Blow Up [DVD] [1966]
It may not stand up as an art-house film (the opening and closing shots of a mime playing tennis belong in the Pretentious Metaphor Hall of Fame), but this head scratcher is an absorbing travelogue of swinging London circa 1967, courtesy of auteur tourist Michelangelo Antonioni. Blow Up is also a meticulous, paranoid murder mystery that has left its fingerprints on dozens of later films, from Coppola’s The Conversation to the recent cult item The Usual Suspects. The efforts of a fashion photographer (David Hemmings) to analyse a photo snapped off-the-cuff in a public park, which may have recorded a crime in progress, resonated at the time with conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination. From here it looks like an anticipation of up-to-the-minute anxieties about the filtering of perception through metastasising media. The movie marked the film debut of Vanessa Redgrave, and in the justly celebrated purple-paper scene, expat chanteuse-to-be Jane Birkin. –David Chute
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A fascinating enigma…,
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Read “film-buff” reviews of “Blow Up” and you’ll find a huge diversity of opinion. It’s a masterpiece… it’s rubbish… it’s tantalisingly complex… it’s hedonistically superficial… what happens in the film is “real”… nothing that happens in the film is “real”… and so it goes. Watch the film and take your choice, but the fact that it still generates such reactions is a testament to its enduring impact. So what does it have?
Well, on the down side, a lot of the acting is weak, the musical soundtrack is too self-consciously “hip”, and several of the scenes appear to have been inserted purely for effect – “we do nudity, drugs and rock & roll as well as making films”. And on the plus side? David Hemmings acting is superb, the cinema-photography is brilliant, and the use of sound (and silence) to create atmosphere is stunningly effective. But beneath all that’s superficially good & bad there’s something much, much deeper. Firstly, a riddle that drives it and to which there’s no answer – in simple terms, what’s real and what’s not? Antonioni poses this question throughout the film, from the heavily handed obvious (the play acting of the mime troupe), the subtle (the fact that Hemmings’ character is never referred to by name), to the brilliantly tense darkroom scenes where his photos are “blown up” to levels that make interpretation of what he and we are “seeing” impossible. Secondly, and even more subtle, is this man’s life simply play acting itself – has he become nothing by having everything – is he still “real”?
Deep stuff and a film that is, as a result, a fascinating enigma in its plot, its execution and people’s reaction to it.
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|An iconic film about sight and perception.,
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It seems that Blow-Up has been re-evaluated somewhat in recent years, no longer being hailed as the iconic classic it once was, and instead being criticised for the meandering plot (more of an anti-narrative than anything else) and the somewhat dated depiction of swinging 60’s London. This is a real shame, but at the end of the day, it’s a film that I still enjoy so really, I don’t care!! For me, Blow-Up is a film that holds up to repeated viewing, with each subsequent re-viewing revealing more and more (possible) interpretations of the plot. It’s a film that requires the viewer’s participation and imagination to elaborate on the ideas that Antonioni suggests through movements, composition, actions and sound, and mostly works for me because of an obsession I have with British 60’s culture… so the chance to revel in the colours and locations is fantastic, with the film standing as something of a cultural time capsule as well as a slight (though no less enjoyable) murder mystery.
The basic plot revolves around a feckless and self-infatuated photographer at the heart of the happening 60’s scene, with Antonioni sketching a world of no-ties sex-orgies, pot parties, protesting students, shallow scenesters, chic fashionistas, gaudy colours, bizarre camera angles, extended jazz-numbers, waif-like models and the gradual disintegration of the hippie era and the sense of innocence lost (see the director’s follow up Zabriskie Point for more). Amongst all of this, he and co-writer Tonino Guerra manage to comment on the urbanisation of most major metropolitan cities moving towards the 1970’s (with the newly built concrete housing blocks that our protagonist drives past a number of times during the film now being an all too familiar presence, particularly in areas around London, Manchester and Birmingham). It also taps into the existentialist idea of a character lost in his own abyss, finding little comfort in the scene he has immersed himself in, whilst simultaneously struggling to find something more tangible and worthwhile within the mire of 60’s caricatured excess.
More than that however, the film is a great treatise on the notion of perception… for example, is it really that coincidental that our lead character is a photographer, someone who’s entire profession revolves around documenting an abstracted view of reality? Throughout the film, Antonioni is playing with the notion of perception and the way we see things, from the opening scene – in which the photographer emerges black-faced from a factory and dressed in grungy overalls to match his work-mates, before he rounds the corner and jumps into his pristine Rolls Royce – right the way to the end, where a group of students act out a tennis match using mime, in which our hero finally realises the difference between what is seen and what is felt.
The point of the film is not “who was murdered?” or “who murdered who?”, but rather, did the murder actually take place at all? Can we trust our central character? And, more importantly, can we trust what we are being shown by the director? The major set-piece here is a tranquil moment in which the photographer (brilliantly played by the late, great, David Hemmings!!) innocently snaps a couple enjoying an intimate moment in a secluded park for the closing chapter of his book. When he is spotted by the couple, the woman, who is much younger than the man she is with, approaches and demands to have the negatives returned to her. Our hero refuses and, in moment of confusion, manages to slink away with the snaps still on his camera. Later, the same woman appears at the photographer’s studio and attempts to seduce him in an attempt reclaim the negative. Again, playing off the notion of perception, we assume that the woman’s urgent desire to reclaim the photographs stems from a possibly illicit affair, however, once Hemmings has developed the negative and printed the shots he sees a curious shape in one of the bushes that almost resembles a face.
What follows is another tense, low-key set-piece in which Hemmings has large scale blow-ups made of each picture and studies them at length. Antonioni forces the audience to study the pictures along with him and, in a moment of unrivalled cinematic subjectivity, the outline of the face and the possible appearance of a gun begins to become clear. In the last picture, the photographer outlines what could be the shape of a collapsed body, but the images are purposely obscured by the pixilation of the blow-up and the harsh contrast of the picture’s black and white. When he should be bringing the photographs to the attention of the police, the photographer instead gets roped into a three way sex-game (an important and historical cinematic moment featuring a young Jane Birkin and Gillian Hills, with the first sight of pubic hair ever glimpsed in a mainstream movie) and later, when he should be…
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|Style meets substance in Swinging Sixties,
A meditation on voyeurism and the powerlessness of objectivity, Blow Up is undoubtedly one of the most intelligently crafted films of the Sixties. David Hemmings plays the photographer unwittingly caught within an (admittedly slim) murder story. His accidental photography of an assassination makes it impossible for him to remain the passive outsider. Should he discard his objectivity and take action or should he try to walk away?
When is a propellor a work of art? How can a broken guitar cause riots? Seemingly irrelevant scenes litter this film until the beautiful final mime sequence …. A message could be that one’s actions give an object/situation an importance, but Antonioni is never quite as simpistic as that.
One of the coolest soundtracks of the Sixties, Antonioni’s meticulous visual style and a cast to die for bring you have the ultimate outsider’s vision of sixties Brit-cool
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