O braku tożsamości człowieka tłumu – hipostaza miejsca – dekonstrukcja czasu, czyli co można powiedzieć o Zawodzie: reporter Michelangela

Abstrakt

The text is an attempt of a hermeneutical and phenomenological reinterpretation of the great film work of Antonioni, looking at its protagonist’s problem with his never ending journey. Professione: Reporter is not only a continuation of the road movie genre started with Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969). It is also a kind of philosophical reflection about ontological (in Heidegger’s terms: ontology as a question of being – Sein) and epistemological meaning of the modernist and postmodernist life in permanent movement. Can we say what the world is not being immobile? Do we know who we are? Do time and place even exist? This text tries to answer those questions, paying attention to the motive of traveling and the contemporary city, which is a symbol of modern civilization and its instability, liquidity and lability. This article considers Antonioni’s conjectural question: who will a man become without his place, without the roots, referring to the philosophical and sociological theories and media studies (Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Lévinas, Michel Foucault, Paul Virilio, Martin Jay, Anthony Giddens, Sigmund Bauman), and also to the history of art (Antonio Gaudí) and literature (Edgar Allan Poe, Max Frisch, Boris Vian). Antonioni, in the classic way of filmmaking, shows the ‘wrestling’ of Professione: Reporter’s protagonist with his own identity, which can’t be and doesn’t want to be stable because of the changing world. That protagonist doesn’t agree on that pressuring fluency and also he knows from the beginning that his identity-journey leads to nowhere, that there’s no moment of discovery. Antonioni sketches that film portrait in the moment of ‘passage’, balancing movement, wandering, but never finally agreeing to the postmodern condition of the self. And this fact allows to classify Antonioni as one of the masters of the cinema of reflection.