The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Michelangelo Antonioni · a film · 1966 · about 111 minutes · written with Tonino Guerra · in English
Mode
A thriller of discovered evidence, built and then refused; portrait of a city and a profession, and an essay on looking, in one film
Mythos
The man who sees what he should not, in a grove; the detective whose inquiry dissolves into what it uncovers; a masked troupe that frames the hero and at last takes him in
Phase
A little over one day, from one dawn to the next, with a park visited three times: by day, by night and at the next dawn
Presentation
Feature film in colour, in English, about 111 minutes; Carlo Di Palma’s photography, Frank Clarke’s cutting, Assheton Gorton’s design, Herbie Hancock’s music and one song by the Yardbirds
Register
From a studio of purple paper and pop to a park with nothing in it but wind; long silent passages of looking at stills
Scale
One man, one day, one city, and a print enlarged until it shows nothing
Governing Proposition
A fashionable London photographer takes pictures of a couple in an empty park, enlarges them and finds in the grain what may be a gun and a body, and by the next morning has lost the prints, the corpse and his interest. The wager of the film is that an image pressed far enough yields grain and not truth, that a man who only takes from the world can find a death and do nothing with it, and that reality is partly a matter of consent, which he gives at the end to a ball that is not there.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins at dawn with a jeep of students in whiteface, and only then finds its hero. A photographer, played by David Hemmings, leaves a doss house where he has spent the night among the poor, photographing them for a book, and goes back to his work in a Rolls-Royce with a telephone in it. The script calls him Thomas; the film hardly needs a name. The first thing it shows of him is a man who goes among others to take something away, and what he takes from the poor is a portfolio, the work of a night.
Michelangelo Antonioni wrote it with Tonino Guerra, from a short story by Julio Cortázar, “Las babas del diablo” (1959), with English dialogue by Edward Bond. Carlo Ponti produced it for MGM. Carlo Di Palma photographed it in colour, Frank Clarke cut it, Assheton Gorton designed it, and Herbie Hancock wrote the music. With Hemmings are Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, John Castle, Peter Bowles, Jane Birkin, Gillian Hills and the model Veruschka as herself. It was Antonioni’s first film in English, shot in London, and runs about 111 minutes in the one version released.
It spans a little over one day, from one dawn to the next, and it visits one park three times: by day, by night and at the next dawn. The masked students open it and close it. Between them the photographer works, buys, bargains and drives across the city, from Chelsea to Charlton. The music is sparse, Hancock’s cues in the studio and the car, and one rock performance; in the park the only sound is the wind in the trees. In the middle of that day, without meaning to, he takes a picture of something he did not see.
Movement II
In the studio he photographs Veruschka, and then a group of models, and the sessions are work and business at once: whites, purples and blacks in the frame, a man giving orders to women who are paid to be looked at. The film watches the studio with the same cool as the man who runs it, and does not say whether it shares his eye or judges it. Afterwards he goes into an antique shop and buys a propeller, which he wants at once and will not think of again.
Maryon Park, in Charlton, is a wide green held under a wind that never stops. He wanders in with his camera and moves in on a couple at the far edge of the grass, a woman and a man, and photographs them. The leaves are loud on the soundtrack, and nothing else is. The woman, played by Vanessa Redgrave and called Jane, sees him and pursues him to have the film. He refuses. It is the plainest exchange in the film: she wants the picture back, and he will not give up what he has taken.
He lunches with Ron, played by Peter Bowles, and talks of the book the park pictures might close. Jane finds her way to the studio and bargains for the roll, and he gives her a false one and keeps the true. When she has gone he develops what he took. So far the film has shown a pursuit and a bargain, and nobody has said what either was about. The rest of its day is spent finding out, and then losing what was found.
Movement III
He prints the park pictures, enlarges them and pins them along the wall, and the film goes quiet. For a long stretch there is no speech. His eye moves from print to print, and the cut follows it: from Jane’s glance, to the fence, to the bushes, to what may be a hand in the hedge holding a gun. Each enlargement asks for the next, and each is a corner of the last made larger. The suspense, the most sustained in the film, is made of nothing but still photographs and a man looking at them, and the viewer searches the wall with him.
Two girls, played by Jane Birkin and Gillian Hills, arrive hoping to be photographed, and the afternoon turns to a romp on purple backdrop paper. It is long, longer than its work in the film requires, and the film lets it run. Then he goes back to the prints. A second pass finds, near the hedge, a shape on the ground that may be a body. What the camera recorded and the photographer did not see is now, enlarged, the only witness.
At night he goes back to the park. Under a lit sign the body lies white in the grass. He has found what the prints suggested, and finding it does not tell him what to do. He cannot get anyone to see it, and he does not stay. What the prints could not settle the night has settled, and the settling changes nothing: the photographer who takes and drops has taken a death, and has nowhere to take it.
Movement IV
His studio is emptied of everything but one print, the grainiest, enlarged so far that it shows only blotches, and it looks, someone says, like one of the abstract paintings of Bill, his neighbour. Bill, the painter, is played by John Castle, and Patricia by Sarah Miles; the visit to them is looser than the darkroom, more mood than law, and Patricia’s thread is left at an angle the film does not resolve. The rhyme is the point: a photograph pressed far enough becomes a painting, which may mean anything.
In a club the Yardbirds are playing “Stroll On”, with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page on guitars. In the crowd the photographer fights for the neck of a guitar, gets it and carries it out into the street, where he drops it on the pavement; a passer-by picks it up and drops it too. In a few seconds the film tells the photograph’s fate again: a thing fought for, carried off, and then nothing to anyone.
Then a party, which restates the club, idler and longer. Nobody he knows will come and look at what he found. The day has used it up, and the night runs on into morning. The film is loose here, and knows it: the girls’ romp and the party are its slackest passages, the places where its law of taking and dropping becomes mood. But even the slack obeys the drift of the man at its centre, whose attention lasts as long as the taking and no longer.
Movement V
At dawn he goes back to Maryon Park for the third time. The body is gone. The grass where it lay is empty, and the wind is in the trees again. The film does not say whether there was a murder, who held the gun or what Jane knew, and it never will. The evidence that a picture seemed to give has dissolved into grain and an empty lawn, and the man who took the picture stands on the grass with nothing to point his camera at.
The students in whiteface come to the park’s tennis court, and two of them play a match without a ball. The camera follows the ball that is not there. When it goes out of the court the photographer returns it, entering their world of agreed appearances, and then the sound of a ball on a racquet enters the track. He has agreed to hear what is not there. Then he vanishes from his own frame, and the grass remains. The film that began by showing a man who takes ends by taking the man.
The film had the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1967, after MGM had released it in the United States without a Production Code seal, through a subsidiary, and made a success of it; it is one of the events in the end of the Code, before the ratings system of 1968. Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) and De Palma’s Blow Out (1981) were built on its premise, the enlarged image passed into the grammar of the thriller, and its picture of Swinging London has stood for that city and decade ever since. The ball is never seen.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test bites at the centre and slackens at the edges. The middle third is compelled: each enlargement requires the last, the eye moving from a woman’s glance to a fence to a hand and a gun, and the night visit to the park is required by what the prints could not settle. The frame is required too: the whiteface troupe opens and closes the film, and the tennis it mimes answers the question the prints raised. The guitar neck, fought for and dropped, tells the photograph’s fate again. What gives: the romp with the two girls outlasts its function, the party restates the club, and the Veruschka shoot and the models make one point twice. A tighter film of ninety minutes can be imagined.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: an image enlarged past a certain point yields grain, not truth, and a man whose whole relation to the world is taking pictures of it can find a death and be unable to do anything with it, or to care for long. A second truth is given in image and is the film’s own: reality is partly a matter of consent, and at the end the photographer agrees to hear a ball that is not there. Beneath both lies a culture that turns everything, the poor, a propeller, a guitar, a corpse, into a thing to be acquired and dropped. Held below the bar because away from the darkroom and the park the condition is carried as a mood of London as much as a meaning.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The elevation is cold and uncanny, and it recurs. The park by day: a wide green under a wind that never stops, the leaves loud on the track, a couple at the far edge. The enlargements: silence, the prints pinned along the wall, the cut from one to the next as the eye finds the hand in the hedge, the most sustained suspense in the film made of nothing but stills. The body at night, white in the grass under a lit sign. The last sequence, the camera following a ball that is not there until its sound enters the track. Held at the figure by frequency: the studio, the girls and the party are level, and a surface cool by design keeps much of the film from rising.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The patterns are there, and partly built. The man who sees what he should not, in a grove, is the oldest of the voyeur figures; the detective whose inquiry dissolves into the emptiness it uncovers is that myth turned inside out; the whiteface troupe, at dawn and at dawn again, is a chorus or a commedia that frames the hero and at last absorbs him. The ending builds rather than evokes: the man who has lost his evidence enters the troupe’s world by returning its ball, and vanishes from the grass. But the photographer stays a type more than a figure that deepens, and for most of the film the myth lives in the frame and the coda, not load-bearing as the Oedipal frame is in Chinatown (8.7).
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance is the thriller of discovered evidence, and Antonioni’s own art cinema: L’Avventura (1960) had already let a mystery go unsolved and turned to the people who forget it. The turns are real. The thriller’s machine, a photograph, a body, a woman who wants the film back, is built and then refused: no solution, no culprit, no police. An Italian modernist made a commercial English-language picture in the most fashionable city of its day and used its surface, colour, pop music and sex as the matter of a philosophical film. The stake was high, an MGM release without a Production Code seal that could have failed and did not. Held below the bar because the swerve is in large part a proven method carried to a new city and a new genre frame.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Its knowledge is that looking does not secure the thing seen, and the form puts the viewer through it: we search the prints with the photographer, see the hand, the gun and the body when he does, and are left with him when the evidence is gone, holding one grainy print that, someone says, looks like one of Bill’s abstract paintings. The film is a sequence of surfaces, and its last shot completes it by erasing the man from his own frame and leaving the grass. A novel or a radio play would lose exactly this. Held below the top because outside the darkroom, the park and the coda the form is a day-in-the-life drift that a different film could have used.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Sixty years of return are evidence. The questions stay open: whether there was a murder at all, and who held the gun; what Jane wanted and what she knew; whether the ending is surrender, conversion or a new kind of sight; how far the film judges its hero and his city and how far it shares his eye, and whether its women are props or its indictment. It has sustained work in film theory on photography and the index, on the image as evidence, and on what the film made of Cortázar’s story. Formally it rewards return: propeller and guitar neck, painting and enlargement, the doss house and the mimes, three visits to one park. Held at the figure because part of the yield is a puzzle’s, and thin characters give some returns less than they promise.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Released in 1966, so force and reach are scored together. The field is the cinema of the 1960s, crowded with Godard, Bergman, Fellini and Antonioni’s own trilogy. The force: a thriller made about the medium’s own means, the photograph, its enlargement and the act of looking, and art cinema’s open ending carried into a popular release. It transposed and perfected more than it invented, since L’Avventura had already let a film refuse its plot. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Grand Prix at Cannes and a box-office success; a release without the Code seal, one of the events of the Code’s collapse before the ratings of 1968; a direct line to The Conversation (1974) and Blow Out (1981); and an image of Swinging London that has stood for the decade since. Together they reach the bar, narrowly.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across sixty years. The form survives whole as released, in one version, and restoration has been repair. Presence is continuous and wide: repertory, television, every home format and teaching, wider than most art films of its decade, its look known to people who have not seen it. The charge falls on the surface, and the surface is its moment: the clothes, the studio, the models, the club and the party are London in 1966 and read now as period dress. The film is in part about that surface and holds it at a distance, so it does not date as fashion alone; but the charge is real, and it holds the figure a step below what such presence over sixty years would otherwise earn.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Carlo Di Palma’s colour is designed throughout: whites, purples and blacks in the studio, the greens of the park, the single sign at night. The enlargement sequence is a masterpiece of editing and sound, stills, a moving eye and silence, and a story found in them. The park’s sound, wind and leaves, does more than any score. David Hemmings carries the film’s cold restlessness from first scene to last. The costs fall on real shares of it: the English dialogue is often flat and the supporting performances mannered, Vanessa Redgrave’s Jane above all; the party and the girls’ romp are loosely made; the Yardbirds scene pays its thematic debt but is stiffly staged. Load-bearing at the centre, serviceable at the edges, and below Chinatown and The Third Man (9.0).
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the doss house at dawn, photographed as documentary, and the romp on purple backdrop paper with two girls. One law governs both: the photographer takes, and drops, and nothing he takes holds his attention past the taking. The same law covers the propeller he buys and forgets, the guitar neck he fights for and leaves on the pavement, the corpse he finds and cannot make anyone see, and Jane’s roll of film. The mimes obey it from outside: a world of agreed appearances, which he finally joins. The range is wide, from documentary to sex comedy to thriller to allegory, and the law holds across it. The strain: the party and the visit to Bill and Patricia are mood more than law, and Patricia’s thread is left at an angle.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 111 minutes holds. Consciousness, the photographer’s, seen from outside by design; art, in photography, painting, fashion and pop music set against each other; labour and class, in the doss house, the models’ work and the Rolls; commerce, in the book, the antique shop and the studio as a business; the city, London across classes from Charlton to Chelsea; politics, glimpsed in a march with placards; sexuality, at length; death, in the body in the park. All are held through one man and one day, and that holds the axis lowest: the family is absent, the state and history stay at the margin, the sacred appears only as the park’s stillness, and the poor of the doss house serve as a portfolio, the film’s point and its limit.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.7, then The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.6. A making whose colour, editing and sound carry the film at its centre; a form that puts the viewer through the search and the loss, and ends by erasing its hero from his own frame; and one law of taking and dropping that governs doss house, studio, park and club alike.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.4: consciousness, art, class, commerce, the city, sexuality and death are held through one man and one day, but the family is absent, the state and history stay at the margin, and the poor of the doss house serve as a portfolio. Below the rest, The Archetypal Deep at 8.0: the voyeur, the dissolving inquiry and the masked troupe are built in the frame and the coda, and for most of the film the hero is a type and the myth is not load-bearing.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5 and Pressure on Tradition meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4, The Swerve at 8.3 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.0 fall short of it: the disclosure is carried partly as a mood, the swerve carries a proven method to a new city, and the myth is built in the frame rather than throughout. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.4. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, which stands at 8.3, below the 9.0 the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Blow-Up as released in 1966, the MGM English-language version of about 111 minutes, in colour, from the students in whiteface at dawn to the tennis court at the next dawn: directed by Michelangelo Antonioni from a screenplay by Antonioni and Tonino Guerra, with English dialogue by Edward Bond, after Julio Cortázar’s story “Las babas del diablo”; produced by Carlo Ponti for MGM; photographed by Carlo Di Palma, edited by Frank Clarke, designed by Assheton Gorton, with music by Herbie Hancock and “Stroll On” performed by the Yardbirds; with David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, John Castle, Peter Bowles, Jane Birkin, Gillian Hills and Veruschka. One version is known, and the film is scored as released; restoration bears on The Imperishable only. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. No line of dialogue is held to the word with certainty, so none is quoted. The order of some middle scenes is given in outline only. Figures that could not be verified, among them the length of the enlargement sequence, the scene and shot counts and the share of the score, are not given.