Antonioni and 'temp mort'

Just recently I finally managed to see Antonioni's Red Desert.
As I have been busy getting ready for the workshop in December I have been thinking of the idea of what has been called temp mort, which is seen in Red Desert and The Passenger.
The dead time is that moment when the characters have exited the scene and the camera lingers for too long on the empty space. In the conventional world of British cinema this would be considered bad form or sloppy editing, but here it suggests that this space is autonomous. It has its own reality and the story we are following just happened to occupy the space for a time.
(You can read much more about this idea in Seymour Chatman's excellent book on the director, Antonioni or, the Surface of the World)
A variation of this idea occurs in a number of Antonioni's film. In The Passenger, when Locke goes out into the desert to make contact with the rebels he sees a man coming towards him on a camel. He assumes that this man is his contact and as the man passes him the camera pans to follow the man. But it is a dead end. The man is not his contact and plays no part this story, though we assume that he has a story of his own.
For me the attraction is important for the first part of the three-part story, in which Sophie becomes aware of another reality, by the leaking of one into another. But in the story we only see two, whereas I want to suggest an awareness of all these possibilities, which I suppose is some moment of awareness of the infiniteness of the universe.
So temp mort would be used to suggest those moments when we become aware not just of one other possibilities, but an infinite number.