UK/Italy, 1966. Starring David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, John Castle, Jane Birkin, Gillian Hills, Peter Bowles, Veruschka von Lehndorff, Julian Chagrin, Claude Chagrin. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Available on DVD from Amazon

There's a reason, however misguided, that we here at Teleport City have always avoided reviewing films like Blow Up, and as I explained in the preamble for this whole viewing journal experiment, that's part of the reason we are now doing what we're doing. The reason, as detailed there, was because films like this have so much said about them, spark so much conversation, that I always felt like you didn't need us chiming in as well, regardless of how terribly charming and witty we may be. What would we have to say that hasn't already been said and been said better? Discussing a movie like this is redundant, or so I thought.

I reconsidered that position, however, and found it to be wholly misguided, especially these days. That was brought into crystal clear focus a few days ago when driving back from a hiking trip up to the White Mountains in New Hampshire (read about that elsewhere on the site!), I subjected myself to a brainless tirade from some talk radio nobody who, on the day of Marlon Brando's death announcement, insisted that he wasn't the greatest actor of his, the previous, and the next generation. The opinion is not in itself offensive to me. I don't think of Brando as the greatest actor who ever lived, either, though I do have a pretty high appreciation of him. What was offensive about what this guy said - and incidentally, he just kept repeating himself over and over and saying the same thing because, like all talk radio personalities, he doesn't actually have anything to say - was that Brando wasn't the greatest actor on account of his films are too weird and, with the exception of Godfather and Apocalypse Now, won't be remembered or seen by anyone younger than the current generation of thirty-somethings.

And there in lies the heinous claim: that something or someone can't be considered great simply because modern teenagers aren't going to be interested in it. Yep, if the same people who make Britney Spears and boot rap popular don't appreciate your work, then it can't possibly be good. If Brando, or Jimmy Cagney, or any number of famous people aren't held in high esteem by people who recently appeared in a Girls Gone Wild video, then there can't possibly be any merit in the work. But rather than pontificate on the implications of what this radio guy said, especially since in all honesty he was probably just trying to get a rise out of people and get them to call in to cover the fact that he was just repeating the same couple of sentences over and over until I finally got bored to tears and just put in a Les Baxter CD, I thought we'd look at the one sliver of truth in what he was saying: that "kids these days" have no appreciation for or even knowledge of anything beyond what was made in the past few years, and most of them have no interest in investigating things further.

Obviously, if you are here and have made it this far into my rambling nonsense, you can't be accused of not wanting to investigate things further. You're obviously not the typical member of young society that is being put under the microscope, though even you may find that you've been sorely lacking in the drive to delve into the past. That's no condemnation. After all, the goal again of this journal is to give me a public forum to discuss films that we might not discuss otherwise, and to give you a first hand account of my effort to plug the holes in my own cinematic education. So here we are, and what I realized is that by ignoring some older acclaimed films simply because they were acclaimed some decades ago, we were doing a disservice to our readers - an even greater disservice than the one we do simply by inflicting our writing on you. Although as someone in his thirties I can no longer set myself up as a credible spokesman for "the youth," I do know that Teleport City has a lot of readers in college, and more than a few who are still in high school. If they are here and ignorant of a lot of great films from the past, it's not because of a lack of interest or intelligence on their part; it' simply a lack of exposure. You can't know to try a certain film if no one ever tells you about it, and we were so busy reviewing Filipino midget spy films that we didn't realize no one was bothering with "the classics," which have been all but forgotten by the generations below my own, and by and large by my own generation as well.

And as an aside, nothing irritates me more than when someone's chief complaint about a film is that it "looks dated." This one truly baffles me. Only an utter buffoon couldn't understand or relate to a good movie simply because the clothing is from a different decade, or the music is old, or the style of filmmaking is not what is currently expected. I expect more from myself as a viewer than to be completely coddled and nestled into the safety of a film that looks exactly like what is currently surrounding me, and if I'm ever thrown for a loop simply because some of the lads have shaggy Beatles haircuts, then I figure I'll just hang it all up, grow a big beard with owls living in it, and go live in the mountains.

Which brings us, in our usual roundabout way, to Blow Up. I wish I could be cool and say I'd seen this movie plenty of times before. It is considered to be one of the great important films of the 1960s, and someone who studied film, makes it his hobby, and has a love affair with all things swingin' sixties ought to know the movie inside and out. But truth be told, the first time I'd ever seen it was when I sat down to watch it for this review. That's going to be the case for a lot of the films that show up here from now on.

Even with that mission in place, assembling thoughts around a film like this is daunting. It's been a long time since I had to try and write seriously about a serious film, or as the case may be, humorously about a serious film. And Blow Up is one of those films that is considered to be everything from a masterpiece to a ground-breaking avant-garde piece of art, not to mention "overrated" and "confusing." The last adjective I dismiss entirely, simply because it is the one people so often employ to criticize a film that challenges them or doesn't allow itself to be easily explained. It is the insult of the lazy and, for my money, is no better than people who think "it rocks" or "it sucks" is viable commentary on a film. I would agree that the movie is both a masterpiece and an avant-garde work of art, and I would also agree that, as is almost always the case with works of art and masterpieces, it is indeed overrated, though only ever so slightly and simply because much of the praise aimed at the film has been so hyperbolic.

On the surface, Blow Up is a simple enough film about a fashion photographer who is popular among London's hipster mod crowd. While wandering through a park snapping candid shots of people to complete a photo book upon which he is working, he accidentally photographs a murder, though even he himself doesn't realize this until much later when a frantic woman from the photos shows up demanding he turn the film over to her. This is the plot that serves as the basic description for the film in many places, but frankly, anyone who goes in expecting a murder mystery or thriller because of it is going to be either pleasantly surprised or severely disappointed. The murder is much less of the film, and everything else is much more.

David Hemmings stars as our photographer, Thomas. Though popular and seemingly successful, his life seems directionless and shallow. When he's not earning a living shooting emaciated waifs for fashion spreads, he wanders the streets of London in search of art with some sort of meaning. He never finds it, or really, seems to look particularly hard. Similar people, artists who seem to have no meaning or desire for meaning in what they do, surround him. Blow Up paints a stark picture of the so-called swingin' generation. Whereas it was and still is often portrayed as full of wild abandon, freedom, color, cuteness, and blossoming daring and adventure, director Antonioni paints it more as an aftermath. The city is washed out and gray. The hipster denizens often verge on a catatonic state, engaged in the excesses of freedom and youthful rebellion without actually enjoying any of them. They are listless, jaded, and look like their ten days into a two-week heroin binge. The women adorn themselves in cute and sexy mod fashion, but their bodies are waifish, bony, unhealthy and unattractive. Everyone looks tired, disinterested, and glum.

Thomas stands at the center of it all, drifting in and out of one excess after another until finally this mystery in the park ignites in him a fire that none of swingin' London's decadent nightlife and counter-culture can match. His curiosity sparked by the strange woman's desperate plea to have the film he shot, Thomas begins scrutinizing the photos in ways he never would have otherwise. What looks at first to be a simple tryst in the park between a young woman and an older man, possibly of an adulterous nature, soon takes on different dimensions when Thomas notices the woman seems unduly preoccupied with something going on in the bushes near them. He enlarges the photo, then enlarges the enlargements, until what he's looking at is scarcely more than a series of abstract blobs of black and white. But there, in the bushes, he sees a gunman - or does he. Hard to tell. And in a later photo, is that a body lying near a tree? Impossible to tell, but that's what it looks like - at least to Thomas and, presumably, to us.

Thomas investigates further and does indeed discover the body of the man with whom he had seen the mysterious woman. But is it a murder or something else? Perhaps he had simply died of a heart attack or some other common ailment while in the embrace of his young lover, and she had fled in fear of a scandal. Who is he? We don't really know. And we won't know, because Blow Up delights in a slow assembly of all the pieces of a thriller but never allows it to get going and never bothers to solve it. Thomas' interest in the corpse isn't moral. He doesn't want to solve the crime, if indeed a crime has been committed. He doesn't examine the body, comb over the scene, or even phone the police. His motivations are purely artistic. Here, finally, is something that has challenged him.

The murder is not the central plot. Instead, it is what it sparks in Thomas and how it calls into question the reality of what we perceive, or how reality is shaped by what we perceive. Almost, in a way, related to that old joke about ten different eyewitnesses having seen ten different things. All the drugs, the groupies, the sex - nothing matters much to Thomas, but as he tries to decipher what he has photographed in the park, he rediscovers passion. He becomes an artist lost in his art. But the closer he looks, the more abstract things become. Every step he takes toward decoding the images carries the solution even further away. Thomas will never understand what he is seeing, because like all of those around him, he survives at the surface and doesn't know how to dive deeper even when he wants to.

Antonioni manages to both critique rather savagely the politics or lack thereof of this embryonic era and become one the shining examples of it. The mod crowds are seen as burnt out but unable to quite make that push to the next level of awareness - a society trapped between two worlds. They've managed to throw off the shackles of 1950s repression, but their freedom comes without meaning or direction, leaving them adrift, sitting listlessly and without passion at a Yardbirds concert or simply staring off into nothing a hashish party. The impetus that would push them forward - namely the war in Vietnam and large-scale social upheaval - is only just beginning to influence people, and even then in only the most cosmetic of ways. The characters are images without meaning. But just as he tears apart the culture around him, Antonioni builds it up again through the very existence of his film calling for some meaning to be applied to life, and doing so in a way that shocked, puzzled, delighted, and outraged viewers. His film pushes the boundaries of what was acceptable at the time, not just in the obvious way of onscreen sex and drugs and nudity but in the more meaningful ways of how one tells a story, or refuses to tell it, and how one photographs a film. Plenty of movies embrace the op-art vibrancy and colors of the early 1960s on the surface, which is the problem as far as Antonioni is concerned. Like the characters in the film, they are there for the spectacle. They need to grasp more than the pretty colors and nice dresses. They achieved their freedom; now they have to do something with it.

Blow Up is one of those sharply divisive films that is as loved as it is hated. It demands the viewer do a lot of thinking and a lot of work, and then it refuses to give you any sort of obvious pay-off for what you contribute. The murder will never be solved. Thomas will never come to any sort of revelation about himself. No one will ever step forward and give some well-written soliloquy explaining the film's meaning. If you're not prepared for it, I would imagine the whole thing could be a bit of a let-down. What I found, however, is that the movie's power is in its ability to linger. It's sort of like how I felt watching Wicker Man for the first time, though I don't know that I would exactly put the two films up against one another. But like that film, Blow Up has the ability to stick in your mind, to make you feel as you are watching it like there is more at work than what you are seeing. And that, in my opinion, is absolutely bloody brilliant. Antonioni doesn't just make you ponder the theme; he makes you part of it. He makes you feel it. And like Wicker Man, which shares beautiful composition set in a curious and insular subculture, the film becomes increasingly haunting and hypnotic the further away from it you get. You become Thomas, only hopefully without the various aspects of his character that make him a bit of a prick.

In this sense, Antonioni has made a movie about the movie he is making without it being one of those "film within a film" deals, and his final conclusion, if it is indeed a conclusion, is a bit sad. Thomas chases the meaning of the photographs he has taken, but he never gets there. And in the end, everything he has done vanishes. One of the subtlest yet astounding little tricks has Thomas catching a glimpse of his mysterious woman outside a club, only to watch her vanish seemingly into thin air. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert remarks on this same scene and says they sat there and watched it frame for frame and couldn't for the life of them figure out the exact moment she disappears. "There is an uncanny scene where he sees her standing outside a club, and then she turns and takes a few steps and simply disappears into thin air," Ebert writes. "We ran the sequence a frame at a time and could not discover the method of her disappearance; presumably she steps into a doorway, but we watched her legs, and they seemed somehow to attach themselves to another body." Once again, Antonioni has made the viewer into his subject, has us examining his film frame by frame to decipher how things were done, just as Thomas pores over his increasingly impossible-to-read enlarged photographs. Just as the woman disappears, so too does the body, and the photos. And eventually, even Thomas himself vanishes into thin air during the film's final sequence.

In a rare moment in which one of my ramblings actually connects to something about the actual subject, my whole spiel in the beginning about how these older, astounding films are being forgotten fits squarely when with one of the over-arching themes of the movie. Antonioni seems to be acknowledging that everything will fade. His own film will one day cease to exist simply because it has been forgotten, or subsequent generations can't decode its meaning. Not only does Blow Up not solve this mystery; everyone and everything involved with it simply vanishes, though in a way much more creatively and artistically satisfying than, say, Monster A Go-Go's finale. And heck, the fact that Antonioni seems to resign his work of art to fading away is a good reason to keep it around just a little longer.

It's impossible, at least for me and perhaps for you, to avoid comparing this film to the one for which most cult films know David Hemmings, Dario Argento's Deep Red. In fact, the connections between this film and that run much deeper than the simple inclusion of David Hemmings as the central character: an artist who witnesses something crucial in a puzzle yet can't quite decipher what it is he has seen. The way the story goes, it was his frustration with Blow Up's lack of narrative resolution that drove then film critic Dario Argento to launch his own career, and Deep Red was his answer to Blow Up. Argento loves to play with perception and give audiences puzzles, but though his imagery is often fantastic and grotesque, he is at his heart a logical man who has to fit all the pieces together and solve the mystery in his films. Putting his film next to Antonioni's makes for interesting companion pieces. Personally, I think despite whatever criticism of Blow Up might exist that is thought-provoking and well-written, the best commentary on it remains Argento's reaction, which was to go out, hire the same actor, and make his own movie in response - which probably pleases Antonioni to no end, since that was sort of the reaction for which he was fishing.

Thematic and artistic discussions of the merits of Blow Up have gone on for decades now, and with any luck the DVD re-issue will keep the movie from fading. Just like the movie, we're not going to be solving any of them here today. We just don't have the space and I, quite frankly, don't have the motivation (or skill) in this format to properly order my thoughts into a cohesive argument. So I will leave you with the various points, ask that you see the film, and allow you to go from there. We shall move, then, to more concrete discussions regarding the film.

The performances are wonderful. Most of the people are props, and the only ones attempting to engage us are the arrogant Thomas and shady Jane (Vanessa Redgrave). They are the only two characters meant to seem the least bit alive. Hemmings became a 60s icon thanks to his role here, and he is indeed wonderful. Thomas is not a sympathetic character, but he's not a total bastard. He's rude, sometimes condescending, often irritable, but he acts less out of malice than out simply out of boredom. He is at once irked by the shallow world around him and unable or unwilling to detach himself from it. So he wanders from one party to the next in a state of ennui. Yeah, that's right, baby. You never thought you'd see the term ennui in Teleport City, did you? Well, it just never came up, but it's one of those words that will get you through film studies classes, like "juxtaposition" and "mise-en-scene." Did I spell that right?

Like most art cinema of the 1960s, the look of the film is entirely gorgeous. Antonioni and cinematographer Carlo Di Palma paint a vivid landscape that wanders from featureless gray streets to vibrantly colored windswept parks. The city seems almost uninhabited. In a film about photography, filmmaking, and the elusive nature of reality and the image, composition is of the utmost importance, and every shot here is put together with the utmost care. It is through these images far more than the dialogue (which is sparse and simplistic) and the characters (which are thinly drawn) that the director pulls you into the story - only fitting given the themes of the film. Yet as hypnotic, vibrant, and arty as the film looks, it never sinks to the level of bombast. Everyone is, after all, too world-weary at such a young age to be garishly colorful and peppy.

Antonioni was, like Takeshi Kitano later on, famous for his films' slow pace, long takes, and expansive stretches of silence. Though Blow Up is one of the director's more kinetic films, you wouldn't exactly call it a flurry of activity, which is fine by me. Years of rapid-fire, thrill-a-second MTV-era films have left me utterly numb and disinterested and feeling a bit like Thomas, so I've come to re-appreciate the value of a languidly paced, quieter film. Almost all the music here, and there isn't much of it, comes from within scenes. A radio playing or a band performing. Vast stretches of the film, are without music - crazy, I know. There are films made today that have music in every single scene, sometimes several songs in one scene, never allowing for a moment of rest or contemplation. Blow Up has some beautifully quiet scenes, culminating in the final scene of Thomas, stymied by the disappearance of the girl, the photos, and the body, watches a group of young art students engaged in a pantomime tennis match (once again indulging the notion of images that don't actually exist). When it does show up, the jazzy score by Herbie Hancock is superb, but this isn't a film that survives by filling itself with lots of timely hits. Just as the streets of London seem peculiarly empty, so too is the soundtrack strangely desolate.

I think any lover of film has to see this. Make up your own mind about whether or not you liked it or whether or not it has any value or is simply a big load of pretentious garbage, but see it. Like me, your education will have a large hole in it until you've plugged it with this movie. As far as my opinion is concerned, I thoroughly loved the film. It becomes something of an obsession you want to visit over and over again. It is utterly captivating and sticks with you long after you've finished watching it. Though the characters are jaded and cynical, the movie itself is full of reserved energy and possibility. It earns its hype. And best of all, it gives you something to ponder without giving you answers. If it gave you answers, then the process would be over. But it's open, and you can think about it, have to think about it, and discuss it. With any luck, this and many more older films that still remain as cutting edge now as they were four or five decades ago, will continue to get discovered and discussed and won't simply vanish into thin air.

Labels: Director: Michelangelo Antonioni, Drama, Netflix Diary, Year: 1966