Blow Up
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Movie Reviews of Blow Up
Movie Review: Artistic Perspective on Cameras Distortion of Time & Place
Summary: 5 Stars
Amidst swinging London, students painted their faces white in order to fundraise, and weed was easily obtainable. Pleasure seemed to be sought in every corner, as Puritanical values once had held down the societal freedom to express self, while a new bohemian period was emerging. Philosophy in regards to everything was pondered as nudity emerged as an art form as well as an exploitation. French New Wave had already influenced the world as had the dreamy visions of Fellini, psychosocial introspection of Bergman, and philosophy behind human choices in Antonioni's films such as L' Avventura (1960). The world was about to explode into a colorful spectacle as artistic freedom and expression were pushing the boundaries of censorship and moral value. In the middle of the cultural anarchy, a story about a photographer helped pushing the boundaries, which was one of the milestones that was needed for artists and alike as they sought true freedom.
Blow-Up focuses on what is within each frame of each scene, which is also how the film's hero, Thomas (David Hemmings), sees the world. Thomas is a successful photographer, in a monetary way, as he drives a Rolls Royce convertible, donates money, has a big studio, and has several photo shoots with beautiful models. Yet, Thomas does not like the job as a model photographer, as many of his models seem to be oblivious to what he is trying to accomplish while capturing the aesthetics of the moment. The photographic moment must be caught as if the camera was not there, however, it seems as if many models lack this knowledge or understanding. This ignorance comes across as an insult to Thomas whenever someone stands in front of his camera, which seems to put him in a severely bad mood. Nonetheless, he lives to see what he captures through the lens as he brings the camera wherever he travels.
There are a selected few models that know how to pose properly for Thomas in order to create an aesthetically emotional moment that enhances the texture of the image, which Thomas attempts to capture. In the beginning of the film Thomas returns to his studio dressed in rags while a stunning model is waiting for the photo shoot with him. The model is barely dressed--just enough to cover up her personal parts. Thomas begins the shoot as the model moves seductively and he is slowly drawn to her, as seaman would to the singing of a siren. Closer and closer Thomas gets until they seem to merge into one. The scene is very suggestive in a sexual manner, which seems to please both. The model effortlessly repositions herself in enticing manners as Thomas provides her with admiring comments that urges her to continue with her visual seduction through the lens.
Thomas' true passion for his profession is to capture the present time where the truth is revealed, which is done in all places of life. The truth seems to be the way a person genuinely appears in solitude. Thus, a voyeuristic portion of Thomas appears as he seeks to see the world the way it is without him being present. An early morning Thomas ventures to see his agent, but stops by an antique store. Nearby the small antique store there is a small path that leads to a park where he discovers a couple, a woman and an older man. The couple appears to be of some sort of relation to one another, yet it is difficult to see exactly what the couple is doing. They could be hugging and kissing, yet they could be arguing. Thomas takes cover by trees and bush while he captures the ambiguous moment with his camera. The true nature of the couple will be revealed later through the photos that Thomas develops in his darkroom.
Symbiosis seems to exist between Thomas and the camera as Thomas seems to need the camera as the camera needs him in order to be used. There is an emotional distance between Thomas and reality as the camera seems to be the boundary of moral judgment. The camera offers him an opportunity to observe the world at a safe distance, yet he can partake in what he sees. The safety truly appears when the audience notices the difference between when the picture was taken and when the picture is viewed, as time and place change and leave him at a safe distance from the truth. Time and place appear to be the divider that is provided to Thomas through the camera, which offers him a safe role in his photographic society without responsibilities, or guilt. It also offers him the opportunity to relive a moment, or an experience. Similar notion could be drawn to the experiences that the audience can revive in many museums throughout the world where emotions such as desire, fear, sadness, happiness, joy, and more seem to be trapped in time and place.
Michelangelo Antonioni does a marvelous job directing as each scene offers something for the audience to ponder. Compared to L' Avventura (1960) Blow-Up provides a similar drifty theme, which at times seems to wander aimlessly. Nonetheless, the context in which Blow-Up takes place is unique and despite its directionless touch most scenes seem to be perfectly choreographed together with the outwardly meticulous mise-en-scene. This provides a sense of natural beauty that Antonioni captures through the camera. In addition, the natural beauty offers the concept that there is beauty everywhere, and it most certainly surrounds all viewers too, which should be captured and revived when needed. Blow-Up offers a truly artistic perspective, which could be found tedious for many, however, it is what encourages the processes of contemplation as Thomas is devoured by his passion. Thus, let the artists have their freedom as the audience longs to experience the stored sentiments, which offers morals and enlightening lessons.
Movie Review: Be Advised "Pretentious" Shall Not Be Found Here
Summary: 5 Stars
The word art is sullied with numerous derogatory connotations by the vox populi. It has become habitual for people (callow reviewers who sputter inane opinions through an internet-based retailer) to deride any work they do not fully comprehend. Without question, some work is not intended for some people. Narrow thinking requires equally narrow answers, therefore those of us who raven for substance have to search elsewhere to sate our appetites. Often a work comes along that precipitates a great diverse outpouring of thought. The reception for said works is usually demarcated into either of the following camps: those who persistently laud the effort, showering it with the kind of encomium usually found in the gnarled tongues of pamphleteering zealots, or those who contemptuously debase the film - their efforts being only to tear down the exceptional work that they have not the temerity nor the initiative to create (see the rebuke of blue velvet as supplied by that stammering lout roger ebert - ugh, my spine shakes in contempt for him...ugh).
Blow-up is a shining example of this. It repulsed as many critics as it attracted. Even the curmudgeonly sour-crotched crone Pauline Kael took time out of her busy schedule of ridiculing Woody Allen to praise the film. Mostly, i think, this is due to the singular nature of the film. There is a very isolating aspect to it, where the viewer has to be appeased slowly, nourished sporadically by only meager bits of action, and have faith vested in the competence of the director. Nothing really happens in the film until the final scene, where the main character dissolves in a verdurous field. It's akin to Videodrome in a way, where the ideas that the film presents are infinitely more potent than what is shown on the screen (though the vagina on james woods' chest tends to linger).
Ostensibly, this film concerns a murder mystery. A virile, young photographer in mod london is taking pictures in a small secluded park. In the middle of photographing an embracing couple, he is pursued by the female party. She implores him to hand over the film, vaguely ranting about all of the complications in her life, how she doesn't desire anymore. He stubbornly refuses to acquiesce to her demands, responding that it is his obligation to take such photos.
Certainly, this would appear suspicious in the minds of an audience and its implications are numerous. However, this element of the story is barely utilized. It is touched upon briefly, as we see the woman (Vanessa Redgrave) only once more. Instead the film follows the photographer through his hedonistic trysts with lascivious young would-be models. It is only later in the film that he develops the pictures which seem to suggest malice. Yet even upon contemplating such foul goings-on he seems unperturbed, not in the least deterred from his usual behavior. He doesn't think for a second of the victim or the perpetrator, his thoughts are solely centered on what these photos could do for his career.
Blow-Up is exceptionally well made. There are certain moments when the camera flits with the kind of terpsichorean grace of a ballet dancer, moments where the viewer is given an exhilerating sensation throughout their body (especially the scenes of the main character driving around in his car), moments that are so exquisitely shot it's difficult to imagine anyone having such a perverse distaste for the film.
At the conclusion of Blow-Up i was effected in a way few films have ever effected me. It belongs to an exclusive dearth of films that have sent my thoughts soaring and given me a renascent vigor for the artistic efforts of others, a film that further braced my intractable faith in cinema. It is indeed an arduous film to sit through for the casual viewer, as it doesn't offer much in external action. However, the way it questions our perceptions of reality (which i wouldn't dream of spoiling) with that one scene at the end completely (to me) vindicates its place in the venerable pantheon of great films. The fact that a film can so succinctly but precisely capture the nature of existence on celluloid is as good a reason as any to seek out this film, given that you are the kind of person to do so. I think people have a genuine aversion to that which they are incapable of processing. Instead of meditating on what aspects of the film they don't comprehend, they are wont instead to throw nothing but slander and scurrilous accusations its way, moaning about pretention and pseudo-intellectualism. Those people obviously don't understand Antonioni's work, nor will they ever if they remain so obstinate in their narrow mindedness.
Movie Review: Antonioni rocks
Summary: 5 Stars
Blowup was Michelangelo Antonioni's first English language film, made in Great Britain, in 1966, and it's a flat-out great film, at a crisp 111 minutes. It was nominated for two Academy Awards; Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay- by Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, and Edward Bond- adapted from the short story Las Babas Del Diablo, by Argentine writer Julio Cortazar, and won the National Society Of Film Critics title as best film of 1967. Having first seen the two Hollywood films most influenced by it- Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, in 1974, and Brian De Palma's Blowout, in 1981, I did not know quite what to expect, since the former is also a great film- arguably Coppola's best, and the latter is a merely solid Hollywood thriller. Blowup is not only a great work of art, but a great work of philosophy. It is arguably as great as Antonioni's earlier Italian language masterpiece, La Notte, and the film caused a bit of a scandal upon its release, both for its showing casual sex and drug usage, and for its female nudity. Of course, forty years later, this all seems a bit silly, as tame as the scenes really are to the modern eye.
The story follows an unnamed photographer (David Hemmings) who may or may not have inadvertently captured a murder on film, which may or may not involve a mysterious young woman (Vanessa Redgrave) who later visits the photographer in his studio, ready to have sex with him to retrieve the photos before he develops them. Both of the main characters are never named in the film, despite numerous reviews that call the two main characters Thomas and Jane. In watching the film twice- with and without commentary, I found zero in the way of evidence to support this claim of their being named, so I take it as one of those bits of information that gets repeated ad nauseam by bad critics until accepted, despite its being untrue. Possibly there were press kits that named the two characters, but they are not named within, nor in the credits. Yet, this very lack of names only makes the film all the more interesting, for not knowing the truth of these two characters only heightens their mysteriousness, and the events that ensnare the both of them. The photographer even sardonically comments in the film, when he's about to lay two girls- or `birds', `What's the use of a name?'
Hemmings is a famed photographer whom we first see emerging from a London flophouse, just one of a crowd- not unlike the Carlo Battisti character in Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D., where he's gotten some great and intimate photos of the poor, which he plans on using in a book. He posed as a poor guy to get them, yet hops into his convertible wood paneled Rolls Royce. We then see him rather misogynistically mistreat a high fashion and clearly pre-anorexia nervosa anorexic supermodel (Verushka) in the grotesque Twiggy vein- whom, in a famed scene, he erotically `mounts', as he photographs her from above as she lies on the floor, five models who pose behind dark glass screens, and the two `birds' in pink and green pantyhose. We also find out he lives next door to an Abstract Expressionist painter, Bill (John Castle), and his girlfriend, Patricia (Sarah Miles), whom he has an unspoken attraction to, and who seems to return his feelings. In describing his paintings, Bill says he has no intent when he starts a painting, and that meaning only comes later. This is a key to the film, or at least the viewer's warning on how to take what they see....Others have laid bare the plot.
Like Akira Kurosawa's classic film Rashomon, Blowup works on many levels, yet allows us to participate in the interpretation to an even greater extent than Rashomon. Photographs can lie- just ask AP photographer Eddie Adams, who, a few years later took the infamous photograph of a Vietnamese police commander shooting a Vietcong prisoner in the head. What was not shown was that the prisoner had killed many innocent people. By going beyond being a mere whodunit, and engaging the very the meaning of meaning, itself, Blowup (and it is Blowup, not Blow-Up, as on the DVD cover) illustrates the differences between the writer and the visual artist. The former elicits significance from things that need to be seen, while the latter does so from that already seen. In truth, there could be plausible and non-criminal reasons for all that happens in the film, and only the dull life of Hemmings spurs him on to imbue significance. That we can never know the real truth within the film is the real truth as to why this film never loses its hold in repeated viewings. On that score, no comment is needed.
Movie Review: Red Sun
Summary: 5 Stars
BLOW UP (1966) was Michelangelo Antonioni's second color film, and his first in English. Interestingly it was his first film that had a male protagonist. He is considered the master of abstract cinema, and this film continues in that vein. The cinematography was presented in very abstract ways, with most shots framed oddly, blocked by beams, banisters, photographic equipment, windows, and furniture. The camera made no effort to clear these objects in order for us to see the actors. Primary reds were the dominant colors, and in London that seemed easy, passing the double-decker buses and phone booths and pubs, all painted blood red. He painted one apartment building bright blue just for the contrast.
Swinging London of the Mods in the mid-60's seemed so wonderfully dated, captured in its spectacle. Those beehive hair-dos and mini-skirts, smoking that demon joint, the beginnings of the British invasion, that hard rock sound presented in the film by the Yardbirds, the first stages of long hair on men, and the casual way nudity and promiscuity is handled; all old hat to us now, but very brazen then.
I loved the way Antonioni gave us the skewed perspective of an unnamed photographer snapping candid shots of a young couple in the park, while the director shot him doing so; an overlapping sense of three perspectives. What the movie camera saw was not exactly what was snapped by the photographer. I loved the parallel of the photographer hopping over the low fence to hide in the bushes to shoot some shots, and then later discovering in exactly the same pose and framed shot, the sniper, the killer, behind the fence in the bushes. And of course the obvious parallels of the artist's abstract paintings, just so many random dots of color, until he capped the painting with some point of view, some detail that drew it all together -and the blow ups themselves, those photos of photos, with pixels blown up so large that they too look like abstract paintings to be interpreted.
Some have argued that the park represented Nature versus the pandemonium of the city, and yet what is a park? It is just an artificial large garden planted in the middle, or on the edge of a city, and it "represents" nature. We go there and have picnics or our lattes and imagine that we are off in the forest or field. This illusionary concept is important to Antonioni. Add to this the sense of each of us remaining strangers midst the teeming masses. The photographer and the mystery lady (David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave) both remain nameless. People seem to know them, but never refer to them by their name; very existential. It has been suggested that the director gave us several plot lines that were never meant to make sense, like the antique store scenes; and yet that would be a place that a photographer might haunt. His suggestions that his agent would bid on the store, that he might be a real estate speculator is never explored. Unlike a real photographer who asks permission to shoot a subject, Hemmings always shot secretly; even in the opening scenes, where he pretended to be homeless to shoot those old men in the shelter. Then there is the issue as to what was reality. Hemmings thinks he saw a corpse in the park when he visited it again, and yet he was not carrying his ever present camera. Why not? It seems to suggest that any of us alone witnessing something has no validity. We must find another human being to collaborate our find, to verify our conclusions.
Then the director gave us the "Merry Makers", the 8-10 Mimes that traveled around in an open jalopy, panhandling and performing, providing a prologue and epilogue. Their wordless game of tennis became the most "real" thing the photographer encountered, as he accepted their non-reality. As Antonioni made the character disappear in the grassy field, it made us wonder if any of the story had happened, or was it an allegory or dream. A complex and provoking film, it never fails to tantalize, a provoke attempts to make sense out of a senseless act.
Movie Review: The labyrinth of realities ....
Summary: 5 Stars
Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up" features David Hemmings as the photographer. This film follows the photographer into a park where he takes photos of a couple embracing and playing. It is later when he develops the photos that he finds out that he has evidence of a murder in the backgrounds of the photos.
The movie is as much about the photgrapher in the film as it is about Antonioni, who is also the photographer of the movie. In the movie when Hemmings develops the photos he is trying to put together the reality of the scene, and he is trying to impose a narrative on the scene he has viewed just as the director himself through a sequence of scenes is creating a narrative. Can reality ever really make sense though? Here, the photographer is going over photo after photo in order to try and recreate the past moment that he witnessed. Interestingly enough while we are watching the scenes there is no sound or music except the haunting sounds we heard in the park of the leaves of the trees rustling in the wind. Through these sequences of shots a marvelous build up of drama is created as we speculate about what he is going to find. Eventually he does find a man in the woods holding a gun, and believes that he has prevented a murder. It is through a series of shots like these that Antonioni's genius for film making is conveyed. After blowing up a few more photos he finds a body and realizes that someone was killed after all.
There is a scene that is important in the film that shows an artist in his studio who makes a comment that he often doesn't know what he has made until after the fact. And it is only after he has had some time to view the painting that some aspect of it begins to have meaning for him. It is at this point that he has then imposed meaning on the image. This could be said to be the way Antonioni works through his own work as a director. When the photographer goes back to the park to see if the body is there it is to verify the reality of what he has seen in the photos. After he sees the body in the park he then must find someone else in order to verify his view because reality only has meaning in a social context. But then when he goes back to his studio he finds that someone has stolen the photos, and so the evidence of the murder is gone. When he returns to the body in order to photograph the body it also is gone. Now he can't prove that there was a murder. The blown up photos look like one of Bill's abstract paintings where there was no meaning until the artist imposed one on the image, just as Hemming's character too has imposed meaning on the photos he has taken. By blowing up the photos it is as if he has revealed layers under layers to find meaning, but has he found any meaning if he can't now prove it to anyone else? Vanessa Redgrave's character appears again and then disappears. Constantly we are led through this labyrinth where the truth remains elusive. Meaning is shown as only having meaning if it is in a social context as meaning is a social construction. Hemming is never able to verify his reality since he can never get anyone to see the corpse.
In the last scene, with the mimes, we have a group of people participating in the illusion of a tennis game which the photographer witnesses. We are shown that the imaginary tennis game has meaning because this group of mimes buy into this reality. Eventually Hemming's character also buys into this reality as he goes to retrieve the imaginary ball that was hit over the fence. Even the camera buys into this reality as it too follows the flight of the imaginary ball which flies over the fence and rolls over the grass. Ultimately Hemming's character disappears which seems to reaffirm that this is the director's reality that he has created.
Blow-Up is about these layers of meaning that are constantly being pealed away as if there is no true reality that can be seen since reality is constantly shifting depending on the context or point of view.