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Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” was released in America two months before I started my journey as a film critic, and for the first years that I worked, it influenced me profoundly. This was the first step towards the emergence of the “film generation,” for whom the doors of “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Weekend” (1968), “The Battle of Algiers,” “Easy Rider,” and “Five Easy Pieces” were all waiting to be explored. To add on, it was lauded as the highest-grossing art film up until then, voted the best film by the National Society of Film Critics, and garnered Oscar nominations for Best Screenplay and Best Director. Nowadays, no one seems to talk about it.
It is unsurprising that young audiences today are not satisfied with a film about a self-loathing and cynical London photographer who witnesses a murder, only to end up in a park at dawn fantasizing about kids playing tennis. “Blow-Up” is a film that twentysomethings would have been most inclined to, and now they bring their attention to ironic self-referential slasher films. While Americans flocked to ‘swinging London’ during the 1960s, Londoners are now the ones boarding charter flights to Orlando.
I recently took a deep dive into shot-by-shot analysis of “Blow-Up,” which I got to do over the course of three days. Without the glamour elements and the hype, it is crystal clear that for its time, it is an astounding film, if not somewhat detached from what it was expected to be. The film captured “Cool” as its theme at the 1998 Virginia Festival of American Film activity. The festival started with the rise of the Beat Generation and progressed through Cassavetes to “Blow-Up” after which the Cool Virus leaped from underground subculture to millions of willing new hosts, and has colored our society since, including “South Park.” In “Cool,” the phenomenon is elaborated. Step 3 is described here: Aestheticism in the form of a sacrilegious phenomenon. The festival is “blown up”.
Again, as I set out to watch “Blow-Up,” I first subconsciously know that I need to condition myself to accept the overblown psychedelic colors and the protagonist’s propensity to drop “fab” and other Austin Powers-like terms. However, after some time I found myself in a trance, which is the magic of the film. He McGuffin’s with the materials of a suspense thriller, but without the payoff. He sets them in the London of heartless fashion photography and groupies, bored rock audiences, slow pot parties, and a hero in which a dead soul is only roused as a negligent stimulus by his craftsmanship being challenged.
The film features David Hemmings, who became a cultural figure in the 1960s for this role as Thomas, a young photographer with a Beatles haircut, a Rolls convertible, and “birds” banging at his studio door willing to pose for him. The depths of his spiritual hunger are suggested in three brief scenes involving a neighbor (Sarah Miles), who cohabits with a painter across the street. He regards her as though she is the only person who can heal his soul (and might have at some point), but she is not in a position to help. He spends his days in projects involving meticulously planned photo shoots (the model Verushka plays herself, and there’s a group shoot involving grotesque mod fashions), and his nights at boarding houses taking snapshots that might look nice as a counterpoint in his book of fashion photography.
Thomas spots a couple in the distance and walks towards them. Are they fighting? Horse playing? Getting flirty? He fiddles with his camera and takes a plethora of pictures. The woman (Vanessa Redgrave) starts chasing him. She wants the film back extremely badly. He outright refuses her. She tracks him to his studio, rips off her top to seduce him and get back the film. He sends her away with the wrong roll. After making a huge canvas for his pictures, he sees in the beautifully edited middle of the movie, that he unknowingly captured a murder.
Antonioni’s cut is so neat, forwards and backward at the same time. Blows-up photographs and the photographer are alternated to the point where we see combinations of light and shadow, dots and blurs, that may suggest what? But he is disturbed by two girls who have been irritating him for what feels like ages and starts engaging in frenetic sex play as they roll around in wrinkled background paper. Then feverishly peering at his blowups, which he had previously turned over to her, he brusquely tells them to go. In the grainy, on the verge of abstract, he makes further impressions. In one of those blurry photographs the woman appears to be glancing towards some bushes, where a sniper lays, and perhaps in some of the pictures, a man can be seen sprawled throughout the ground. Or maybe not.
Upon returning to the park, Thomas saw the man’s lifeless body on the floor. Despite being what many choose to call a writer, the photographer is portrayed as an unreliable witness, unsure whether or not he sees the body. What remains debatable is whether or not he actually saw someone killed right in front of him. People commonly have his understanding of the photographs, but there is room for an alternative explanation: Redgrave had been hoping for the photographs because she was having an affair with a man who, while completely gray, suddenly died of what seemed to be a heart attack so she very panickedly rushed out of the park. By the following morning, the corpse was found and taken away. (The suggestion of even scandalous infidelity reminds one of the Profumo scandal where a cabinet minister was reportedly involved with an escort; the obsession with the Zapruder film suggests the analysis of the aforementioned photographs is eerily too similar to the former.
The resolution of the issue whether it was a murder does not matter. The film seeks to represent a person plagued with pessimism and contempt, who, inspired by his photographs, becomes something that can be called passionate. As Thomas makes his way between his darkroom and the blowups, we see the joy of an artist consumed in the thing behaviorists call the Process; now, he is not preoccupied with money, power, bones, or even his detestable personality traits. Rather, he is now sitting in front of his craft.
A smooth and coordinated process takes place in his mind, hands, and thoughts. This makes him happy.
Ultimately, everything that he once possessed is reclaimed. The body along with the photographs vanishes, as does Redgrave himself. (One of the more startling moments occurs when he recalls seeing her standing a few feet away from a club, then she begins to walk away only to vanish completely. At Virginia, we examined the sequence meticulously frame by frame but were unable to find how she managed to disappear. It is presumed that she steps into a doorway, but we were following her legs and they somehow seemed to link themselves to another torso.)
In the climactic sequence, which occurs and the park, Thomas meets students from the university who were featured in the opening sequence of the film. (Pauline Kael, in her review of the film, referred to these people as “white-faced clowns.” But, the British audience would have recognized that these people took part in the ritual known as ‘rag’ where students dress in outlandish costumes and emphasize the whole event for charity.) They engage in a game of tennis using an imaginary ball. The photographer supposes that he sees the ball. The soundtrack includes the sounds of tennis. Afterward, the photographer walks off over the lawn and disappears from one shot to the other. Like the corpse.
Antonioni has remarked that his protagonist’s death is his ‘signature’. He also recalls that of Shakespeare’s Prospero “All Spirits, and are melted into air.” The audacious “Blow-Up” wraps us in a storyline that provides an incredible promise to solve a mystery yet keeps us bare to the players of the ‘game’.
Of course, in retrospect, there are already clear explanations for the initial popularity. It famously became controversial because of the groupies and the orgy scene where it was claimed there was actual pubic hair (this is a rumor that went around when Janet Leigh’s breasts were exposed in “Psycho” (1960) only seven years later). The ‘decanent’ milieu as it came to be known was highly and wildly appealing at this point. Parts of the film have flip-flopped in meaning. In 1967, peculiarly enough, a lot was made from nudity, but the photographer’s cruelty toward his, ‘models,’ was simply ignored. Today, what seems so tame and shocking is the contempt that the hero displays for women.
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