IdyllopusPress Presents

Republished Feb 2009. Revised and expanded upon the analysis with additional material.

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Michelangelo Antonioni has died, less than 24 hours after the death of Ingmar Bergman. Two individuals who made remarkable contributions to cinema and story telling. Kurosawa’s film Dreams, which Marty and I were watching again two days ago, ends with a traveler happening upon an old village, the Village of the Waterwheels, in which the deaths of those who’d lived long were not mourned, instead their lives and contributions were celebrated.

More than a year ago I wrote the following on Antonioni’s Blow Up but then was disinclined to post it. I thought I may as well go ahead and do so now.

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I know much has been written about Antonioni’s Blow Up. Despite my love for the film, I fortunately have managed to avoid most of the literature on it and so haven’t a clue what people have to say about the film. But I did listen to the critique supplied it on my DVD the other night, which focused on the sexism of the photographer, the brutality committed against the women, and less on the mystery, and having listened and watched Blow Up again, I thought I’d part with some thoughts I’ve had on the film over the years. Not a review, but a step-by-plodding-step analysis, which is probably best passed over and one should go directly to the movie, which remains a remarkable work even after 40 years. I was probably inspired to view it again as I watched The Conversation a couple of days before, and thus was reminded of Blow Up. The films are similar with Hackman straining for truth in a recorded conversation, misinterpreting, and then denied evidence of a murder, just as Hemmings happens upon a perhaps murder by way of his art and then is denied evidence of it, but they are also very different, and there couldn’t be two more different protagonists.

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THE CREDITS

Letters upon a green expanse of grass. One notices in the letters a man holding up a camera which is significant as the main character of the film, Thomas, is a photographer. One also views, atop an elevation, perhaps a building’s roof, a single black model. Her movements are slow and fluid, stylized, as will be the movements of the models in the movie, contrasting Thomas’ (if also often stylized) intentionally quick, even explosive energy. The images in the letters may be discounted as no more than a neat pop token of the time but the audience is already being forced to piece together furtively gotten fragments of a story as observed in those letters, and probably is significant too that these images are viewed via letters, language becoming scene and vice versa.

As we view the photographer in the letters of the title, the camera zooms in on the scene, blowing the letters up, so we see briefly the photographer within more clearly, and the gestures he makes encouraging the model to mimic, cueing her on postures she is to assume.

Though we are yet unaware of it, this is the same grassy field upon which Thomas stands at the film’s end, which is where he makes his exit and we here are introduced to the story.

Interestingly, the photographer within the letters is not Thomas.

THE REVELERS AND THE DOSS HOUSE

Now to a scene of several skyscrapers surrounding a plaza. My first response is that the rather stark and featureless buildings look like they’ve suffered an explosion, then I realize, no, this effect is had through a seeming blown-out appearance of a number of the windows of the lower floors of a building, facilitated by the way drapes are drawn in some of the windows and panes open in others, and buildings reflected darkly in still others creating an appearance of shattered glass. The impression is brief, almost subliminal. But the emotional response is “blow up” already.

The buildings, their windows, the arrival of the mimes

Into this gray scene ride a number of white-faced clowns or mimes on a jeep (license plate SGK 661). One knows these are likely students but, again, on a nearly subliminal level, the impression may be had of a military jeep and the revelry of liberators drunk on their gift of freedom. The mimes, dressed predominately in black and white, with some splashes of bold color, have free rein it seems, driving right onto this plaza, circulating several times, then leaping out of the vehicle and running out the plaza into the streets.

A similar scene occurs at the end of “The Passenger”. While Nicholson’s character (who faked his death, assuming the identity of an individual who had died) meets his fate in his hotel room, the camera slowly zooms out that room’s window onto a parking lot, one of the cars that enters that lot being a driving school vehicle which meanderingly circulates between the hotel and the bull ring before driving off at film’s end.

Before following the mime’s onto the street, note the upraised arms of one of the mimes in the above photo and how they replicate the upraised arms of the photographer in the credits, he lifting his arms to indicate to the model, from a good distance, that she should raise her arms as well. No speech is involved in communicating an idea. Instead it is transmission of knowledge by means of a gesture, a symbol.

Crescent symbolism is explicit later in the film, but these upraised arms remind me less of a crescent than the symbol of the Ka, considered rather the enduring life force of an individual and tied up with notions of thought and conscience. Ka is also the word for bull and is thus linked with the Apis bull, the sacrifice of which, as a spiritual double, was considered to ritually symbolize the death of Osiris. As noted above, this scene of the mimes resembles very closely the end scene of “The Passenger”, during which the lead character is killed, which takes place across from a bull ring, so this Ka symbol and the link to the bull may be relevant.

Once on the street, several mimes pause and look to the screen’s left (their right). The male mime is bearded and in a red and green striped shirt. The female mime, in red and black stripes, is one who will participate in the tennis game at the end of the film and interact with Thomas. Behind her has ducked a female mime in a black and white checked outfit. This act of the one female in black and white, slipping behind the other, would seem to be scripted, calculated, anticipating several other instances in the film of characters or things pointedly disappearing, or seeking to blend into other groupings of individuals and the environment.

View image of mimes looking left, woman ducking behind.

In answer to this glance left, cut to men leaving a doss house (flop house), passing from screen left to screen right, through the doss house’s iron gate.

View response image of men leaving the doss house to right.

Again, the scene is gray, bled of all color. Even if one is yet unaware this is a doss house, as if an after-image of the mimes’ striped clothing superimposes and the emotional comprehension is of destitute men wearily filing out of a prison-like environment. Despite his youth and the overall well-tended cut of his blond hair, Thomas (David Hemmings) nearly passes, from a distance, as one of these impoverished, beaten men, his shoulders constricted, held up near his ears, one hand dug in a pocket, the other clasping a nondescript bundle. As Thomas, with these men, exits through now a brick gate onto the street, they look screen left, glancing back over their shoulders, but continue to their right.

View image of doss house men exiting brick gate.

These glances back and forth are to be recollected at the film’s end, during the mimed tennis match, as the mimes look left and right at the play of the invisible ball.

The film’s central story is repeated numerous times in the movie, but veiled, so that its retelling is not apparent.

Cut to the mimes rushing from screen left across the intersection of a busy road, tying up traffic. One woman is in a white shift that resembles the clothing of a hospital patient, her left leg giving the appearance of being bandaged. Yet she gallops with the rest, swinging a cane, as if a jubilant pilgrim rejoicing in a successful journey to some holy, healing shrine.

The mimes bang on cars, holding cans, seeking money.

Cut to the men from the doss house also spreading out over a street, but this one otherwise empty, no cars competing. A little girl appears and runs through their midst, away from the camera, down the street, the only feminine presence. Children are viewed rarely in the film and her presence is notable.

Three of the doss house men convivially part with Thomas at the overpass of Consort Rd. The scene is unnaturally silent. Becoming now surreptitious, rounds a corner of the brick overpass (where there is an interesting triangular architectural detail in the brick).

View image of Thomas at Consort Rd.

He glances both ways then books it down the street, discarding the homeless role he’s been playing. Passing between a spindly tree and a shorter, lone, older man in a gray suit, Thomas runs to his Rolls and leaps into it (the top of his car will be down throughout the film).

Thomas and the older man in the suit both pass the tree at the same time

This spare tree is the first foliage we see and I think of the park in which the central story of the film is enacted. Perhaps not to be overlooked is that the only other individual on this street is that older man in a gray suit, who he passes by at the tree, who happens also to pass out of frame just as Thomas reaches his car, a seeming foreshadowing of the older man Thomas will later photograph in the park, who will also be wearing a gray suit.

Cut to another street busy with sound. A red light blinks in the foreground as two nuns clothed in white habits exit a barred enclosure onto the sidewalk. Authoritarian and sacred are two ideas that come to mind. The revelers come barreling down the road rushing past a stately guard in red and the nuns. The revelers running off screen to the left, the woman with the faux bandaged leg and cane trailing, the guard turns and marches back in the opposite direction, the same direction of the nuns. The feeling is one of restriction for the guard while the mimes continue to explode conventional boundaries.

The revelers surround Thomas in his Rolls, holding out the cans, demanding money from this man who had only a moment before left the poor house.

Receptive, amused, he gamely reaches into the back seat to scratch around briefly through several newspapers beside which his camera can be seen in a rumpled brown paper bag. From beneath the papers, Thomas scrounge up a bill that he hands over.

Let’s take a closer look at those newspapers.

The first headline we are given the briefest opportunity to see in part reads,

AIT ?

We see that the full word is AIT. There is nothing preceding it. There is no such word as AIT and the viewer perceives it as an acronym. But there is another way of looking at it. The Y above the AIT seems to assist in posing the question. Y AIT?

To the side we see another headline reading, PILL IN. An alternate possibility to Y AIT? is PILL IN AIT?

Now, these papers have been carefully positioned so that though it seems what headlines end up showing would be artless, unplanned, due to Thomas’ rummaging and tossing them about, there really is no possibility for error in what headlines are exposed. There is this top paper which Thomas throws aside, then the next that was already in position beneath it, and then a third already in position at the bottom.

Thomas grabs this top newspaper section and flings it to the side, and we see now a photo and headline reading,

Sniper in Tower

Newspaper with “Sniper in Tower” headline.

Already, we have a shooter mentioned, and it’s interesting that it is paired with the revealing of the camera in the brown paper bag, with which one takes “shots”.

The last and most prominently featured headline we see as Thomas unearths a crumpled bill. It reads,

Ah!
(Paper covers up part) is is

Ah! Isis

An exclamation mark as if in answer to the question.

Ah! …isis.

An Osirian mystery? Isis, whose husband Osiris was tricked by Set into lying in the box which became his coffin, who traveled long in her search for him and discovered that box in a tree which had been cut for a pillar at Byblos. Recovering his body, Isis lay on Osiris in their barge and thus conceived Harpocrates or Horus, who rests in an egg of blue atop a lotus flower, became the god of silence for the Greeks, but is first the suckling child, youth symbolized by the finger to the mouth which later, with the hand to the mouth, came to represent silence and secrecy. After this, Set discovered Osiris again, cut him into pieces and spread them throughout Egypt, which it was then Isis’ travail to seek out and rejoin.

Now, the thing is the Osirian/Dionysian vocabulary of this myth is so enmeshed in western culture that–with it serving as metaphor which all embraces man’s predicament, his spiritual and physical relationship to the natural world–one can look at any film or story and find it evident. The question is whether Antonioni intended us to find the story here.

Another reading could focus instead on “is is” as a doubling of is, which is in keeping with doubling in the film.

The next shot, we briefly see a sign that reads “Keep Left”, a blue work vehicle passing before it followed by a yellow-orange vehicle, as Thomas now turns screen right (his left) and we see his license plate, EVN 734C.

Continuing, we have an overhead shot of Thomas driving under a bridge or into a short tunnel. He makes a call on a radio (“Blue 439 over…Westin 0219, tell him I’m on my way”) and the story on him broadens, we understanding this is a person of some means and a demanding schedule. Driving up outside an unimposing warehouse-like brick building with first a door with a small number 39 and then another door with a really great big 39 on the outside (letting you know exactly what a significant address this is) he stows his camera in the glove compartment of the car and enters through an office where he greets a woman who is touching up a photo.

A PLANE TO CATCH FOR PARIS, AT 11

A clip is available at Youtube.

First we had seen the mimes and dosshouse men pointedly looking this way and that, followed by the traffic direction signs. Thomas entering another room, now we see an arrow that points to the right. He goes left.

A model has been waiting for Thomas for an hour and is obviously irritated. As Thomas enters the room where she waits, we see on the wall a painting which, following after the image of the arrow pointing to the right, seems to replicate it after a fashion.

The model (played by the famous model, Verushka) has a plane to catch for Paris at 11 (which may allude to the story by Julio Cortázar upon which “Blow Up” is loosely based, the short story taking place, in Paris). Thomas questions but appears disinterested and the model’s “it doesn’t matter” response is confident in that disinterest.

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Click for enlarged images of (1) the arrow, (2) the painting, (3) another view of the model.

“Who the hell were you with last night?” Thomas asks, as if something about her appearance betrays her, but is only met with a grimacing smile and sniff on the model’s part.

The model removes her black shawl. Her scant, glittering, black sequin evening dress beneath leaves her sides entirely exposed, which would have been quite something on the big screen in the 60s. But so would this entire film. Thomas removes his shoes, but does not change out of the soiled poor house clothing. He examines a variety of colors of ostrich feathers, reflecting on the staging for the shoot.

Thomas begins to photograph at a distance then moves in for a more intimate session, becoming more intimate himself, more passionate, constantly encouraging, offering instruction.

Thomas tells the model to hunch over more, to put her hand over her mouth.

Thomas places Verushka’s hand over her mouth.

“Give it up”, Thomas yells as he vigorously continues photographing the languorous woman who responds to his energy, his vibrancy, his attention. We are supposed to think of it in sexual terms. He nuzzles her. Straddles her. Entreats her to raise her head toward the camera. And having used her and gotten the photos he wants, he abruptly rises and walks off, so we are to think of him as a man who has used this woman, manipulated her emotional involvement, is someone good at getting the model involved, getting what he wants, and then thoughtlessly discards. The camera remains on the woman as she lies on the floor, beyond her a box that reads “Buy new…apples”. Finally, she stands and exits without a word.

Thomas collapses on his gray sofa. An assistant brings him the phone. After a brief conversation on the phone, Thomas tells the assistant to take down the address of the bloody junk shop. Thomas is just too exhausted from the shoot and too important to take the address himself.

THE PHOTO SHOOT OF “THE BIRDS”

Cut to Thomas shaving while watching himself in a very small mirror. Here’s a man who photographs others but he has this tiny tiny mirror–strikes as odd. But then the world is his mirror. His image is plastered over every photo he takes in the way he frames it, the energy he invests in it and what he demands from his models, how he manipulates a scene, how what he is shooting responds to him. Thomas sees himself everywhere, just as do we all in that when we view things we are viewing our judgments of those things, our evaluations of appearances. But does Thomas realize this?

He is cleaned up, now in white pants and blue shirt. Youthful, vigorous, ever on the go, at the top of his game. He’s a young man at the top of the wheel and you have the impression he will continue to ascend. An assistant brings photos of the doss house shoot for him to look at and he remarks on them as fabulous. We shall see later these are harsh, stark photos of humanity deeply scarred by experience, and what does Thomas have to say about those over which the wheel has ridden but “Fabulous.”

He hands off the old clothes to the assistant and tells him to “burn them”, as if he couldn’t be more repelled by that other world, those individuals with whom he’d spent the previous night, that he would want the clothes incinerated.

There are sculpture busts everywhere in the studio which we are supposed to probably accept as artistic eccentricities, but, again, these busts end up playing prominently in the film and are presences in their own right, an idea explored also in “The Passenger” via intentional placements of objects encouraging pareidolia, one such incident backing dialogue on there being “men in the desert” for whom the main character is searching, who will have something to tell him.

Thomas passes a large photo of a hang glider beside another of a scuba diver leaping. The camera tracks up to show above, seen through a milky expanse of obscuring plastic, models dancing in the upper room where Thomas had just photographed Verushka. “Get the birds down, will you,” Thomas calls.

Antonioni has begun building on a theme concerning birds which I will comment on when we come to the scene of the park.

There is a series of smoked glass panes that stand like walls which will be used in the photo shoot so that the women will be viewed half in light and half through these glasses darkly.

“When I was a child, I spake as a child,
I understood as a child, I thought as a child:
but when I became a man, I put away
childish things. For now we see through a
glass, darkly; but then face to face: now
I know in part; but then shall I know even
as also I am known.”

The above is a phrase from the Christian New Testament, and I read is intended to mean mirrors. One should consider the film as making reference to this passage which speaks to imperfect perception.

The women are all “pinned” up in their clothing, which is a fact, that this happens, so one has the sense of seeing behind the scenes, how nothing is as it appears, that the clothing is ill-fitting and is rigged, but because of the way things in this film cycle round, cycle round, it also makes me think of a later portion of the film when Thomas is pinning the famously blown up photos up on his wall. And, indeed, just as we now view Thomas between the women, between the “through a glass darkly” sheets of Plexiglas, later there will be a scene in which Thomas is viewed at a similar angle from between pinned up blown-up photos of the murder scene.

Thomas seen between the “through a glass darkly” sheets of Plexiglas. This should be compared with a later image (down the page) of Thomas viewed between the blown-up photos of the supposed murder scene. If you click on the image you’ll see that the model on the right is not facing her own reflection but that of the woman behind her.

He is impatient with the women. Yelling. He tells one model to put her leg further forward and goes to her and grabs the leg and moves it, bossing her.

Pulling the model’s leg leg

One of the models looks like the reveling mimes. She is in white face and the poses she strikes seem even more ridiculous because of it. She is wearing a silver bonnet which will be recalled in a later woman who wears a bonnet and possesses an infantile impression. One of the models is attired in a black and white dress without sides reminding of the earlier photo shoot with Verushka who was also wearing an open sided dress, encouraged to put her hand to her mouth. One could perhaps see this as a type of doubling.

Click to view image of models with reflections.

But they are all doubled in the staggered smoked panes.

The model with the bow in her hair, hand to her mouth.

The mime model makes a gesture of prayer which takes us back to the mimes rushing past the two nuns.

Click to view image of praying model.

Throughout, we see on the wall behind Thomas the large photo of the hang glider and the one of a scuba diver leaping into the water. As viewers we may accept these as staged environmental touches meant only to reinforce this being a photographer’s studio, but it should be noted that these are individuals who are in a sense suspended in flight. Up in the air.

“Stripes down!” Thomas yells at a model. He wants her arms up and down, making a movement that reminds of a bird in flight.

The shoot continues. He yells at the models to “Wake up!” And the scene switches from models posing in clothing that is all black and white and shades of gray, to being dressed in colorful clothing. Condescendingly, Thomas tells them they should thank their lucky stars they’re working for him then commands them to smile.

Thomas is sweaty with exertion. As the movie camera passes over the seeming zombie-like gazes of the models (the model who had been in mime white face is now adorned with peacock feathers and her eyes heavily made up to resemble the “eyes” of a peacock’s feathers) one gets also the impression of just how strained and nervous they may be. The last model in this particular line up, who is seemingly trying to smile in a vague and stilted way, startles as if she has been struck when Thomas yells at her. And now Thomas backs off. Tells the models they’re tired, tells them to relax and close their eyes.

Click to view image of the models with shut eyes.

A song plays in the background,

Sometimes you really dig a girl the moment you kiss her
and you get distracted by her older sister
when in walks her father and takes you in line

The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind”.

The eyes of the models closed in meditation, Thomas says to his assistant, “Close your eyes” as he passes her and exits. I don’t think it’s too much to suppose that Antonioni is suggesting here the idea of Thomas ordering all not to see him as he exits, while at the same time intuiting a greater significance. There are many times in the film where the comings and goings of actors are intentionally obscured so that finally we have instances of seemingly magical disappearance from the street.

On the way out, Thomas spies the clothes he’d worn as a homeless person. He picks them up and dumps them outside. We notice a young boy standing at the gate to a rear garden/courtyard of the warehouse. An interesting shot because children have elsewhere no place in this film.

Click to view image of boy at the gate.

SOMETHING TO HANG ONTO, “LIKE THAT LEG”

Thomas passes through the courtyard and enters the neighboring house of the abstract artist, Bill. Bill indicates a painting and says of it, “That must be 5 or 6 years old”, (which was about the age of the boy at the gate). He continues on that the paintings don’t mean anything when he does them, they’re a mess, but he finds something to hang onto afterward.

“Like that leg,” the painter says, running his finger down a leg in an abstract painting.

“Like that leg.”

Recall how among the mimes had been a woman whose leg was bandaged, as if broken, but she was running without use of the cane she was wielding. Recall too that Thomas had grabbed the leg of the “bird”, the model in a black sheer split skirt and black shirt with white polka dots, and yanked it forward. Now the painter points out a leg which he had found to hang onto.

Perhaps like the leg of the hang glider in the previous scene.

The painter says it all sorts itself out, adds up.

I would add it is, at least at this point in the flim, not unlike finding a clue in a detective story, foreshadowing not only Thomas’ later struggling with clues, but the audience looking for clues, for signs to follow, and attempting to form, via them, a coherent picture.

Then Bill says of another painting, one on the floor, that Thomas isn’t to ask him about it, that he doesn’t know about “this one” yet. A canvas of random black speckles on white. One should think of this painting when later presented with the grain of the blown up images. That is what this painting is. The problem is already there, presenting itself, the body of the supposed dead man which we will later see in the blown up photos.

Bill deals in abstracts while Thomas ostensibly deals in capturing the reality of the moment, however manipulated by him it may be, constructed of his personal vision. As it turns out, neither one is absolutely certain what they are picturing, afterward discovering elements in their work which transform and mold their experience of it. Or, at least Bill is aware if this, his situation, and one feels his uncertainty, whereas Thomas is still self-assured, confident in his ability to capture what he sees.

Thomas stoops to examine the painting. He asks if he can buy the painting and if not then will Bill give him the painting? Patricia, Bill’s partner, perhaps his wife, enters wearing a black and white flowered dress that recalls the speckles in the painting and thus ultimately also the grains in the photographs.

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Click to view larger images of (1) Patricia passing the dotted painting (2) the horizontal blinds (3) Patricia massaging Thomas’ head

A tea canister above her head, she pulls out a beer and as she takes it to Thomas she passes behind a horizontal blind door, Antonioni often following scenes of dots with lines. As Thomas relaxes, she briefly massages the back of his head, caretaking, but there exists too a certain gentle empathy and tension between them that speaks of a reluctant attraction and an edge of acknowledgment which neither will approach. Though the woman seems a sort of object, a muse, a passive participant, there is something distinctly apart about her, distancing Patricia (played by Sarah Miles) from the women we’ve thus far encountered and from the Pygmalion desires of the men, and Thomas treats her with greater decency than he does the models.

Antonioni gives us no history of these individuals, nor does he ever. We must rely entirely on how they act and respond to each other in the moment.

Thomas tells the woman that Bill is a tight-fisted bastard–which brings up another theme, Thomas later saying he himself charges too much for his photos and the woman at the junk shop saying she asks too much.

“I’ll creep down one night and knock it off,” Thomas says, meaning the painting he desires. But in that statement is also perhaps a hint of his desire for Patricia.

When Thomas leaves, as he closes the door, Patricia turns and faces her household with a frustrated but resolute expression.

THEY SAY THEY WERE ASKED TO COME THERE

Now back to the studio where Thomas finds two girls are waiting, a tall blond and shorter brunette, both obviously not models, not just unsophisticated and naive but too exuberant, not exhibiting the reluctant blankness of the models we’ve thus far viewed.

Thomas is told by a skeptical employee that the girls said they’d been asked to come there and the girls confess that they hadn’t specifically. Thomas buttons his shirt in an expression of sexual disinterest. He sits at his desk and plays with a coin, rolling it over his fingers, which the commentator on the DVD of the film stated was supposed to be a descriptive quirk. The girls are hoping Thomas will take their photos, but Thomas says he doesn’t even have the time to have his appendix removed.

Antonioni, by virtue of the plot of the film, Thomas later probing film grains for truth and meaning, trains the viewer to look for anomalies in the film. Such as I noticed a dark stand-out freckle/blemish on Patricia’s wrist as she stroked Thomas’ hair, massaging his head (see above photo) and I had thought it funny they left this instead of covering it with make-up. And after I had noticed it I noticed other blemishes periodically on the bodies of the models and prospective models, blemishes which stood out to me and made me think of the grain, the film grain. I’m not going to go so far to say this is intentional, but I’m not saying it isn’t either, Antonioni encouraging one to examine the smallest details, every grain.

It was after the focus on the painting of dots and Bill’s mention of something to hang onto, like the leg, that we had the first shot of Patricia, which was of her feet and legs as she entered, passing next the painting, the lower portion of her dress visible which in that view also looked like a mass of black and white dots, so to then notice the freckle on Patricia’s arm as she massaged Thomas’ head is an extension of the encouragement to see all in terms of grains of light and dark.

I mention this because now, as Thomas rolls the coin over his fingers, rather reminding one of a magician’s sleight of hand, we observe a dark spot on one of his fingers, which is perhaps caused by either paint or ink. And I believe it’s intentional. My mind returns to the white canvas flecked with black paint that Bill had said he didn’t know about yet. A painting that prefigures the distorted grains in the later blown up photos. It is as if we are being signaled that everything on this celluloid is as the mystery observed in the later blown-up photos. The closer in one moves, the less certain one is of what is being seen, preconceived worlds disintegrating and becoming something other than what one initially perceived.

Thomas rolls the coin over his fingers.

Thomas exits the building. The girls chase him and he tells one of them to get rid of a diabolical red bag. The girls ask if they can return that afternoon.

“WHAT DO YOU WANT?”

Now Antonioni takes us through a gateway of scenes. Thomas travels through a neighborhood of bright red buildings bearing the signs Pride & Clarke. Pride & Clarke was a motorcycle dealership, the shop’s facade painted bright red, and as Pride & Clarke did quite well in the 60s neighboring properties were purchased on the same road and painted the same bright red. As Thomas rides down the street through this Pride & Clarke neighborhood, one red shop after another displaying the same Pride & Clarke lettering, a sense of deja vu enters, as if Thomas repeatedly is driving past the same shop, again and again, and somehow he is failing to notice what is obvious to us, the repetitions, that he is traversing the same territory over and over.

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Pride and Clarke neighborhood

Eventually, Thomas passes a blue building on a corner and enters into a world where there is again virtually no color, a good deal of construction taking place. A blank, unfinished neighborhood being built on the bones of the old, from where we can see towering high above the letters of a sign that will figure prominently in several later scenes, looming over the grassy park where Thomas takes the photos that catapult him into a night of chaos and confusion.

The first glimpse of the sign.

Thomas now enters the area of the junk shop he is on his way to visit and drives past two gay men walking their dogs who stop briefly to window shop before the junk shop (street number 33). They take special notice of Thomas as he passes them, entering the shop.

Inside the old junk shop one notices that again there are heads everywhere, reminding of the busts in Thomas’ studio.

Thomas’ profile duplicates the busts

Among the busts, Thomas notices a statue of a woman which has no head (an encircled 2 is on its right shoulder, representing the price).

Behind the headless statue is a screen. “What do you want?” demands a voice from the direction of the statue, whereupon an elderly man steps out from behind the screen.

“What do you want?” demands the yet unseen elderly man from behind the screen.

One can think of the old man behind the screen as taking the place of the missing statue’s head, speaking from behind the screen, and a connection is made thus between the old man and the young woman who is later revealed to be the shop’s proprietor. As the old man steps from behind the screen, one could even look at him as a kind of screened oracle. I could even take it a step further and speak in terms of the Holy of Holies and the screen that separates the profane from the sacred. The series of questions that follows is certainly in the language of the spiritual quest.

Beside the headless statue is also an old box (perhaps some type of old device for viewing film?) which through pareidolia gives the impression of having a face, two eyes and a mouth.

The elderly man is abrasive with Thomas, and the way he tells Thomas there is nothing for him there, the viewer could interpret him as being irritated by the gay men in the neighborhood and thus rude with Thomas if he believes him to be gay. He seems so much the natural proprietor that when he says the proprietor isn’t there we think he is probably lying. He informs Thomas there are no cheap bargains there, recalling how knowledge comes at great expense in most adventures.

The packet of letters

He asks Thomas what he wants and Thomas says pictures. The man says there are no pictures as he takes down a packet of letters from before a painting of a lighthouse and blows dust off them in Thomas’ face.

The shape of a shadow falling on the painting of a lighthouse and the ocean reminds me of the two photos at Thomas’ studio of the hang glider and the scuba diver leaping into the water.

The elderly man asks Thomas what kind of pictures and Thomas says he wants a landscape. The man replies there are no landscapes. But there is obviously a landscape there and Thomas points this out by moving a couple of busts and revealing an old painting of a pastoral scene, a Stygian river surrounded by craggy mountains, and a boat bearing two people upon the water. “Sold,” the old man says. “All sold.”

“All sold.”

The seemingly rejected Thomas steps outside. After taking pics of the shop, as if “owning” it in this manner, Thomas turns and wanders into the landscape of a park where he will, indeed, find the pictures he desires, which also aren’t for sale, which he will be treated as having stolen.

WE HAVEN’T MET, YOU’VE NEVER SEEN ME

The park is our first touch with generous green nature in the film.

There is a peculiar gateway person, an older, larger woman in a brown uniform, her waistline seeming as if it is cinched in to accentuate her full curves in her masculine uniform attire, an androgynous figure. She is on trash detail and uses a stick to spear bits of paper. Bits of white lying amongst the grass, cleaning up the mess. Little seems to be without potential meaning in the film and so I wonder at her significance. With the attention to the photos and blacks and whites later, one could interpret her as having perhaps missed something in her cleaning up. And Thomas comes upon it. Or maybe she comes through later and cleans up what Thomas has found.

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(1) Entering the park and passing the trash collector (2) The man in the suit passing the pink roses

Thomas faces a tennis court before which are two beds of roses, yellow on screen right and pink on screen left. Two youths play tennis, a third watching. A man in a gray suit passes to screen right on a path beyond.

Return to the theme of the taking pictures of “birds” as, having passed the court, Thomas comes upon a flock of pigeons which he now photographs. The way he plunges into and sends the flock fluttering there is again the idea that he not just observes but uses all that he sees. Possesses it without regard for what it is. Without examining its relationship to him. Without observing it as live, rather than another photo opportunity.

Augery was the ancient practice of studying birds, their flight, their sounds, determining by these what action should be taken, the birds acting as intermediaries of the gods, and we have now an unfolding, a stacking of bird imagery in the film. First there were the ostrich feathers, which will also play in a disrobing scene with Vanessa Redgrave (ostrich feathers bring to mind their role in the strip tease), and eventually act as a guiding arrow to Thomas in one of the movie’s more critical scenes. Thomas called his models “birds”, a condescending term, like “chicks”, but as this had directly followed the images of individuals in flight, and considering the ethereal appearance of the models as seen through the milky light of the plastic, when he had called for the models to be brought down, I believed there may be a more spiritual aspect to them which was being veiled by the mod energy and dialect of the time.

It is in this spot, where Thomas had photographed and disturbed the birds, that the film will end. It is in this spot that the film begins with the credits upon this green revealing an interior scene of a man photographing a woman.

And now, Thomas taking his photos of the birds, Antonioni shows a bird that separates itself off from the rest, which soars high into the sky, the camera following its flight, the bird flying in the direction of a hill which will be immediately after brought to Thomas’ attention, then cutting back to the right.

We have here an instance of augury, a sign presenting itself to Thomas, an individual who has heretofore forged his own path, demanding his way, rather than following the voices of nature.

As the bird fleets away and the camera follows, we have a brief glimpse of the top of the heads of the man and woman who will momentarily climb the hill.

Wandering away from the flock of pigeons, Thomas now notices a man and woman going up a hill, Jane (Vanessa Redgrave) and her lover, Jane leading, pulling the man. It seems obvious they’d want to be left alone but Thomas follows them to the upper level of the park, making hugely exuberant leaps and kicks that briefly suspend him in the air as he climbs the steps. And I think of the pictures of the hang glider and skin diver, the two individuals caught in mid air…

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(1) Photographing the bird (2) The bird that separates from the flock and flies toward the hill the couple climbs (3) The couple on the hill

What a wonderful scene. The breeze through the leaves of the trees. One can smell the grass, feel the wind.

We see Thomas at the height of the stairs observing the couple.

See between two trees the couple at a distance, their pose forming a triangle. The woman laughs as she breaks the pose with the man and leads him to screen left.

The couple

Medium shot of Thomas moving to screen left, watching the couple, then leaping behind a fence and moving into the trees in order to more discreetly photograph them.

Closer shot as Thomas shoots the couple.

A shot of Thomas from the side as he moves along behind the fence then stops and begins taking photos again.

A view of the couple as Thomas shoots them.

A shot of Thomas beyond a tree and fence, putting the strap of his camera around his neck then leaping over the fence and crouching, then moving to hide behind a tree and take more shots.

Now a shot from behind Thomas of his photographing the couple from behind the tree.

A distant shot of Thomas photographing the couple, showing him moving from one tree to another to get a closer view.

A shot from Thomas’ perspective of the couple who kiss then stop playing. The woman releases the man’s hand and moves away from him, turning about in circles, as if aware that someone is watching them. She looks toward the trees. She looks in Thomas’ direction. Does she see him?

Shot of Thomas now moving toward the stairs. He stops at the tree near the stairway and hides behind it as he continues to take more shots.

Now a shot from Thomas’ perspective of the couple embracing, the man’s back to him. Again, the woman looks screen right to the trees. This is one of the shots Thomas will later blow up, which will reveal her looking toward a gunman in the trees.

Shot of Thomas beside the stairs, photographing from behind the tree.

As he moves toward the stairs, now a shot of the woman and the man noticing him. Hand at her mouth, anxious, the woman pursues, leaving her companion.

A connection is already being made between Thomas and the shooter, for it is immediately after the shot is made of the woman looking towards the trees in which will later be found the possible gunman, that she sees Thomas and pursues him.

Thomas is spying on the couple, there is nothing else to call it but spying and stalking, even going behind a fence, hiding in the trees to take pics of them. The extension of his lens will later be recalled as he looks at the blow-ups of the pics made here and finds a gun. The camera will become (perhaps revolver, cycles) identified with the gun and thus Thomas, the photographer, will also be the shooter.

Furious, Jane berates Thomas that he can’t just go around photographing people like that. Thomas says that some people are politicians, bull fighters (the before mentioned ending of Antonioni’s “The Passenger” takes place across from a bull fighting ring) and his job is that of a photographer. Jane protests that they are in a public place where everyone has a right to be left in peace and Thomas replies it’s not his fault if there’s no peace. He says most women would pay to have their photograph taken by him, so the woman offers to pay him for his photos but he says he always asks too much. Thomas climbs back up the steps and the woman follows, demanding the photos, finally fighting him for the camera. She bites his hand, falling on her knees before him, desperate.

Jane bites Thomas’ hand

The lens of the camera having been knocked off during the struggle, Thomas retrieves it. He tells the woman not to spoil things, that they’ve only just met. Fleeing Thomas and the scene, Jane says, “…we haven’t met. You’ve never seen me.”

Jane runs back toward the tree where the body of the dead man will later be observed in the photos. She stops there, and if you have seen the film before you also now see the body lying on the ground, which one wouldn’t have noticed the first go through, and that she has stopped to stand briefly by the body and then run on. But unless you have seen the film before, you don’t see the body, the woman only looks like she is hesitating, and Thomas doesn’t see the body either.

THE PURCHASE OF THE 8 LB. PROPELLER

Thomas returns to the junk shop, the address of which he’d gotten after the first photo shoot with Verushka. A woman with a baby buggy is entering the park and I make note of it as, as I’ve mentioned before, there are so few references to children in the film.

Passing the old man who is lowering an exterior blind or awning, Thomas enters the shop and there is now present a young woman who is the proprietor of this old shop, which one wouldn’t have expected, and she is saying she is tired of it, she wants to go off and do something else. Before, there had been all the busts and the headless statue. She is, however, surrounded by statues with heads and at least fuller fragments of bodies, one or two of these statues showing a a distinct pitting of black on the white surface, very obvious, which reminds of grains of the photos. One could even look upon the spots as though spreading or becoming more distinct.

The black spots on white recall Bill’s abstract paintings and the black speckled canvas Thomas had hoped to purchase from Bill, but which Bill wouldn’t let him have.

The proprietor of the shop surrounded by statues.

Thomas standing between a white statue and a black, watches the young woman. She is listening to records and runs her hand around the circle of a record, which is to be remembered as this gesture will be repeated later by Thomas. For a moment it seems she is listening to the record with her hand, playing it with her hand. Thomas reveals his agent had seen her about the shop, a man with a cigar who was throwing ash everywhere–peculiar, as when Thomas was first in the shop the old man had blown a good amount of dust off a packet of letters onto him. The proprietor says she probably asked for too much money. When Thomas inquires why she’s selling, she replies she’d like to do something different, that she’s fed up with antiques. She says she wants to go to Nepal. Thomas says but it is all antiques in Nepal. She says then maybe Morocco.

Behind the woman we view view a photo of an old airplane.

Now, Thomas sees in another area of the shop a large wooden propeller behind a red and white striped flag. She wants 8 pounds for it and Thomas accepts. They are both quite excited by the sale. Thomas says he “can’t live without it”. “Hard luck,” the woman replies, “that will teach you to fall in love with heavy things Saturday morning.” To pull the propeller out of the corner means rearranging some of the objects around it. The woman moves a clear lamp on one side and Thomas moves an orange glass shade on a pedestal that is to the other side. Then he picks up a chair that is draped with a cloth which is formed of two panels, one a field of white and the other a field of black. Thomas lifts this up to the camera until all we see is the field of black.

Cut to Thomas and the woman exiting the shop with the propeller which we see forms a figure 8.

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(1) The back of the chair going to black, cut to (2) putting the propeller in the car

As they port the propeller out to his Rolls, the woman argues that Thomas’ car isn’t a delivery van and says she’ll take care of it, that “something will turn up”. Well, it better turn up today, Thomas says, leaving the propeller with her.

IT’LL GO LIKE A BOMB

Another transition. We had gone through the red neighborhood on the way to the park. Now Antonioni carries us away from the junk shop neighborhood through red buses, to a modern section of the city.

The red buses

We see a sign, “Car Park”. Thomas passes a bus which is the same orange-yellow color of the sign. After this, his car will be one of very few we observe traveling over several roads for a number of blocks.

Thomas had passed through the succession of red Pride & Clarke buildings on the way to the park. Now, he is moving away from the park yet passes this succession of red buses and the “Car Park”, a part of the park scene being expressed again in different terms, this followed by his speaking about the park.

Thomas makes a call on his radio, Blue 439. “Get me Flaxom double two four nine…Mr. Walker, Mr. Peter Walker.” . He’s talking about the junk shop and says he thinks the kid will come down on the price.

“Already there are queers and poodles in the area. I saw something the couple of minutes I was there. It’ll go like a bomb,” he says.

Yes, blow up. Explosive.

“Blue, 439, what is in the area, over?” he’s asked.

Thomas says to forget it.

GO AWAY

Thomas drives up to the restaurant where he’s to have lunch with his agent, Ron. Entering the restaurant and taking a seat beside Ron, who is already dining, Thomas pulls out the photos and excitedly shows him them, all black and white. Photos from the doss house. Destitute men dressing or undressing, vulnerable flesh bared. Several individuals viewed through the window of a booth at the poor house, perhaps where they were signing in, and the booth’s window has been shattered as if by a bullet, this shattering paired with a circular cut-out in the glass (a mouth hole). There’s a shot of a man kneeling beside a cot and its thin mattress. An old thin man stripped completely nude in a wash room, ribs protruding. These would seem to be in opposition to the photos he takes of the young woman in their rich clothing, though the thin old men remind also of the thinness of the women. He says that for the end of the book he has something fab that he got this morning, very peaceful, very still, and as the rest of the book is so “violent” he thinks it good to end like that.

As he speaks of violence, we see a photo of a slaughterhouse with a sign in the background reading “Home Killed”, the blood on the men’s white uniform jackets appearing black in the colorless photos.

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(1) Booth with shattered glass (2) Slaughterhouse with sign “Home Killed”

Ron continues flipping through the photos. Elderly women with creased faces. Youthful mopheads. A man on a filthy street beside jackets hanging on a line. Finally, two different photos of a door on which has been painted, “Keep out, police. Keep away police order”. Ron says this rings true.

A waiter passing, Thomas places his lunch order by pointing to the plate he’s carrying.

Thomas had seemed to show a certain affinity for the female proprietor of the junk shop, speaking to her more as an equal than in his usual interactions. Now, as he looks off through the blinds, he says, like the girl at the antique store, that London doesn’t do anything for him and he’s going off it that week. In the restaurant, a model passes whose movements remind distinctly of Verushka, sunglasses to her mouth, playing to him, the photographer, wanting to be noticed. He says he’s tired of bloody bitches like that. He wishes he had tons of money, “then I’d be free.” Which seems contrary the wealth exhibited in his lifestyle, the Rolls Royce that he drives.

The agent says free like what, “Like him?” pointing to the apparently lost and desperate face of a homeless man in a photo, he standing amidst a rubbled, broken, urban landscape, facing the camera with insistent, querying eyes. We notice that the man’s right hand is bandaged. Jane had bitten Thomas’ right hand.

Like him? Thomas’ hand seems to show no sign of having been bitten. But this man in the photo is wearing a bandage on his hand. It seems we may be looking at a picture of the real, impoverished Thomas in a landscape that resembles one blown up, bombed.

The individual in this particular photo is actually Julio Cortazar, the author of the story on which the movie was based.

“Like him?” The man with the bandaged right hand against a scene of urban decay resembling a bombing.

“Someone we know?” Ron then asks.

A man has been spying on them through the blinds and having been noticed now crosses over the street. Thomas steps outside and sees the man has gone to his car and is pulling on the handle of the trunk. A few men in African attire passing, the man attempts then to hide behind them as he goes down the street then rounds the corner and enters a car that we can’t see.

Again, Thomas seems to be doubled in the pose of the “spy”.

Thomas goes to his car and tries the trunk. Then gets in it and speeds off. The men in flowing African attire crossing a street, he drives right through them, scattering them, this action reminiscent of the same heedless self-involvement when he was pursuing the images of the birds in the park.

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(1) The “spy” hiding behind a group of men (2) Thomas scatters the men with the car, much as he had scattered the birds

If we forge a connection here between these men in African attire and the birds in the park, it’s curious that the spy had attempted to conceal himself among them.

Thomas would likely not have noticed the spying man had he not come to the window. He would not have been alerted to the possibility he was being followed had the man not then gone directly to Thomas’ car and tried the trunk. An action which Thomas had afterward duplicated. Just as after the bird at the park had flown up, in the direction of the hill, Thomas’ attention had found Jane and the man, and he had followed the pair.

GO AWAY

Thomas passes by a small band of what appear to be anti-nuke protesters, but upon examination their signs say nothing about nukes. They read, “NO NO NO”, “GO AWAY”, “PEACE NOT WAR”. One sign shows the words “NOT THIS” with a painting of what appears to be a mushroom, nuclear explosion, and so we assume this is an anti-nuke protest, when instead it refers more to the “blow up” theme of the film. Another sign shows, white on black, a mushroom explosion with the words “THE END.” A woman pushes a perambulator on which are the words “BABY BOY”.

“Not this!”

There is another sign that reads simply, “ON ON”. So, as one can see, though the audience is to see this is an anti-nuke protest, it instead has all to do with something else. The ON ON is a reversal (opposites) of NO NO. But because of the context, the frame, our eyes pass over this bit of information, assuming that it fits in somehow with what we believe we’re seeing.

Thomas had not too long before told Jane in the park it wasn’t his fault if there was no peace. Immediately prior this scene, Ron and Thomas had looked through photos for his art book, many picturing urban decay on par with bombed out war scenes. Two of the photos they’d last reviewed had painting on doors reading “Keep Away”. One could take these as warnings directing Thomas to stay away, go away. No, not to say these warnings are literally targeting him. But in the life of the film, in the story line concerning Thomas’ foray into the park, these events transform and become personal signs.

When Thomas had left the junk shop he was unable to carry the propeller with him in his auto’s back seat. The proprietor had said that would teach him to fall in love with something heavy on a Saturday morning. Here, Thomas stops and smiles at protesters who, despite their silence, remind of the mimes who opened the movie. One of the protesters wears a placard that reads “WE don’t FIGHT” and carries a sign reading “GO AWAY”. The “don’t” on the placard is a different script and smaller than the bold letters WE FIGHT. She places the GO AWAY sign in the back seat of Thomas’ car where the propeller had been, Thomas even helping, then driving on after a glance back at a gray car behind him.

“Go Away!”

What sense does a lone sign reading “Go Away” make out of context of the protesters? Perhaps it is Thomas speaking to the gray car behind him, for as he pulls off he is followed by it. Though we don’t get a good glimpse of who’s in it, if one pays attention, one wonders if the car is following Thomas. One may even notice that in the car is the man who had spied on Thomas at the restaurant (we don’t see his face), and Jane is discerned as well in her black and white checked shirt and black neck scarf fixed about her neck like a tie.

Remember the propeller had been said to be “heavy”, but this sign is not, it promptly flies right out of the car.

But what is a propeller for if not for flight?

JANE VISITS THOMAS’ STUDIO

Thomas pulls up to his neighborhood. Climbing out of his car and looking back down the street to see if he’s been followed, seeming somewhat anxious he honks his horn long and loud, perhaps hoping to draw attention, to bring out witnesses and ensure he isn’t harmed. An elder man holding a spade emerges from a door next to a wall behind which are some trees. A gardener. Thomas then goes to a red phone booth across from his studio to make a phone call. Why? Why make this call outside rather than from his studio? Again, perhaps he is worrying, concerned that someone may be ambush him in his studio, and is ensuring that someone will phone him and perhaps be concerned if he doesn’t answer (that is only a guess on my part). Behind him, through the glass, we see a sign for St. Francis’ Catholic Church. He asks for Frobesher (?) 3229 saying he only has a sixpence. Then says, “Park 1296.” He asks the person he calls why they haven’t gone to Hurley yet? Then tells them to stay where they are and call him soon at home.

The windows of the red phone booth reflect the neighboring buildings in such a way that they appear to be red, reminding of the repeating shots of the red Pride & Clarke buildings by which Thomas passed on the way to the junk shop and the park. We may expect then there to perhaps follow another scene replaying the events at the park.

The red phone booth

As Thomas goes to his door, Jane dashes up, breathless, saying she’s come for the photographs. Thomas asks how she’d managed to find him and she inquires if he lives here.

They enter Thomas’ studio and pass a row of white bars laying against a white wall, an image upon which the camera lingers.

Speaking of birds, as Thomas opens a door for the woman, we view on the wall behind the door a large black and white photo of a baby chick.

The pair ascend to the second floor of the studio where Thomas pours wine for them both. Jane seats herself on the gray couch then immediately stands, nervous. She pleads for the photos, saying her life is already a mess (the abstract painter had said when painting it was a mess at first) and that this would mean disaster. Thomas coolly replies that there’s nothing like a little disaster for sorting things out. So we are intended to refer back to that earlier conversation, for the abstract painter had said first the mess, then things sorted themselves out.

Jane passes back and forth before the plastic window behind which we’d earlier observed the dancing “birds” then settles next to a safe. Thomas tells her she has what it takes to be a model, is dismissive and bossy with her while also perhaps trying to curry her favor, flatter her, in order to keep her from arguing about the photos. He pulls down a purple backdrop and has her stand against it, then observes that not many girls can stand as well as that. Jane protests no thanks, that she’s in a hurry, and Thomas tells her not to worry, she’ll get her pictures, he promises, that he always keeps his word. Taking a spot on the sofa he commands her to “come here” and show him how she sits. Resigned, with a deep breath, she takes a seat beside him.

The phone rings, which is the person he’d earlier told to call. He waits a minute then literally dives for the phone. Plunges down. A ridiculous, jerky, fast, plotted, scrambling movement. Digging out the phne from behind a chair, bumping his head on the wall, he asks who it is and says, “Oh yes, that’s right” as if he had forgotten the earlier agreement. He then holds the phone up for Jane.

As Jane stands, surprised, asking if it is for her, we see not Jane but Jane’s reflection in a pane of glass or plexiglass leaning against a portion of the studio wall that is painted black (the majority of the studio is painted in bold stretches of highly contrasting black and white) so she is viewed as the earlier models had been, through a glass darkly. Coming over she takes the phone. “It’s my wife,” Thomas says. Jane rejects the call, saying why should she speak to her. So he says, “Sorry, love, the bird I’m with won’t talk to you,” and hangs up.

The camels and the primal point.

Thomas traces the primal point.

Jane has moved to stand before the window. Thomas stands near her, before a picture of a white dot in a field of black. A point of light. Recall the antique dealer tracing the round of the record. Thomas now traces that point of light with his finger. Thomas confesses he has no wife, that they have kids, that they have no kids, but sometimes it feels as if they have kids. He says she isn’t beautiful, that she’s easy to live with, that she’s not easy to live with and so doesn’t live with her, lighting a cigarette and placing the match on the bonnet of one of the busts, patting its head gently. Back and forth, back and forth. Black and white. Opposites. What is the truth of the matter? Is it somewhere between.

The camels.

On the wall is a large photo of camels crossing the desert, the wasteland, with two busts before it. The photo is large but mostly white, the line of camels so small that from a distance they seem scarcely larger than dots.

If one is so inclined, one could also look for occult meaning in the camels and the wasteland, but it isn’t necessary. The mysteries are already present in nature, repeating patterns. The vocabulary that nature presents is enough.

“But even with beautiful girls, you look at them and that’s that. That’s why they always end up…and I’m stuck with them all day long,” Thomas says.

And now he raises the volume of some music he’d put on for Jane to hear. “Listen to this”. Jazz. He tells Jane to keep still. To listen and keep still. Her movements are jerky, unlike the fluid movements of the models, as if she is unacquainted with the music and beats. He is now the slow one, smoking. Thomas tells her she can smoke if she likes. Tells her to go slow, against the beat. She circles her head slowly, hands the cigarette back to him (or perhaps a joint). And she laughs, unlike the models from whom he couldn’t elicit a smile. Only she’s uncomfortable. She says she can’t stand it, that she’s nervous enough as it is.

The desert. Jane asks for water. Thomas exiting to the kitchen to get her some, she spies his camera and tries to leave with it. But when she flees to the bottom floor and opens a door he is there, as if by magic, standing in her way, having anticipated her intent.

“I’m not a fool,” he tells her, taking the camera.

Returning to the second floor, Thomas comments that her boyfriend is a “bit past it” and now Jane says why doesn’t he just say what he wants. Assuming it is sex, she removes her black and white checked shirt, a direct view of her chest obstructed by the strip tease line of ostrich feathers.

Thomas tells her to get dressed, that he’ll cut out the “negatives you want”. Thinking to deceive her, he goes to his dark room and returns with another, substitute, roll of film.

Entering the room, Thomas grabs onto an absolutely useless handle on the wall, black handle sticking out of the white brick wall, as he looks left and sees the woman’s leg projecting beyond the purple photographic backdrop, her body otherwise hidden.

So, we are back to the grabbing the leg theme. Thomas had grabbed the bird’s leg (the model’s). The painter had traced the leg on the painting, something to hang onto. Now, Thomas sees Jane’s leg as he grabs hold of the handle.

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A variation on the artist’s comment on the leg in the painting being something to hang onto. Thomas takes hold of the handle and turns and sees Jane’s leg.

He walks behind the purple backdrop toward Jane who has not yet put on her shirt. He gives her the roll of film and she kisses him. Removing his shirt, Thomas takes her to what I assume is his bedroom, but as they reach its doorway (a painting of a fat man in trunks observed on the opposite wall) the doorbell rings interrupting their encounter. Jane asks Thomas not to go but he does.

It’s the propeller without which Thomas has said he couldn’t live.

Shirtless, Thomas helps the delivery man cart the propeller in and places it on the floor where he’d earlier been photographing the models amongst the dark Plexiglas. Jane watches from above and asks what it’s for. Thomas replies that it’s “Not for anything”, that it’s just beautiful. Jane says that she would hang it from the ceiling like a fan if she’d a large room like that. Returning upstairs, Thomas points out a beam and says his intention is to use it there as a sculpture. Jane says it will break up the “straight lines”.

That big a fan in a room would of course blow you away.

A fan is all cycles.

Cut to Jane smoking again, arms crossed over her chest shielding her breasts, laughing as if she’s getting stoned. Then Jane notices the watch on her wrist, starts up and runs to put on her shirt. “It’s late!” Thomas asks if he’ll see her again and she shrugs her shoulders. He asks her for her name and number and brings her paper on which to write it down.

Jane leaves, thanking him.

We have a shot of Thomas from down below, from the door by which Jane has just left. He stands for a moment, examining the paper, then slips it in his pocket and moves along.

THE INITIAL DEVELOPMENTS

Thomas goes to develop the photos and now one gets a sense of the isolation of the photographer. He closes a purple door and a red light comes on signaling he’s in the “dark” room. (I think of the red light at the beginning of the film and the nuns passing it, the revelers surrounding them.) Then he goes into the room where he will print the photos, closes a green door and again there is a red light beside the door that shows the “dark” room is occupied.

In the dark.

Thomas examines the small negatives with a large round magnifying glass. Despite the small size of the negative, within it is contained the broad scene of the landscape and in the following scenes as Thomas blows the images up, blows them up, blows them up, he dives further and further down into that landscape, from the broad landscape into the particular, sorting through the grains, the light and dark.

He makes a large blow up of two of the park pics and puts them up in the second floor lounge where he can relax on the sofa and examine them. Lying on the sofa, he looks at the photo of of Jane pulling away from the man after they had been playing, their bodies forming a triangular figure. Looks next at a photo he would have taken just before Jane had noticed him, the woman and the man embracing, the man’s back to him. He looks back to the first photo. Back to the second. What has caught his eye? He moves in for a closer look, wondering.

Cut to Thomas returning from the dark room with a third image and putting it up alongside the first two. It is a blow up of the second image, the woman embracing the man and staring to screen right, as if watching something.

Thomas has wondered now what she is looking at and he examines the second photo again. What would be her line of vision? With his finger he sketches it across the grass lawn to the trees.

Cut to a view of Thomas from behind the photos, looking at him from between them as he puts on a record and pours himself another glass of wine.

The photos here as if take the place of the “through a glass, darkly” panes of Plexiglas in the earlier scene in which Thomas had been photographing the “birds”.

Thomas takes the magnifying glass from the glass coffee table where it’s set between a bowl of ornamental eggs with a blue pattern and a large piece of rose quartz. The music fades out as he examines more closely the second photo, marking it with a white grease pencil.

Cut to Thomas putting up on the white wall, corner to the third photo, an extreme blow up of what appears to be a a face in the trees. The camera pans back and forth from that photo to the woman looking out of the third photo upon it.

Cut to Thomas pinning up on the wall, beside the photo which may show the face of a man in the trees, an enlargement of Jane running toward Thomas with her hand raised to cover her face, then an enlargement of Jane looking toward him while still with her companion, then an enlargement of Jane facing him with her hand over her mouth, the companion standing near her.

I think of the hand to mouth posture Thomas had Verushka assume and which is a theme in the film, repeated again and again.

The studio with its green carpet, surrounded by the photos, has become the park. One hears the same quiet breeze through the trees that had been heard at the park.

Thomas looks now at a final photo in the series of only the woman’s companion looking towards Thomas, or perhaps it was toward Jane as she ran after Thomas.

Thomas rushes to the phone to call Jane (“931239″ I believe) and finds he was given a wrong name and number. Of course! He slams the phone down.

Thomas returns to examine the photo of the man in the trees…and this time he sees something else which causes him to run to the dark room.

Returning from the dark room, Thomas takes down the photo to the right of the face in the trees and replaces it with another enlargement. Again, the camera reviews the photos for us. The couple playing in the park (we hear the sound of the trees), the woman and the man embracing, Jane looking toward the trees, the blow up of the woman looking at the trees, the face in the trees. Finally, an extreme blow up distinctly showing a gun with a long silencer on it, Antonioni leaving no question whether or not there was a shooter.

The gun

More photos. The face of Jane as she looks toward Thomas, drawing back from her companion, Jane standing apart from the man with her hand to her mouth, the photo of the man looking toward Thomas, again Jane with her hand to her mouth, the photo of Jane with her hand up to cover her face as she pursues Thomas. And another photo. The empty green of the park after Thomas had returned to its upper level with Jane. A blow up of Jane standing beside the tree (behind which lies the dead man, Thomas yet unaware of this).

Jane and the man

Back to Thomas staring at the photos, examining them, his face soaked with sweat.

I wanted to note how Thomas’ positioning duplicates the positioning of older man, as well as the shooter in the trees. The meaning of the name Thomas is twin.

THOMAS BELIEVES HE HAS SAVED THE MAN’S LIFE

Thomas now runs to the phone and calls Ron to tell him that something fantastic has happened, that there was a man at the park whom someone had been trying to kill and he had saved his life. “Will you listen? What makes it so fantastic…”

Interrupting his conversation with Ron, there’s a buzz at the door. Thomas tells Ron to “hang on” and goes to answer the door. As he does so, he briefly stops before the image of Jane looking at him at the park, having realized his presence.

I want to take moment to reflect some on the idea of the camels. It may be pure happenstance, but on the sofa is a pillow with the number 3 on it. And we have on the wall what could be taken as an image of the primal point. Extending away from this primal point image we have a photo of a long line of camels, looking like a series of black dots, crossing an expanse of white, a desert. Now the juxtaposition of these images may be pure happenstance, but I’ve considered it a possibility that Antonioni has been building in this film a multi-dimensional Tree of Life.

Here are two versions of the Tree of Life.

Compare these with the below shot of Thomas as he was viewed just after Jane had departed.

In the Kabbalah, the first Sephiroth at the height of the tree being Kether, the Primordial Point, the 3rd is Binah, the letter of which is gimel, camel, the numeric attribution being 3. It is said that Gimel is composed of a yud and a vav and yud as its foot and represents the leg of a rich man who runs to bestow good upon the poor, the impoverished represented by daleth, 4. It is Jacob’s hand grasping the heel of his twin Esau with whom he wrestled in the womb.

Another word similar to gimel is gamol and means to be nourished until weaned, attributions also given to gimel, which serves as a bridge, the camel being the ship of the desert which takes one through the shadow of the valley of death, crossing the long and difficult abyss from Kether and the higher sephiroth to the lower. Via this journey, as signified in a tale of Rebekeh meeting her husband Isaac and finding him so beautiful that she fell from her camel, the soul may be fully borne into the physical world by a process of free will. Or perhaps that is one way of interpreting the story of Rebekeh.

THOMAS REALIZES THE DEAD MAN

The painter had traced the leg to “hang onto”. Thomas had grasped the handle bar as he had seen Jane’s leg. Now, he pulls on the handle of the door, standing back behind it, and in through the door comes backwards, as if falling or pushed in, the rear of the brunette, her legs. Then she steps or is pulled back out. Then the blond steps in, followed by the brunette, both girls laughing. He hadn’t expected them had he? Or had he? Who had he expected at the door? Jane returning upon finding she hadn’t been given the right roll of film?

The return of the two girls.

We observe on the left side of the door a bust of what recalls a magician figure, his headdress adorned with an upturned crescent.

As soon as the women enter, the camera zooms in on the playful legs and feet of the girls as they circulate. And cut to following those legs up the stairs as the girls ascend to the second floor, Thomas calling out if between the two they can make a cup of coffee. An “Irish coffee” they laugh.

In the kitchen, the camera settles on first dishes which remind of the primal point, of film grain, then other dishes that are striped. We also see in the background an egg holder with eggs in it (they appear to be marble eggs).

Camera settles on dishes that remind of the primal point.

Gesturing to the brunette, Thomas asks the blond, “Is she always like that?” Doesn’t she speak? He asks what’s her name? When she doesn’t answer, he says, forget it. What’s the use of a name? He asks her what she is called in bed and she says, as if injured and unsettled, that she only goes to bed to sleep. When he abruptly leaves the room (returning to the phone and finding Ron no longer on) the girls go look at a rack of the clothes the models had been wearing. The brunette pulls out the dress Verushka had modeled. The other girl pulls out a blue dress and removes her own so she may try it on.

Things turn odd and brutal when Thomas returns to find the blond half dressed. The brunette leaves to check on the coffee and he lays down the clothes rack, pursuing the blond who has hidden behind it. The idea is of playfulness, that they will have sex, but she is nervous or just playful? No, she screeches and bites him on the same hand that Jane had bit in the park when he refused to give her the photos.

Thomas’ right hand is bitten a second time.

That poor hand. It seems it would be showing signs of wear and tear by now.

Thomas yanks the blond’s head back by pulling her hair. They fight. She screams. He throws her down. The brunette enters and now the two women go at it, fighting, as if the blond struggling to involve the brunette, violent, eager to rip her clothes off her. It is a literal wrestling match. Impossible to tell what is laughter and what is anguish. But then, laughing, the girls run into the room where the purple backdrop is, the blond chasing the brunette.

I kept wondering about the colors of the clothing these women were wearing, and it occurred to me that here, with their tights and the backdrop, we have the colors of the dark room doors where Thomas develops his film and prints his images.

The colors of the tights and purple backdrop…

…restate the colors of the dark room doors.

The brunette running behind the backdrop, the blond tears it down in order to get at her. The women wrestle in the folds of the paper. Thomas strips off the hose of the blond leaving her nude. And then he and the blond strip the hose off the resisting, laughing brunette. Now, the women wrestle him to the ground…

As the girls dress Thomas, he awakens to the realization there is a corpse in the photo.

One will assume they have had sex. The sex he didn’t have with Jane. For in the next shot the two women are kneeling at his feet, almost reverently putting back on Thomas’ socks and shoes, the positioning of their bodies and legs forming a triangle with Thomas at the apex. We see the plastic behind the backdrop had been partly pulled down during the melee. Then Thomas starts up from his prone position, from lying down, and looks at the photos. Somehow, it has occurred to him there is a dead man in the photo. Why now when the women are dressing him? There is death in those photos. He sees finally death, that he hadn’t saved the man’s life after all. And he ushers the two women out telling them to return the next day and he’ll take their photos.

THOMAS RETURNS TO THE PARK

Thomas takes the photo of the dead man and makes a photograph of it, brightly illuminating it, and then blows it up large. Ostensibly, by Thomas taking this brightly lit photo of a photo he can draw more information out of it–but that is impossible. What we end up seeing is just a blob of white. The corpse of the dead man is evident from a further distance, but finally the blowing up of the image has gone past a point of clarifying, of revelation, and instead shows darkness and light that would be indecipherable if not for prior knowledge of the subject.

The dead man

It is night. Thomas next is roaring through the streets in his car to the park, passing a red wall that serves as a transition point back to the green grass, that red wall recalling the prior transition when he had driven down the street past the repeating Pride & Clarke red buildings.

The red wall

He climbs to the upper level of the park and as he walks through the bright lit green against the black night I am thinking it seems he is walking through the negative of the photographs.

Thomas passes the neon sign, now illuminated.

Uncertain, afraid, he proceeds to the tree where there is indeed a dead man for the audience to see, the audience fully complicit with Thomas in knowing the dead man, that he exists, he isn’t a figment of Thomas’ imagination. We view the ghastly gray figure of the “dead man” lying with wide open eyes. One knows he is dead because of his pallor and stillness. One assumes he is dead, though his eyes are wide open, staring unblinking into nothingness. And his face is not just white, it is fully lit, radiantly lit as Thomas approaches it. The face is so white it seems like light radiating from the face itself.

Reminding of the point of light Thomas had traced.

Thomas stands beside the dead man.

And I have always wondered where in the heck is the man’s left arm? Where is it? One may say the dead man is lying on it, but I swear it looks like his left arm is just gone below the elbow, broken away. For what effect? Observe how the shadow of Thomas’ leg connects with where the dead man’s arm seems to disappear. One could imagine, via this shadow, the dead man is hanging onto Thomas’ leg. If it’s imagined this is a fanciful bit of thinking, remember that Antonioni much earlier opened the door to it with Bill’s observation on his paintings that begin as messes, but then he finds something to hang onto, such as a leg, followed by Thomas’ curiosity in and offer to purchase the painting that could be seen as expressive of film grain and thus Thomas’ later dilemma of sorting out the truth in his blow-ups as he dug deeper into the grain.

Thomas rises from having knelt beside the man. Does he hear something? The crackle of a twig breaking under someone’s foot?

Is someone watching? If he is the shooter, would it be himself? Is it the click of his camera that he hears? No, the sound is distinctly different from the earlier snaps of Thomas’ shutter in the park, but there is still a connection to be made.

For the first time, curiously, Thomas is without his camera. Perhaps because he is now experiencing that which cannot be expressed to any other, that for which there are no words.

He has become a part of the picture, entered its world.

All one really needs to know is that the protagonist has been in great misery and confusion. He had seemed entirely confident and full of himself at film’s beginning. Then he came upon a mystery of death, finding in the quiet, still paradise of the park, a dead man.

If he does not act rationally, calling the police, it is because the film is not speaking to the purely rational, logical mind.

BREAD, THE STAFF OF LIFE

Thomas returns to his studio. On the first floor level where he’d earlier been photographing the “birds”, where the propeller was delivered, he stands for a moment in the quiet.

He steps forward and gently taps the propeller with an outstretched foot.

Tentatively tapping the propeller with his foot.

Then Thomas turns and we see his reflection in a large sheet of metal, perhaps aluminum, as he looks up toward the second foor.

Thomas exits and goes to the home of his abstract painter friend. But his friend and Patricia are on the floor, making love. Patricia beneath, she holds the painter in the same manner that Jane had been holding her lover when she saw supposedly the shooter in the bushes. And Patricia sees Thomas peering through the horizontal slats down at them, on the “primal” scene, if you will, looking bewildered.

Patricia reaches out her arm, motioning Thomas to be quiet or stay where he is, as if to keep him from making any sound that would disturb her lover. Her eyes on Thomas, she smiles gently, ecstatic, a certain peculiar sharing quality in this expression she extends Thomas, even of communion. Both reluctant and mesmerized, Thomas’ watching through the horizontal slatted blinds takes us back to the restaurant where Thomas had looked through the blinds and said he wished he was free, after which his lunch was interrupted by the realization he was being watched through the blinds by the “spy”.

Thomas, eyes questioning, turns, seeming stunned, looks at potatoes and a loaf of twisted bread on the counter.

On a little table, he sees cigarettes (No. 6 brand) and a triangular ashtray resting beside a radio.

The camera’s eye, and perhaps that of Thomas’ now pans over the red blanket over the feet of the couple, the foot of the bed, to the multi-colored splatters of paint on the floor which are first spread thickly then thin out. The floor recalls the painter’s canvas lying on the floor but that canvas had black splatters against white and here there is color, greens and yellows and reds.

Just as Bill seems to have finished his orgasm, Thomas now leaves and when he shuts the door the painter hears and raises his head, only conscious that Thomas was there once he’d left.

WERE YOU LOOKING FOR SOMETHING JUST NOW?

Thomas returns to his home and studio. In contrast with the earlier scene of the orderly first floor, on the second floor he finds the place a shambles, and all his photographs of the park scene gone.

He glimpses his face in the glass of the coffee table. One notes reflected also some metal hardware fixed to an above beam that seems to form an arrow pointing screen right.

Compare this “arrow” with the same metal hardware as it was glimpsed toward the beginning of the film, just before Thomas began his photo shoot with Verushka.

It was not yet an arrow there. Now it is one. So, if one has thought that my earlier focus on directional arrows and glances may have been a misapplied consideration of things not intended to have meaning, I think this example indicates otherwise.

Thomas goes screen left. Thinks a moment. Then Thomas rushes off screen right to his dark rooms and finds they are torn apart, all his photographic storage boxes opened and left lying on the floor.

He returns to the lounge.

Left hanging in the lounge areas are the photo of the point of light, the camels crossing the desert.

Then, for no apparent reason at all, Thomas, standing beneath the beams, looks down and discovers a photo that has slipped between a white box-like appliance (perhaps a refrigeration case for it looks like he may store film in it) and a black case or appliance. Here between black and white, negative and positive, one of the photos has slipped, hidden away. It is the extreme blow up of the corpse, so white that he is not discernible at all really to anyone but Thomas who went to the park and witnessed the dead man.

I say for no apparent reason Thomas finds the photo. But there is a sign. A signal. It is the lone pink ostrich feather remaining on the tip of an extending metal arm, as if pointing the way to the photo.

Augery. Signs. Through the course of the film, it seems he’s been trained to read them. To really pay attention. To submit to being led rather than forcing his way. Or to be in dialogue.

Compare the image of Thomas sensing where the photo lies with the one above in which he is reflected in the coffee table. With both there are the black and white fields side by side, and in both there is what may be described as a line functioning as an arrow which Thomas eventually follows, whereas at the film’s beginning Thomas was always going opposite the direction that arrows pointed.

This white appliance will figure again shortly.

Hearing a noise, Thomas hides.

“Were you looking for something just now?” Patricia says, entering. She is dressed all in red, red shoes, a red hand bag, and a dress of open red crochet lined in a flesh-colored fabric which gives the illusion of one being able to see through it to her nude body.

Oh indeed, Thomas was looking for the photos which had been stolen away. Thomas had of course also gone to the house of the painter, perhaps to tell him about the corpse, but Patricia and the painter were bound in a passionate embrace resembling the embrace in the park and she had motioned silence.

One remembers that Thomas had earlier said he would sneak down one night and steal away the black and white painting Bill was working on, which Bill had told Thomas not to even ask about yet. So, what happens that night while Thomas is down at Bill’s, but the photos are stolen from his apartment.

All but one. The most abstract.

There had also been the impression that Thomas’ expression of his desire for the painting, and carrying it off one night, might have been an expression of his desire for Patricia.

“Do you ever think of leaving him?” Thomas now asks, signaling perhaps it is Patricia he wants, and that he is aware her relationship with Bill is troubled.

Patricia says no.

Before continuing, I want to take a brief look at the choice of red here. Why that open red crochet dress? But, if one remembers, I mentioned that a bright red blanket had been covering Bill and Patricia as they made love. And though they were covered, they were also exposed, in a sense. Now, Patricia shows up all in bright red, the only person in the film to wear all red, and the red dress is an open red crochet with a nude lining.

I am reminded of how Thomas had said some people are politicians and some photographers. I think of the red capes that bull fighters swing in their dance with the sacrificial bull, the swinging of the cape seducing the bull into closer and closer passes, the red being to hide the color of blood.

Thomas tells Patricia he saw a man killed that day.

She asks, who was he?

Who indeed.

“Someone.”

Peculiarly, Patricia smiles. Maybe she smiles because Bill had said in the end it all “adds up”, and here the “who” equals “someone” or sum one.

Probably not but it’s fun to note.

She asks how it happened. But Thomas says he didn’t know, he didn’t see it.

First he had said he had seen it, now he says he hadn’t. Jane looks at him, wondering. You didn’t see it, she says in a voice that seems less a question than a statement.

She asks shouldn’t he call the police?

Thomas doesn’t answer. Instead he gestures to the photograph, saying, “That’s the body.”

Patricia examines the photo

Patricia picks the photo up and examines it, dubious. She perhaps doesn’t see in it what Thomas sees. But unless one had seen the physical body, then it would be difficult to accept this is the photo of a corpse.

She replies that it looks like one of Bill’s paintings.

After a moment, she says to Thomas, “Will you help me?”

Thomas at first shakes his head as if he’s in no position just now to help anyone. Then reexamines and says to her, “What is it?”

Instead of answering, Patricia wanders several steps away. After a moment she says, “I wonder why they shot him?” Then, with smiling hesitation, she leaves.

Where the photo was found between the black and white appliances.

We have a shot looking back up at Thomas from the stairway by which Patricia had exited.

Thomas lunges for the phone and calls Ron but he’s not at home. Telling the individual at the other end (perhaps Ron’s wife) that he wants to take Ron somewhere, he’s told where Ron is and says he will go and get him.

TRANSFORMATION

The camera comes up from behind Thomas in his car now, driving, and stops in front of it. He has seen, before a store named PERMUTIT, Jane window shopping. Others approach and Jane disappears, as if melting into one of the passing woman, legs merging. Event merging with another event, her person merging with another. One wonders if PERMUTIT has something to do with permutation, meaning a complete change; a transformation.

...
Jane disappears

Thomas gets out of the car to pursue the woman.

Nope, not there…

To screen left of PERMUTIT is the shop Leisure. Thomas first looks behind a wall here, thinking perhaps Jane had slipped there. But she’s not to be found.

Note, however, the appliance that Jane was looking at in the PERMUTIT window. It is nearly identical to the appliance as was back at Thomas’ studio, standing beside the black appliance, between which two Thomas had unearthed the photo of the dead man.

The man in similar clothing but a red shirt passes

A man in an outfit very similar to Thomas’ passes. The same white pants. Black belt. Blue jacket. Instead of Thomas’ light blue and white checked shirt, however, he wears a red shirt. The man walks from screen right to screen left. And now Thomas goes to screen left to look down the alley to screen left of Leisure. Toward the end of the alley we see a street lamp brightly shining and two red telephone booths.

For some reason Thomas backtracks, he goes now instead to the alley at screen right of PERMUTIT. From the position of the camera, the alley can scarcely be seen. As Thomas enters the alley, over which a green sign hangs, it almost seems as if he slips into a narrow, nearly imperceptible crack in the facade of the street.

I have already attempted to establish that Thomas’ studio becomes also the park. Here, with the appearance of a very similar white appliance (beside which is seated a stuffed adult panda holding a baby panda) we are returned to his studio, to the white appliance resting beside the black appliance there, between which he’d found the photo of the dead man.

Note that also seen in the shop windows of PERMUTIT appear to be several coffee dispensers? I recall that Thomas had earlier asked the two girls, wannabe models, if “between them” they could make a cup of coffee.

Thomas, going down the alley, is now slipping himself into that space. At the alley’ rear, hearing music, he races up stairs and in through a door past a sign reading “Keep Clear”, entering the nightclub The Ricky Tick, which is painted all black and white, just as his studio is predominately painted black and white. He passes through another inner door on which there is a sign that reads “Here lies Bob Dylan, RIP.” The date on the sign is 17 May 1966. Here is also a sign “I love Harold” which probably refers to the British politician, Harold Wilson.

If Thomas has slipped between the cracks where the photo of the dead man was found in his studio (“That’s the body,” he had said to Patricia), the image of the “Rest in Peace” tombstone is a salient one.

R.I.P.

Inside is a band called the Yardbirds. And it would be nice if Antonioni had chosen them specifically because he liked the music but their name says something too doesn’t it. (I read however Antonioni did consider two other bands before this one, including the Velvet Underground.) They are on stage singing and the audience all watches them stark still, expressionless as mannequins.

Oddly, the lead singer with his blond hair reminds of Thomas. And his perspiration. Reminds of Thomas’ exertions with the models, attempting to drag smiles out of them, seeking response.

Only two people dance. A tall woman and a black man. Their movements, especially those of the woman, seem unrelated to the music, out of time with it.

And just to the side of them, beside a white door, stands an isolated man in white pants like Thomas’, a black belt like Thomas’, black shoes, blond hair cut like Thomas’, but wearing a black or dark blue shirt. As Thomas passes him, as if on cue, the man raises a cigarette to his mouth and takes a drag, Thomas progressing on past the dancing couple.

.

It is a replay of the scene at Thomas’ studio in which he was instructing her on listening to the music, on how to smoke, telling her to go against the beat when she was nodding her head out of sync with the music, telling her to go slow.

Things such as this couldn’t possibly be happenstance. They are planned.

Thomas passes a woman with a bonnet on her head, sucking her finger, the theme of the adult infant (signified sometimes by a bonnet or a finger to the mouth) is now found here at the nightclub where the finger to the mouth is finally understood as the child, the woman being obviously infantile in appearance.

Woman wearing a bonnet with her finger to her mouth

Singer (Keith Relf)

The Yardbirds now contend with static in an amplifier/speaker. The guitarist (Jeff Beck) makes a rather passionless but purposeful display of blowing up as he bangs the amp then smashes his guitar and breaks the neck off of it. The crowd goes Dionysian wild as the Yardbird throws this piece of the guitar into the audience, fighting for the neck. Thomas grabs the neck and goes running off with it, nearly colliding with a couple as he flees down the black and white hall out the front entrance of the club.

In a sense, he has entered here the black and white world of the blown-up photos.

Thomas flees with the guitar neck

Just as Jane had slipped between the cracks, disappearing, just as Thomas had also slipped between the cracks, entering the alley to the nightclub as a man had passed, partly obscuring him, so does Thomas emerge from the black and white world of the club in the same manner, a passing couple obscuring his exit. And who is strolling past but a woman in a blue suit with white piping, white shoes and a red umbrella, who had also numbered among the individuals standing around Jane when she had disappeared before Permutit. She now also wears a checkered hat and carries a white coat. Point is made of her, the camera on her not only as she is walking past as Thomas slips from between the cracks onto the sidewalk, but returns to focus on her as she markedly glances at Thomas.

...
Thomas’ exit of the club obscured

Once outside the club, having emerged on another street, Thomas looks at the broken guitar neck as if it is useless and tosses it on the ground. Some people passing by pick it up and quickly discard as useless, meaningless trash that guitar neck which had incited such a furor in the club.

The allusion to the sacred, sacrificial and phallic nature of the instrument is pretty obvious, the audience suddenly animated by a sort of blood lust, but exterior specific context the article of adoration becomes ordinary and everyday, a simple broken guitar neck. And so it is too with Thomas’ transformative experience which, at least physically, has only left him with a token that no one else can decipher, in which no one will see the same material as he does, its meaning lost upon others.

Another thing to note. While the “Ricky Tick” was a real club, the interior was filmed on a stage duplicate of the club while the exteriors had nothing to do with the club’s actual location. David Hemmings seems to enter at about 156 Regent St., located by a Burlington News sign at the Heddon House. I read the Ricky Tick club exterior, where he exits, is at a place now called the “100 club” which is at 100 Oxford St. In the movie he exits next a shop full of mannequins in the windows, furs advertised, and the address for the shop is viewed in one of the windows as 309.

One will recollect that Thomas’ house number is 39. When he has slipped between the cracks into the Ricky Tick club, he has entered, as it were, “0″, a place located in his own home, 39. The filming of his home was actually at about 77 Pottery Lane W11 in London, not 39. So, the 39 and the 309 are quite meaningful.

A Googlemap to the Heddon House where Thomas entered an alley that led to the “Ricky Tick”.

View Larger Map

A Googlemap link to 77 Pottery Lane.

View Larger Map

I AM IN PARIS

Thomas goes through a gate to a mansion. He passes from the more subdued ordinary front rooms where people mill who are drinking wine and alcohol, to the back rooms where individuals lounge about smoking pot on a bed. Time is slowed here, reminding of the scene in which he gave Jane the cigarette to smoke, which made her laugh as if she was smoking a joint, and instructed on moving slowly and against the beat. The camera lingers long on a brunette dressed all in white–a white jacket and long white skirt.

Smoking “grass” on the bed

A man in a black and white herringbone checked coat stands, and Thomas, turning with him away from the bed, now locates a stoned Ron who he takes into the library. There, he tells him that someone has been killed, in the park.

“OK,” Ron blandly replies.

Exasperated, Thomas puzzles over how to get Ron to understand. “Listen,” he says. “Those pictures in the park…”

Ron now motions Verushka to enter and hand him a joint.

Thomas questions her, he had thought she was in Paris.

Verushka, dressed in a skin tight jump suit, the fabric of which has a pattern resembling snakeskin, replies, “I am in Paris.”

“I am in Paris”

Ron asks Thomas if he wants a drag but Thomas passes, handing the joint back to Verushka, who leaves the pair.

Thomas tells Ron he wants him to see the corpse.

“I’m not a photographer,” Ron replies.

After a moment’s reflection, as if trying to orient himself as he is now with the self he was that morning, measuring the distance between then and now, Thomas says, “I am.” and stands, stepping away from Ron.

Ron sits wondering, absolutely out of sync with Thomas. “What’s the matter with him?” he says less to himself than as if an unseen person, standing. Then asks of Thomas, “What did you see in the park?”

“Nothing,” Thomas replies, dispirited, giving up his attempt to communicate his experience.

We have moved from the “someone” Thomas told Patricia he’d seen killed that day, to his having observed nothing, recalling the “0″ which we found inserted in the number 39 after the scene at the Ricky Tick.

The girl in the long white skirt and white jacket, smoking a joint, bumps past Thomas and Ron as Ron takes Thomas back to the bedroom in which had been the individuals smoking pot.

THOMAS’ EARS ARE OPENED, AND HE DISAPPEARS

In the AM Thomas wakes up on the bed where the group had been smoking pot, still fully clothed, the house apparently empty, the rooms littered with the debris of a very successful party.

The bed with the green dot behind it

He looks up from the bed at the windows through which one can see trees and portions of a building beyond.

Recall that at the film’s beginning, when the mimes had accosted Thomas wanting money, he had riffled through the newspapers in the back seat, one of which read, “Sniper in tower…”. Now, finally, we see a tower out the left window.

The Tower

It was on this bed, the night before, that some of the celebrants had been rolling joints, smoking grass. That Thomas wakes up on this bed thus has him as the man waking on the grassy area and looking up to see the giant sign (the sniper’s tower).

Exiting that bedroom, Thomas enters another plush room decorated with old furniture, where there is a painting of cherubs and briefly glances out the window at a bay, then exits.

Thomas goes to the park. The camera follows him as he approaches the tree, this time carrying his camera, expecting to take the shot that will be his proof of the corpse. But the dead man is gone. He stoops and examines the grass, which appears to be flattened where the body had been. But there is no dead man. He looks up…

Cut to a shot of the leaves of the tree as black grains against the white sky. The night before Thomas had heard a cracking sound, as if a twig breaking on the ground under someone’s foot. Now we hear a soft click of twigs brushing, not the same as the twig, but there is a correlation to be drawn between the sounds, just as there is a correlation to be drawn with the sound Thomas’ camera shutter had made in the park.

We see behind Thomas the giant sign.

The sign on.

The sign blinks off. Now, neon light would usually make a sign more obvious. But not in this morning light. It is when the light of the neon sign goes off that the sign becomes obvious.

Thomas notices the turning off of the neon sign.

The camera’s focus has been on Thomas. Now the camera’s focus makes a quick shift so it includes the sign, as Thomas turns to look at it.

The word doesn’t make sense. Antonioni said he only put up the sign to provide light for the park’s night scene and that he didn’t want it to make sense to the audience. But I’m just not buying the construction of that huge neon sign only for purposes of providing light.

One may, however, see in the sign a gun. If the letters are FOA, then the F is as a gun, the O as a finger on the trigger, and the A as its target.

This towering sign is the tower that the headline said the sniper was in.

Immediately cut to the mime’s arriving at the park, roaring up in the jeep. As Thomas descends the stairs, they twice (I think) circle the lower green on which the tennis court is situated, then all pile out and rush up to the court. A man enters the court with the woman in red and black who had, the day prior, looked screen right, after which there was a cut to Thomas and the other men being released from the poor house. The rest of the mimes standing outside the court, these two individuals begin to play a game of imaginary tennis.

Is it an expression of mutual consensus reality? Are they returning Thomas to the mutual reality of the rest of the world, after his “blow-up” experience, his brush with death? Or is this replaying, in a sense, the entire movie, they having found a player in Thomas, having surrounded him in his open Rolls and he fishing among the newspaper (and its photos) for a quick camera glimpse of a bill he had handed them, whereas others had kept their car windows rolled up. For they involve him now, even train him. He watches as the ball goes back and forth, following the gazes of the others. He watches as the ball several times goes out of bounds and is returned to play. He watches as the woman in red and black pursues an out of bounds ball and shrugs at him…and he responds, shrugging in return.

Thomas watches and as he watches the pair play on the gray court, we notice that on one side of the court is a small white shed.

The white shed.

Only briefly does Antonioni allow us to see that on the other side of the court is a small black shed.

The black shed.

The court is as that area between the white appliance and the black appliance at Thomas’ studio where the image of the corpse had fallen.

All is silent. The mimes make no noise. Finally, the mimes and camera watch as the ball soars far out of the tennis court to land on the grassy green past Thomas. The mimes look at him, expectant. The woman in red and black points in the direction of the ball.

The silent mimes act as the signs that Thomas has learned throughout the movie to read and follow.

To what end?

Thomas turns. He goes to where the imaginary ball has fallen, which is in the same location as where the bird had taken flight the day prior, passing over the heads of the mysterious couple. Placing down his camera, he picks up the ball and tosses it back into the game.

Thomas retrieves the invisible ball

As the camera stays on Thomas’ face, not returning to the tennis court, we now hear the sound of the tennis ball in play.

To what end? Thomas may not be able to express what he has seen, he may have no proof to give of his experience, but he now sees something more than he originally did.

And he hears. His ears opened finally.

The camera pulls back and the film ends with the famous disappearing of Thomas on the field of green, his fading away.

Amusingly, in the long shot we see he was surrounded by tennis balls.

Thomas disappears

Now the thing with this story is it’s dangerous to go around making too many associations, because one becomes like Thomas who eventually saw in the photo the form of the dead man and then went to the park green and saw him lying there–but he was left with no proof and no way to express himself, to dialogue with any about his experience other than the lively world of signs that have guided him, that he has learned to see, which open his ears and initiate him to another level of comprehension. It can be hard to tell, when looking at stories from the point of death/resurrection mysteries, what is intentionally placed by the director or writer and what is not, because that’s the thing about these mysteries, most everything can be fit into their lexicon if one decides, “This is an initiation mystery to do with death and resurrection”, as there is nothing which can’t be infused with their symbolism, the Osirian body disjointed but hidden in all that is and containing all that is. but what was intentional and what is natural? I do think Antonioni has left enough clues lying about that we can make that assumption here. It’s not just a story about sex, drugs and rock and roll in merry old London.

The film shows how just as everything may suddenly transform and play out the death/resurrection myth, so do those elements then disappear. One’s life is transformed, there is a before and after, but the events that inspired and informed the transformation evaporate.

The magic door to the other world vanishes, just as in fairy tale it is only available on a certain day under precise conditions and never again.