865 Blow-Up

[black&huge]

Well this is applied to basically any film but Antonioni in particular there seems to be an urge to understand it right off the bat since one thing you may hear a lot is that he makes slow, boring films. And yes, films can be both of those things but not necessarily bad. Hell films I consider great are boring and I can give some condensed explanation of that as well if wanted. But personally speaking this was my big obstacle with Blow-Up. For some reason this one I tried to get a singular understanding of what it was all about. What I think it was is that I read the synopsis: Hemmings stumbles upon a murder in a park and I ran in my own head this was going to be some form of a more accessible thriller type: suspense sequences, murder solved at the end. I simply wasn't used to Antonioni at this time either. I was disappointed because of my preconceived idea of what I thought the movie was going to be.

Fast forward all those years later when I'm more open, I guess to how I watch films and it clicked! I missed the point to chase one that was never there and with that realization it was an entirely different experience. I would like to use this reply to even say when this happens with anyone and any film sometimes that 180 on a second viewing can be better than if you were blown away by a first time watch.

But yes, what I really mean "nothing to get" I explained in the first point rather vaguely. I was more speaking of what I thought there was to get. Second viewing I guess you could say I went in in a blank slate fashion.

[therewillbeblus]

Blow-Up is, perhaps surprisingly, an old family favorite - especially between my sister and me growing up- that I saw long before delving into Antonioni’s other work as an adult. It’s a film that retains its potent impact all these years later because it handles several of my favorite subjects meshed together: the act of preoccupied overthinking, the complacent male’s sudden existential crisis, the presence of enigmas forcing paranoia as a result of shattered sense of control, a lavish atmosphere of culture paired against an individual's identity as both a product and distinct from that relationship with milieu, and the desperate search for meaning limited by one’s innately-handicapped perspective.

Antonioni projects perspective into even that which should be objective - a static photograph, rather than a narrative, creates the narrative. Even a still image is prone to subjective evaluation on factual events. The camera acts as God- a man made tool that can maintain objectivity, and see what we cannot. The desire to be omniscient and the realization of that deficit begets the paranoia, so Hemmings embarks on the search for mystery to reclaim a false sense of omnipotence; while the end signifies a momentary surrender with the mystery becoming accepted and Thomas dissolves leaving objective truths (the bright colors of grass, the sounds of natural winds) to exist alongside possibly subjective ones (the mime tennis ball, and its ensuing sounds). The act of ‘belief’ becomes one embraced with a shrug that necessitates a blending, rather than separation, of objective and subjective truths (the Cortazar short story makes great use out of this bleeding at its start). Yet any peace Hemmings achieves is not a finite state, and the process that one will inevitably try to make concrete sense out of what we are limited from making tangible will likely continue on past the final frame, which only highlights his isolative position. This final image may even suggest that the only imperishable ingredient in his existence will be this realization of Something Greater Than Him bubbling up into his consciousness and destroying his supremacy from time to time, in a flowing rhythm now that the seed has been planted.

The reveal of the impermanence of life, and the proposition that life can be -and is- more than lucid definitions, is one of the burdening realities Hemmings is faced with as his comfortable, faux-fixed world is upended. In the Cortazar story, the narrator makes a point to laugh at the idea of the word “now” as if it’s a deceitful concept to try to hold onto time, just as Hemmings' attempts to decipher an objective truth based on his own stained viewpoint is futile. The run through the night in a state of anxious pandemonium mirrors Cortazar's story as well, as the narration slips into a delusional nebulous frenzy, and ultimately leads him into a state of tranquility. Like the end of the story, it's unclear whether this is mindfulness or distraction, and Hemmings' state of acceptance could be viewed as perhaps a retreat into his old way of remaining in the imaginary space that is his comfortable 'reality,' however temporary that may be.

The question I’m most interested in is what provokes Hemmings to emerge from his comfortable bubble into a crisis.. How is he being presented with the reality that he lacks full comprehension of the milieu he participates in? Beyond vague concepts, I think there is some merit in assessing this philosophical decline to a break in familiar sexual politics, which perhaps ignites the disintegration. Thomas is accustomed to a very superficial life of being in control; his social life is comprised with one-sided power dynamics, opposite-sex relationships resigned to models who he can photograph with his God-device, figuratively and literally capture in his studio, who will do anything for him including provide casual stringless sex. These 'birds' are two-dimensional people, subhumans even, and Thomas likes life that way. It’s simple, easy, and this confession to Redgrave feeds his superiority, his toxic masculinity, his position of power- while also expressing some dissatisfaction about the banalities of this position. Is he itching for something 'more' because of her novel presence, beginning to poke a hole in his complacent lifstyle? Is she a manifestation of the real that serves as a mirror for the facade that he lives in?

Until this moment I get the sense that, according to Hemmings, nobody has a life outside of his scope of vision that is worth examining, and all that matters occurs in his studio where he has free reign (or if wandering outside of it- the goal is to achieve a physical prop or capture a picture of nature to bring back and obtain as 'his' art). But then enters Redgrave, a woman who has a secret life that interests him. This lack of transparency, this 'enigmatic woman' who withholds information from him and then disappears, becomes a three-dimensional, even equal, human being, and the antecedent that destroys his sense of mastery and narcissistic self-importance, his unquestionable solipsism as the only worthwhile thinking being. All people are unknowable, but since Hemmings has never bothered to see them, or anything in life, as worth knowing, they've existed in step with the worth his solipsistic merits have assigned; but Redgrave becomes something (no, someone) fully-formed and opaque, driving Hemmings to a curiosity that makes her 'worth' knowing. He is obstructed from this knowledge, by her mysterious confidentiality, abrupt escape, and the very nature of being unable to form complete comprehension of another person- all flooding Hemmings for the first time.

This directly precedes, and I'd argue triggers, Hemmings' obsession with the photograph- compulsively evaluating it to find the answers to the mystery of this woman who he now realizes emits knowledge that he cannot obtain as a possession from an antiques shoppe. He makes a call quickly declaring himself to having "saved a life" - what a wonderful narrative to compensate for this vulnerable blind spot whose existence he never had to face before. But he remains unsatisfied with pandora's box of his intellectual, emotional, physical, and most encompassing- perceptive- deficits are acknowledged. He begins to notice other areas of truth that have so far gone uncombed, most obviously in his change in attitude toward Hemmings' friend's wife. She is unattainable, and only after Redgrave's disappearance does he even subtly consider in his consciousness that he wants her, that which is out of reach. His voyeurism as they have sex forces him to meditate on his emasculation, his inability to obtain what he wants, and he beings seeing people as people, equal to himself.

Especially with its use of color, this feels like the male-centric response to Red Desert, in countering that film’s female perspective of admitted powerlessness on a path to finding acceptance with this film’s male empowerment questioning his dominant position for the first time- struggling with even admission, let alone acceptance. This is often expressed in the details of the psychological anguish. In Red Desert, Vitti notices discolored fruit and the color tones in her general surroundings are filtered through a subjective coating of ennui, hopelessness, and suppositions of nihilism. Her worldview is one that recognizes a 'lack of control,' in humanity's ability to contest with the world, as the natural order of things - an admission that, without some kind of harmony with that worldview, causes alienation and distress. Hemmings, on the other hand, glares at black-and-white photographs (grey, relativist truth?) to find information that he cannot locate, and has until now been blind to, in his colorized world drenched in bold, neon hues- which seem to be indicative of illusion that life is beautiful, he's in control, and there is nothing 'more.'

Perhaps Redgrave's entry as an alien figure elicits new feelings that paint all of the details that encompass Hemmings' utopian fantasy as anti-paranoia, thus forcing a malaise of insignificant connections amongst his life, unveiling a dullness at the promise of something 'more,' a yearning for mystery, for paranoia. But paradoxically, he craves a mystery that must be conquered, initiating the disconcerting cycle that forces his desire for comfort and control to clash with his desire to learn and expose himself to all Truth to become God, which exhaustingly propels him into a desert of existential decomposition. Hemmings' dislocation of his 'self' into the night strains his sense of reality and belongingness further, trapping himself in a perpetual state of discomfort as he becomes increasingly divorced from his culture - into as an identity that could not be more infantile without the signifiers of his masculine, confident role in that culture to discern its core validity from the emptiness he has begun to register.

While Vitti's depression appears engrained in an oppressive relationship with an overbearing sociological force, Hemmings finds his despondency springing from the dissonance between the inherently flawed, natural tools in his own perspective that are susceptible to delusion (his eyes, memory, general human senses) and the external tool that is the very source of his power- that of his camera, rendering him impotent for the first time (an impotence she's come to acknowledge). In the end both characters find themselves left with skills in minimizing their focus on the intangible, which provide unclear conclusions that share as much promise to hopeful acceptance as they do cynical predispositions to melancholy reversions, but their journeys stem from different places based on status and experience up until that point where the crisis sets in. It's perhaps a coincidence that both Blow-Up and Red Desert are my favorite films by Antonioni, but few films have expressed existential malaise more complexly using deceptively simple formalism.

[liam fennell]

I think it's okay, maybe even necessary, to point out it is a very funny movie, too! Far more so than your average comedy. I've had great success sharing this movie with non-cinephile friends by pointing out the humor. I just read a Chesterton novel where a character says something about really, truly funny things don't make you LOL, instead you more silently appreciate them and they live on in your mind. Which insight I agree with. I'm thinking here of David Hemmings making goofy faces while driving his Rolls-Royce (when no one can see him being himself and he can let his guard down), or how he has an intercom and a hidden off-screen secretary and they speak in code (calling car 429 over), or when he buys the antique propeller and then after trying to fit it into the passenger seat of his car he just drops it on the ground upon the shop owner offering to deliver it, or when he tries to play it cool with Vanessa Redgrave as the phone rings but eventually he just HAS to dive for it and answer. . . the list is very long!

The movie seems nowadays to me a rather scathing critique of an entire generation (and future generations, maybe all generations, which makes it all the more effective and somewhat horrifying, not to mention profoundly sad), said critique embodied by the central character who is basically a mirror with perhaps a shallow self-centered concavity in the middle -- one gets the impression almost everything he does is dictated by his environment and the culture surrounding him, not his own personality. His actual character only slips in through the cracks, such as him skipping around the park when no one can see him and the aforementioned goofy faces; most significantly his true character shyly reveals itself in his investigation which is continually and digressively and ultimately tragically derailed by his need to conform. Everything the poor misguided guy does is a reflection, this being best and most obviously embodied by the way he gets sucked into the crowd during the concert and proceeds to wrestle away the broken guitar neck, which he only wants because everyone else wants it and which he promptly discards on the sidewalk outside. One feels like he photographs homeless people because that's what serious photographers are supposed to do, that he sleeps with the would-be models for the same reason. I call it a tragic movie because at the end when he has a chance to assert himself and do something not entirely self-centered by leading people to the body he instead just. . . gets high and puts it off until the next morning, by which point the body has vanished -- and then of course he does too, after conforming to the pantomime of the tennis game. The whole notion of I'll just be lazy and put off this super morally important thing until tomorrow is shockingly brutal, and rings so disturbingly true in my ears.

In short, great complex movie that is somehow both fun and sad and profound and engaging in equal measure.

[Sloper]

That being said what really brought me in was just how busy it all is. Not just the people, actions and scenery in almost every frame but Hemmings' character always on the move.

That’s a really interesting observation about Antonioni’s films in general, which are often both ‘busy’ and peripatetic, drifting from place to place in a way that is superficially random and un-structured, but which (I think) always feels painstakingly composed and detailed as well. In fact I would think most people are more put off by the sense that his films are over-directed than by the sense that they are too lax – then again Blow-Up (and even more so his next two films) feel much looser than the films that came before.

Antonioni projects perspective into even that which should be objective - a static photograph, rather than a narrative, creates the narrative. Even a still image is prone to subjective evaluation on factual events. The camera acts as God- a man made tool that can maintain objectivity, and see what we cannot… Hemmings finds his despondency springing from the dissonance between the inherently flawed, natural tools in his own perspective that are susceptible to delusion (his eyes, memory, general human senses) and the external tool that is the very source of his power- that of his camera, rendering him impotent for the first time (an impotence she's come to acknowledge).

This made me want to quote a paragraph from the short story. It’s the moment just before the end when the narrator is reflecting on the meaning he’s deciphered in the photograph (p. 61 in the Criterion booklet):

My strength had been a photograph, that, there, where they were taking their revenge on me, demonstrating clearly what was going to happen. The photo had been taken, the time had run out, gone; we were so far from one another, the abusive act had certainly already taken place, the tears already shed, and the rest conjecture and sorrow. All at once the order was inverted, they were alive, moving, they were deciding and had decided, they were going to their future; and I on this side, prisoner of another time, in a room on the fifth floor, to not know who they were, that woman, that man, and that boy, to be only the lens of my camera, something fixed, rigid, incapable of intervention. It was horrible, their mocking me, deciding it before my impotent eyes, mocking me, for the boy again was looking at the flour-faced clown and I had to accept the fact that he was going to say yes, that the proposition carried money with it or a trick, and I couldn’t yell for him to run, or even open the road to him again with a new photo, a small and almost meek intervention which would ruin the framework of drool and perfume. Everything was going to resolve itself right there, at that moment.

twbb, you give a compelling reading of Thomas’ psychology in some ways, especially the contrast with Red Desert, but I’m not sure the film gives us enough information to construct such a coherent reading of the character. Yes, he treats people (especially women) like objects, but I don’t know if that’s because he thinks he’s better than them – he’s sort of empty and performative, and (as liam fennell says below) mirror-like, but not precisely in the way that a narcissist would be.

[The central character] is basically a mirror with perhaps a shallow self-centered concavity in the middle -- one gets the impression almost everything he does is dictated by his environment and the culture surrounding him, not his own personality. His actual character only slips in through the cracks, such as him skipping around the park when no one can see him and the aforementioned goofy faces; most significantly his true character shyly reveals itself in his investigation which is continually and digressively and ultimately tragically derailed by his need to conform. Everything the poor misguided guy does is a reflection, this being best and most obviously embodied by the way he gets sucked into the crowd during the concert and proceeds to wrestle away the broken guitar neck, which he only wants because everyone else wants it and which he promptly discards on the sidewalk outside.

Thomas doesn’t only goof around when no one is watching: you mention the answering-the-phone thing when he’s with Vanessa Redgrave, and his behaviour throughout that scene is exaggeratedly silly and clownish (lying about his wife and kids, etc.).

It seems to me that he’s often playing a role with people because that’s what an artist does. I don’t think he’s conforming to specific clichés, as you suggest, but that it goes deeper than that: he is (I almost said 'he has become', but there isn't even any sense that he's been on a journey to get to this point, he just sort of exists like this) a walking performance, creating photographic ‘moments’ everywhere he goes, whether he’s alone or not. Even when there’s no one else with him, he’s not going un-watched; we’re watching him, and he’s watching himself, and it feels like we’re seeing him from his own perspective. When he bounds up the steps in the park that doesn’t feel any less self-conscious than his annoying little coin-trick, or his wrestling match with the two would-be models.

I don’t think there is a distinction between his ‘own personality / actual character’ and his habitual performances – but I do agree that the performances get derailed by the investigation, and that as he decodes the photographs he gradually stops clowning around, and appears to develop a different attitude towards others’ performances. Is this because he’s encountered something that isn’t just a performance, something that is inescapably, tangibly true, so he can’t just say ‘I am in Paris’ or ‘no one was murdered’ and decide that’s his reality? I don’t know...as soon as I start to interpret this I feel like I’m being reductive. This film is centrally about art, and I struggle to make sense of what it’s saying on this subject – not a criticism of the film, just an admission of interpretative defeat on my part…

I feel much more comfortable drawing comparisons with Antonioni’s earlier, more relationship-focused films. For example, take the ending of Blow-Up, which is about seeing something that isn’t there, but that might be there in some sense, or that Thomas might need to believe is there, even if doing so threatens his own existence. In that sense it has a strong connection to the endings of all four previous films, which portray relationships that may or may not be hollow and dead, people who may or may not choose to carry on believing in those relationships, and a lingering sense of terror about what that choice (one way or the other) means for the continued existence of the central character(s). Perhaps the most interesting comparison is with the famous final sequence of L’eclisse, where we both see and fail to see see things – or rather, people – who are not literally there.

The earlier films were driven by this idea that ‘eros is sick’ and that the modern world is in thrall to old-fashioned, out-dated ideas about love. I always get the feeling that this is a fancy way of saying that monogamy is a drag and we should all just follow our impulses and fuck anyone we want to – but in Antonioni’s films, whenever this is put into practice it results in chaos and hurt feelings and the unsettling realisation that nothing binds us together. In Blow-Up we see a character, and a culture, that have embraced an ultra-modern, freewheeling, impulse-driven approach to life, and as liam fennell says it does feel like a critique on some level – though maybe not a moralistic one.

I don’t think we’re really supposed to care that much about the man who gets murdered. In the original story the victim is a teenage boy, and there’s an agonised sense that this innocent has been taken away to suffer what may well have been a horrible death. By changing the victim to a completely anonymous grey-haired man, by giving him and Redgrave the appearance of a couple having an illicit affair, and by implying that he was killed instantly (we don’t hear the shot or the victim crying out, and the corpse is almost alarmingly clean and tidy, like a robot that’s been switched off), Antonioni drains the event of almost all emotional or moral resonance.

There’s no sense that this was a tragedy, no concern over the committing of a crime, no imperative to bring the killers to justice – just the pure fact that ‘someone was murdered’, and the existential terror that results from this encounter with (and recording of) the moment of death, and with the empty husk that a person becomes after they’ve died, and then with the truly empty space left behind once the evidence has been cleaned up (all compounded by the fact that it was an unwitting encounter, only correctly interpreted after the fact - like Sarah Palmer seeing Bob hiding behind the bed).

To me this makes most sense if I relate it back to the existential terror of Monica Vitti in L’avventura when she realises how easily a person, or a connection, can vanish or dissolve.

The first time I saw L’avventura, something about those images of people wandering over a barren island captured my own experience of loneliness and alienation in a way that I’d never encountered before in a work of art. Then, when I saw Blow-Up shortly afterwards, I had the same feeling while watching the first scene in the park. The way the characters are positioned in relation to the trees, and the fencing, and the grass, and the way Thomas moves behind the fence, or from one tree to another, as he stalks the couple – I don’t know why, but the whole sequence looks (and sounds; the soundtrack is amazing in this film) like a perfect encapsulation of the human condition, deeply moving but clear-eyed and unsentimental. I wish I knew why Antonioni was so good at this; but am also kind of glad I don’t.

[therewillbeblus]

Great post as always, Sloper- Just to clarify, while I got concrete in my analysis, I do think that ultimately this film is about a more natural kind of solipsism, or innate egocentricity, that is threatened when the performance has to stop, as you put it, rather than an abnormal narcissism. The disruption of his comfortable worldview isn't inherently going to beget such a strong existential crisis, but the magnitude of how much of life is actually enigmatic and not controllable is what disorients him and dissolves his reality. Like L’avventura the real threat is the unrealised catharsis of absolute knowledge, which reveals our limitations to ourselves and erodes the definition of self-as-God, to posture at Sartre, and thus any semblance of connective stability with others or within ourselves. I think you actually answered a large part of why Antonioni's films are so successful at eliciting this experience in the viewer, through your willingness to examine and then surrender grabs on any tangible markers of conclusive evaluation; they're successful because he is unwilling to get as specific as my interpretation, so we are left with the same sense of wonder and mystery as the protagonists, and can share in their experience of trapped alienation without diagnosing or analyzing our way out- which would separate us from that alignment, even slightly.

[Rayon Vert]

I don’t think we’re really supposed to care that much about the man who gets murdered. In the original story the victim is a teenage boy, and there’s an agonised sense that this innocent has been taken away to suffer what may well have been a horrible death. By changing the victim to a completely anonymous grey-haired man, by giving him and Redgrave the appearance of a couple having an illicit affair, and by implying that he was killed instantly (we don’t hear the shot or the victim crying out, and the corpse is almost alarmingly clean and tidy, like a robot that’s been switched off), Antonioni drains the event of almost all emotional or moral resonance.

There’s no sense that this was a tragedy, no concern over the committing of a crime, no imperative to bring the killers to justice – just the pure fact that ‘someone was murdered’, and the existential terror that results from this encounter with (and recording of) the moment of death, and with the empty husk that a person becomes after they’ve died, and then with the truly empty space left behind once the evidence has been cleaned up (all compounded by the fact that it was an unwitting encounter, only correctly interpreted after the fact - like Sarah Palmer seeing Bob hiding behind the bed).

I very much agree with this impression. Watching this film again, I don't feel inclined towards any psychological interpretation of the Thomas character, and I notice the reoccurrence of the theme of violence. The book of photography he's preparing is full of violence of different kinds, and the park pictures were ironically supposed to present an oasis of peace in contrast. Meanwhile you've got the protestors reminding us of the threat of nuclear annihilation, and all the constantly physically abrasive, near-violent behaviour, even when playful or "sexy", when Thomas interacts with the models, Jane, or the photographer groupies. You've got the violence done to his flat/work studio by those responsible for the killing (we assume). You've even got Jeff Beck destroying his guitar as the Yardbirds play their frenetic and loud music. As if all this is somehow an integral part of this amoral modernity.

[therewillbeblus]

That's a really interesting point about the recurrent aggressions. I don't think a specific psychological interpretation is as important as a broader existential gaze at how one's solipsism and egocentricity becomes caustically worn down and exposed to himself. The idea that this sobering experience ignites a search for meaning that is detrimental to our emotional stability or identity is powerfully drawn irony, the agony eerily exacerbated by attempting to access the root of disruptions to complacent relationships with social and inanimate stimuli, through futile 'logical' tangible actions. It's an aggressive condition to endure, and it makes sense that one would see the violence occurring around them (as an externalization of feeling it being directed onto themselves, or as a consequence of this upheaval from our inert existence, or any other hypervigilance to unfamiliar truth) as a result of this disequilibration. For me, the film delivers a horrifying yet exhilarating feeling that if I wake up from my safe habits of living and schema of perceiving my world, what unpredictable and unsettling information I might find, including about my insignificant place in it- or my impotence to grasp any enigmatic significance that may exist, or may not.

[Robin Davies]

when he buys the antique propeller and then after trying to fit it into the passenger seat of his car he just drops it on the ground upon the shop owner offering to deliver it

I thought he gave it back to the shop owner. Then she dropped it and he reprimanded her ("Oi!").
The famous scene where he photographs Veruschka is indeed comedy gold. I'm surprised they don't both smoke cigarettes afterwards.

[Drucker]

It seems to me that he’s often playing a role with people because that’s what an artist does. I don’t think he’s conforming to specific clichés, as you suggest, but that it goes deeper than that: he is (I almost said 'he has become', but there isn't even any sense that he's been on a journey to get to this point, he just sort of exists like this) a walking performance, creating photographic ‘moments’ everywhere he goes, whether he’s alone or not. Even when there’s no one else with him, he’s not going un-watched; we’re watching him, and he’s watching himself, and it feels like we’re seeing him from his own perspective. When he bounds up the steps in the park that doesn’t feel any less self-conscious than his annoying little coin-trick, or his wrestling match with the two would-be models.

I don’t think there is a distinction between his ‘own personality / actual character’ and his habitual performances – but I do agree that the performances get derailed by the investigation, and that as he decodes the photographs he gradually stops clowning around, and appears to develop a different attitude towards others’ performances. Is this because he’s encountered something that isn’t just a performance, something that is inescapably, tangibly true, so he can’t just say ‘I am in Paris’ or ‘no one was murdered’ and decide that’s his reality? I don’t know...as soon as I start to interpret this I feel like I’m being reductive. This film is centrally about art, and I struggle to make sense of what it’s saying on this subject – not a criticism of the film, just an admission of interpretative defeat on my part…

The earlier films were driven by this idea that ‘eros is sick’ and that the modern world is in thrall to old-fashioned, out-dated ideas about love. I always get the feeling that this is a fancy way of saying that monogamy is a drag and we should all just follow our impulses and fuck anyone we want to – but in Antonioni’s films, whenever this is put into practice it results in chaos and hurt feelings and the unsettling realisation that nothing binds us together. In Blow-Up we see a character, and a culture, that have embraced an ultra-modern, freewheeling, impulse-driven approach to life, and as liam fennell says it does feel like a critique on some level – though maybe not a moralistic one.

I saw this one last night and love this observation, Sloper, about the way Hemmings is performing. In that way he sits neatly with the mime-car that bookends the film. Our protagonist certainly fancies himself to be a sophisticate, socially above the people at the rock and roll club or the mimes or the pedestrians that he nearly runs over when parking his car. But at the end of the day he is really no better than them. And maybe he starts to realize this once he participates in the tennis match at the end.

I don't know if our protagonist's self-centeredness and narcissism are definitely supposed to reflect the modern world around him, but it's hard not to see it that way. It's hard not to note that the propeller he buys is described by him as both "beautiful" and "means nothing." And it's hard for me not to continue to think about the mimes in relation to other events in the film, such as the sex he's pretending to have with the first model he's shooting. And I think there's a cruel irony to the fact that the one time he does decide to care about something, it's met with a blase attitude and eye-rolls from his social circle. How can we expect a man or group of people in this kind of world, where nothing really matters, to care about even a murder?

There are other moments in this film where Antonioni honestly seems to be portraying a loathing of modern culture, and I appreciate the earlier points in this thread about how Antonioni makes this point about modernity in his preceding films to varying degrees as well. It's hard not to see the early contrast of the mimes in the car, (or the protestors) with the salt of the earth laborers in those early scenes. Antonioni doesn't just seem to have contempt for his protagonist, but the entire world and scene around him. I didn't see a film about a man who finally loses control. I saw a film about alienation, and in as direct as manner as I can imagine Antonioni would do, laying the blame at culture explicitly. The film is fun to analyze, but in the theater it left me incredibly cold. Maybe he's making the same points in his preceding films, but seeing them in a language I can't speak creates a distances that makes them more enjoyable to me. It's hard for me to say.

[rrenault]

Was Metrograph's screening DCP or 35mm in the end?

[Drucker]

It was indeed a 35mm print. The frames varied wildly in quality, scenes leaning red to blue. But eventually it settled in, and when the colors were solid it looked beautiful.

[rrenault]

Shucks! I should have done a double bill. I watched Mouchette there yesterday.

[domino harvey]

If you’re interested in digging in to initial responses, I enjoyed the collection Focus On Blow Up which I read last year after a rewatch. It’s a survey of contemporary reviews, articles, think pieces, and longer critiques, and it’s helpful for understanding why so many were so dumbstruck by it on first release (though I’m still one of those unswayed)

[kekid]

Is there a place (website?) where I can read all of sloper's writings on Antonioni? Thanks!

[Drucker]

If you’re interested in digging in to initial responses, I enjoyed the collection Focus On Blow Up which I read last year after a rewatch. It’s a survey of contemporary reviews, articles, think pieces, and longer critiques, and it’s helpful for understanding why so many were so dumbstruck by it on first release (though I’m still one of those unswayed)

Yes, I'd be very interested in it. I forgot about the role the film played in helping end the Hays Code, and I was shocked at how well-received it was upon release as well as its box office haul.

Similar to your post in the Pasolini thread, I've been eager to "get" Antonioni for years, first inspired by Heartthesilence's fandom, and Sloper's post last year made me really eager to dig in. I picked up La Notte (which I haven't seen) and Red Desert (which I have seen) in the last Criterion sale so I'll be tryin to watch them both shortly.

[therewillbeblus]

L’avventura would be the place to start, and the thread on this forum has some of the best writing on Antonioni and what his ethos is - a lot by Sloper. It might be my favorite thread on the forum (but I’m also biased because I watch the film more than any other)

[Drucker]

The first time I watched L'Avventura was 14 years ago or so, on DVD in my old apartment, and it completely blew me away. Saw it in 35mm a few years later and it did not have the same effect. I've seen Red Desert twice, Blow-Up, La Signora Senza Camelie, and The Passenger, and none have really gripped me. With that said, I've really made an effort to change the way I watch films so that I'm only watching when I'm really locked in. For many years I attended screenings when tired after work, or when I had a brief window of time in a weekend. So I'm eager to revisit all of these in the kind of focused mindset I had during last night's screening.

[domino harvey]

I highly recommend watching L’avventura with the commentary as well. He does a great job explaining the impact the film has and I remember thinking while rewatching it a few years back how helpful it would have been to me to hear it after I first watched it

[Sloper]

Really interesting comments on Blow-Up, Drucker. I agree that in many ways it’s hard not to see the film as a critique of modern culture. On the other hand, I’m not sure it’s quite expressing the ‘loathing’ or ‘contempt’ you describe, but instead something that’s much harder to connect with. I adore this film but I still can’t explain it myself…

For instance, I really struggle with these comments Antonioni made in an interview:

Q: Since the film dealt with the problem of knowledge, of whether reality can be attained or not, every viewer interpreted it in his own way. Was this what you wanted?

A: Blow-Up is a film that lends itself to many interpretations because the issue behind it is precisely the appearance of reality. Therefore, everyone can think what he wants.

Q: You were, without a doubt, sympathetic toward the character of the photographer. Is the film in some way your ideal self-portrait?

A: I like the protagonist. I like his life. When I made the film, I also lived his sort of life and enjoyed it. It was a fun lifestyle, which I led only to follow the character, not because it was my own life.

At first glance, I find it bizarre that Antonioni claims to ‘like’ the photographer, because as played by David Hemmings he is such an absolute prick in so many ways. And the idea of Antonioni emulating the character’s behaviour is perhaps a little worrying, depending on what that entailed… But I think part of what he’s saying is that Blow-Up takes place in a world devoid of moral judgement, where it’s out of the question to see this character – or the world around him – as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The thing to ‘like’ about the photographer’s life is that he gets to be an artist, and a performer, all the time, in a context that nurtures such behaviour un-critically.

In Red Desert, when Giuliana gets upset about no one else having heard the cry of agony outside the shack (and more to the point, about no one else caring whether there was a cry or not), it’s like she can feel her world turning into the world of Blow-Up. And in Blow-Up itself, we’re asked to accept that the world has completed that transformation. When the photographer tries to convince other people to take an interest in his discovery, his dismay at not being able to do so is very different from Giuliana’s outraged frenzy. There is a real sadness and a kind of tragic revelation in his face at the very end, when his eyes drift away from the tennis game. But I don’t think the revelation is that he inhabits a loathsome modern world where no one cares about anything. It’s more of an existential sadness about how tenuous reality is.

I don't know if our protagonist's self-centeredness and narcissism are definitely supposed to reflect the modern world around him, but it's hard not to see it that way. It's hard not to note that the propeller he buys is described by him as both "beautiful" and "means nothing."

Re: the propeller, the woman asks ‘What’s it for?’ and the photographer replies, ‘Nothing, it’s beautiful.’ It's a small detail, but I think there is a subtle difference between saying that the propeller is for nothing and that it means nothing. Antonioni is sometimes criticised for telling Mark Rothko that his paintings were like his films because they were ‘about nothing, with precision,’ because Rothko didn’t believe in ‘paintings about nothing.’ But it’s more about the precision and the deliberateness with which a work of art can be left open so that, as Antonioni says in the above-quoted interview, viewers can bring their own meanings to it. This means that the film is not ‘for’ anything – it doesn’t approve or condemn, it doesn’t try to teach, it doesn’t have a message – but it is beautiful, and it is supposed to please us, because it expresses an emotion about being a transient creature occupying a transient reality. That emotion can be experienced in many different ways, and can have different meanings attached to it.

Here's another extract, this time from an interview with Roger Ebert:

[‘Zabriskie Point’] is about the characters, about changes going on inside them. The experiences they have during the course of the film are simply things that ‘happen to happen’ to characters who do not begin and end when the film does. […] In ‘Blow-Up,’ a lot of energy was wasted by people trying to decide if there was a murder, or wasn’t a murder, when in fact the film was not about a murder but about a photographer. Those pictures he took were simply one of the things that happened to him, but anything could have happened to him: He was a person living in that world, possessing that personality. With ‘Zabriskie Point,’ it will be the same. It is about Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin. That is why they will have their own names in the film. To some degree, I am making a film about youth in America by taking two American young people and making a film about them.

This again feeds into the ‘with precision’ comment. There is something important here about engaging with the particularity of the person and the environment: David Hemmings’ performance in Blow-Up could easily be mistaken for a bad performance, because it may seem like a series of empty gestures, as if there is no ‘there’ there. But for me, it’s the opposite. He is a believably incoherent person, whose actions cannot be lined up with a set of meanings or ideas external to him. He is unlike the characters in earlier Antonioni films – with whom I’m sure the director identified far more – hence the comment, ‘His life is not my life, but I led that life to follow the character.’ The photographer is to Antonioni what the corpse is to the photographer: a small piece of discovered reality that quickly disappears. We’re asked to engage with this as something that is not ‘for’ anything, but that is beautiful and kind of sad. Other emotions, thoughts, and meanings – including a critique of the photographer’s behaviour and a loathing of his world – might then follow, and clearly Antonioni would say those are valid responses to the film. But even then, I think we’re supposed to be haunted by that moment we spent ‘being’ the photographer, connecting with the beautiful nothingness he discovered.

If you liked L’avventura, La notte and L’eclisse are likely to do something for you, and I’d also recommend Zabriskie Point – a lot of people find it ridiculous, and it is in some ways, but I get the feeling you might also appreciate what’s so wonderful about it.

[domino harvey]

Zabriskie Point was just added to HBO Max btw, since the DVD is OOP

[hearthesilence]

Zabriskie Point was just added to HBO Max btw, since the DVD is OOP

Most copies may even be unplayable at this point.