There are maps in the film, on none of which is Pimlico featured.
A recurrent object is that terrible rival of the map, the scale model, representing a particular and significant (if not yet built) part of Pimlico: Though it belongs in the cosmopolitan class of 'Swinging London' films, Otley is also local cinema, centred on the protagonist's home near Portobello Market, with a key scene at Notting Hill Gate tube station and a car chase all over the general area.
When he finds himself alone in the Superintendent's office at the local police station, Otley studies a map of the vicinity (the open space in the centre is Holland Park). He displaces one of the arrows pinned to the map, at which point the Superintendent arrives: - I see you’ve been diverting all Westbound traffic down Lexham Mews. - Yes, I knew a girl there once who used to … As part of the credit sequence of Col cuore in gola, Jean-Louis Trintignant is shown reading the map of the London tube system, scanning from West to East towards Holborn Station, into which he and Ewa Aulin will later be chased by gangsters. This linear tracking contrasts with the film's general topographic disorder, assembling fragments of London as a collage rather than as a journey through the city. Brass's film is mapped onto Blowup, but Antonioni's film offers no embedded map that might orient us, only this briefly seen and unreadable planisphere: Brass's next London film, Nerosubianco (1968), returns to Holborn station, showing again a graphically linear trajectory that contrasts with the film's graphic and topographic disorder:
‘Memory, too, is a topos in its own right: it is a place we revisit, or to which we are transported; it is the road we travel along and also the destination of our memory-journey. To this extent, memory not only has a topography, it is a topography; and the site of production of place-memories is the lived body, the body which traces out the scenes of memory. Memory, in this view, is at once emplaced and embodied.’
Annette Kuhn, ‘The Scenes of Cinema Memory’, in An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002), pp.16-17. |
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