I watched this again recently, having not seen it for quite some time.
The simple reason why I believe he did not imagine the corpse is because there is a shot of him standing over it. If it was meant to be ambiguous, we would have seen the corpse from Thomas's subjective point-of-view.
Instead, there is an objective shot with him and the corpse. Meaning it is really there.
Did anyone else pick up on this?
Yeah, that's the usual cinematic code isn't it. See it from the protagonist's eye-view and it's probably subjective - but seen in medium shot with Thomas AND the corpse, it's objective.
But I think Antonioni counters this with Thomas returning the next morning WITH his camera to find the corpse missing. Thomas sees things with his camera and is unreliable without it. Or, his reality is different with and without it.
Not a total explanation I know - but it sounded like that scene had become your sticking point.
I see what you're saying, and neither of our explanations are air tight. There is still that touch of nagging doubt, which I suspect was Antonioni's intentions.
It was only that one objective shot where we see the back of Thomas's legs (if I specifically recall) with the corpse a few feet before him, that made it look real. Only what happened to it when he later returns? The killers quickly disposed of it to make Thomas seems nuts? Throughout, he did or could be considered 'unstable' and overly imaginative.
Someone I knew once thought that it was all a trick from the 'merry pranksters' we see at the film's beginning and end.
They put a very life-like corpse in the bushes with convincing stage blood, then quickly swiped it away after Thomas leaves. I know that sounds iffy, but I come to now believe that the director was really playing with the audience (like the pranksters), so we are left pondering all possibilities, never really reaching a final explanation.
Roger Ebert poins out in his review that maybe he just had a heart attack and the body was discovered and then taken away after the authorities were called.
shareoh, that IS an interesting point - about him seeing THROUGH his camera.
shareJust watched the DVD again tonight. Freeze frame the shot when Vanessa runs away from Thomas after their first meeting in the park.
When Vanessa passes the clump of bushes in the center, you can clearly see the gray outline of the corpse to the left of the bushes. You have to be looking for it closely, but it's there.
No imagination here: the guy was murdered. The rest of the movie is brilliantly ambiguous.
Thank you for pointing this out.
shareI just saw the whole thing today for the first time on the big screen. Yes, he's down on the ground as she runs away. I caught it without any freeze-frame.
I don't think Thomas imagined anything, it literally all happened. That's why I'm frustrated with the ambiguous ending.
The problem for Thomas, as concerns the corpse, is not whether he sees it. Of course he sees it. The problem is the existential concern with the assignment of meaning, how perception works and is involved in our search for meaning. What I am specifically driving at is how did the man come to lie dead on the ground? Was he murdered? What was the connection between his death and Vanessa Redgrave's character?
Thomas thought he might have an answer from blowing up his photos, specifically not only the image that seems to be a gun pointing at the man, but also those that tend to implicate Redgrave's character. The body is later removed, to who knows where, and when Thomas returns to his studio, the pictures and prints are gone, except for one. One is enough to "prove" he in fact had gone through the whole process, but not to show to anyone else what had happened.
On a practical level this leaves Thomas with nothing going forward. Calling the police (something he might have done earlier) would be a complete waste, and in fact they would probably think his story worse than fanciful. He has already seen Redgrave's character again, only to have her seem to disappear as well. His great faith and involvement in his craft had formerly seemed to open up his understanding of the "truth" of what happened in the park, but in the end nothing was left to use. His trip back to the park when he first sees the body was in fact done because he felt the prints blown up from the film did not establish to his own satisfaction that he completely understood, really understood enough, of what happened. So he still doesn't know if in fact the man was killed by the man holding the gun on the other side of the white fence.
Thomas in short has experienced the limits of his own perception in establishing truth. It is true, as he knows, that he saw a dead body on the ground that was later removed. It is true that his pictures showed him something from which one could deduce what the truth might have been. But the meaning of it all was never established, and his means of pursuing that meaning has now been taken away.
That is what is missing, not whether Thomas knew or didn't know that he had seen the corpse.
Now, that would be a bit too easy perhaps. Assuming Antonioni only shows us what must pass for "reality" in the fiction named film irrespective of the pov... The seeing/not seeing through a camera bit´s interesting though.
"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan
It's not important if the corpse is there or not. What is important is that this decadent and superficial guy starts seeing beyond appearances - beyond the facade of the picture and into the depth of things, into all the things that are hidden - he sees the figure in the carpet to quote Henry James.
"You couldn't be much further from the truth" - several
Of course he saw the corpse. There was never a mystery about whether there was a corpse or not. The whole point of the film is that because he never finds anyone or anything to validate his experience of having seen the corpse, he starts doubting whether it ever existed.
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Emojis=💩 Emoticons=
yes, good points. we know he is questioning himself, but is he questioning his own perception/reality (did i see it or not) or his own superficiality, i.e. living life on the surface only (suggested by gorgsharpy), which is a consequence of his shallow lifestyle. maybe it's both. we want to think he is going to change at the end, but he returns the imaginary tennis ball which may suggest symbolically that he's not. the viewer's left to decide, which is a credit to the film maker.
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