Introduced by Peter Wollen Peter Wollen, co-author of the screenplay for The Passenger, is a British film critic and theorist, and author of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema and other works. He teaches at UCLA. As we go to press, we are unable to confirm this special screening and talk. In case of cancellation, The Passenger will be replaced by a repeat screening of Zabriskie Point. Please phone the PFA tape, (510) 642-1124, for confirmation. The Passenger is a desert film, but it resembles Zabriskie Point far less than it does the much earlier L'avventura-a desert island film-with its horizontal vistas and its theme of absence. Jack Nicholson portrays a London journalist named Locke who, while in Africa, assumes the identity of a man, Robertson, who has died in the next hotel room. Locke is running away from being a documentarian-from the language and codes that replace knowing, the images that replace seeing. Nicholson's Locke is Vitti-esque in his desire for escape, for a mask. Embracing Robertson's globetrotting, increasingly mysterious persona, he finds himself pursuing not the man's life, but his death. Even the camera seems to have a will toward another world: it tracks a passing camel in the desert, an anachronistic horse-drawn carriage in Munich. The final zoom literally draws out the pain of seeing in focus. (In homage to it, we present Michael Snow's Wavelength, Tuesday, April 13).