lit room, Locke/Robertson/Nicholson extinguishes a cigarette and turns on his side on the bed. In the full frame, both the interior and exterior are in focus, and noises and voices from outside fill the room's soundscape. At a certain point, the square becomes lively; a driving school car arrives, a child runs and throws stones, a girl approaches the bars to look inside and then moves away: it's Maria Schneider. Meanwhile, the camera moves towards the window, and we notice a white car stopping from the right. Two men get out, searching nervously for something, glance at Locke/Nicholson's small room, and persistently ask the girl questions. The noises drown out the dialogue, while the camera passes through the bars almost in flight and shows the continuation of the action that will end in the exact counter-shot from which it started, near Locke's bed.

The camera's circularity has managed to draw a sort of imaginary circle around the character, solitary and invisible to others' lives. Calling these epic seven minutes without a cut a "long take" is simply reductive. Rather, it testified, in 1975, to the extraordinary visual talent of an artist, absolutely devoted to the power of the frame over the word.

"We are never so unfree as when we attempt to act."