Blow Up
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Movie Reviews of Blow Up
Movie Review: Blow-up: meaning-indifferent configurations
Summary: 5 Stars
Blow-Up is based on a short story by the Argentine writer, Julio Cortazar, whose work was once one of the staples of modern literature courses in the late 60's and early 70's. The film, in any case, focuses on a single day's adventure in the life a photographer named Thomas whom we first meet exiting a shelter for homeless men in London. He has just spent the night and early morning there-in cognito-taking pictures for a book of black and white photography. Leaving the shelter, he quickly returns to his studio where he has a morning and afternoon of fashion photography to do. But bored, he sneaks from the studio to visit an antique shop. He wants to buy it but when he can't find the owner, he steps outside and-ostensibly to kill time-begins to shoot a roll of film. He eventually wanders up a path and into a park where he spies a young woman and an older man, whom he begins to photograph from behind a fence. As he moves from the fence to one tree and another, the young woman eventually spots him and, in a panic, comes running to ask that he hand over the film. He refuses. And later, when he returns to the studio, she's mysteriously there to greet him. His curiosity piqued, he decides to develop the film. At first glance, there doesn't appear to be anything unusual or remarkable about the photos or the lovers. But, upon blowing up the pictures, he suddenly sees something odd in their embrace. The woman appears to be staring-purposely-to the side. She is staring at the bushes which, in the black and white grain of the enlargement, seem to hide something just a little more solid than the blur of the surrounding foliage. Is it a person? A voyeur, perhaps? A conspirator? Thomas blows up the photos again and again-and then again-and as they grow grainier, less definite, they also grow more suggestive. Finally, in the last series of enlargements-pushed to an informational extreme-a horizontal flare appears against so many dark islands that once read as grass and leaves. It may be the older man lying beneath a bush-dead. Stunned by the seeming revelation, Thomas will spend the rest of the film trying to make sense of what he has or hasn't witnessed (through an eye that is not his own) and trying to get someone-anyone-to listen and believe. But he will only find the impossibility of doing so in a world that seems more and more and more a loose string of unrelated events, a succession of verbal and visual non-sequitors that lead him to doubt-not so much what he has seen-but what it might possibly have meant.
Antonioni is a great formalist. He is renowned for the graphic beauty of his images, the collision of planes, aesthetically wrecked around the random advances of aimless, lonesome characters. In fact, the visual composition almost always overwhelms the character or characters figuring in the shot. It is impossible to enter into their thought because everything, including the characters, is pushed flat. There is only surface-no third dimension where some revealing instant might await discovery. But it is this very strangeness, the muted metallic colors, the broken narrative, the wonder-inviting quiet-finally-the vagueness that evoke mystery. The technique stands in for the statement; we are offered only a succession of impressions, like so many subtly graded glazes over the surface of an otherwise finished painting. And the serried wash of sensations underscores the way we attempt to give meaning to random elements that eventually dissolve into their original meaning-indifferent configurations.
Movie Review: End of the game
Summary: 5 Stars
David Hemmings plays a bored fashion photographer. Bored because everything he deals with is fleeting and essentially meaningless. He is surrounded by art and artists and lives only through the lens of his camera. People are not important to him, only how they photograph. A book of pictures is his project. That is his contact point with "reality". He earns his living with the fashion photographs but the superfluity of that world leaves him with a wanting for a deeper confrontation with reality. And he gets that one day while taking random photos in a park. Only in the darkroom does he discover what he has found, a corpse. But now that he is confronted with something truly substantial he is uncertain how to act. The body lies in the park but he contacts no one but his agent. He is helpless to exist but as an observer. With the camera he is free to manipulate reality but without the camera(or some other art form serving as interpreter) reality is impenetrable, indefineable, unsolvable. Antonioni uses very little dialogue rather he paints his mysterious picture of the world with sound (while in the art saturated atmosphere of the studio we hear a great Herbie Hancock Jazz Soundtrack) and the abscence of sound (when in the park we hear only the unordered sounds of nature which makes those scenes all the more mysterious). Hemmings lives in the noise and eye pollution of the sixties but seeks his peace and stillness in the quiet park. During the Yardbyrds rock performance the crowd is stone silent giving the film viewer the feeling that the crowd like Hemmings is searching among all the noise for something too. Finally the ultimate creatures of silence, the mime troupe, sum up all human activity as they quietly parody the human comedy. Hemmings lead has gone cold, the corpse has dissappeared. Walking through the park he watches the mimes play a pretend game of tennis and slowly he catches on. The game is allegory for all lifes quests, and the trick is to keep the imaginary ball in the air. Hemmings urge to discover something substantial has led him right back to the surface of things. With the mimes there is a sort of shared recognition of futility but a connection has been made with his fellow artists on some level. In Antonioni's version of the pop world we are all artists chasing a mystery doing our own kind of imaginary dance with "reality". A great and satisfying movie inspired by a great short story writer, Julio Cortazar. The faces in the movie are unforgettable: a young Jane Birken as a want to be model, a young Vanessa Redgrave, Verushka....Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck....And that great Hancock soundtrack, coolest jazz soundtrack I've ever heard. Great London sixties atmospheres from swinging studio to street life to lordly mansion parties. So if you like foreign feeling films(Italian director but made in English) and have a certain affection for the sixties this is your masterpiece.Movie Review: Times they are a-changin '
Summary: 5 Stars
Vanessa Redgrave (* 1937) made her world-wide film-debut in "Blow Up" (1966) with her very slowly and erotically stripped back (as mysterious, murder-hushing Jane) - and she created thereby a long-lasting image. With her special sort of secrecy she built up a profumo-christine-keeler-affair-impression. If one examines Redgraves developing image profile more exactly - alike photographer Thomas (played by David Hemmings) in Michelangelo Antonionis movie is working in the darkroom making blown up photos, then one discovers, that nothing remains as it is in the beginning (and that is the message of "Blow Up" too). In the year 1968 she played among other things the legendary dancer Isadora or the sexually tractable Mrs Codrington (in "The Charge of the Light Brigade"), however 1980 (Playing For Time) she picked out a completely oppositely role: a Jewish survivor of a concentration camp (Julia). The power of pictures is a rapidly changing matter also in the case of Redgrave. This sort of trend-progress encircles the entire identity of an actress, but as a reacting subject with quite strong radiant emittance strength in addition, an actress again can arrange retroacts on the medium profile. It nevertheless surely does not remain without reaction-strength that Vanessa Redgrave strove for roles in films, which were occupied with the cultural heroes of British history so for example with Lord Byron or Churchill. As the sex-crazed, Christ-obsessed Mother Superior fantasising about Oliver Reed in Ken Russell's "The Devils" she won her longstanding disapproval of The Vatican. Visiting Fidel Castro (1962) or Yasser Arafat (1972) made two more different sorts of contracting parties. Finally in the film "If These Walls Could Talk 2" she played a lesbian woman (in the atmosphere around 1961 without any social acceptance), in "Howard's End" (and also in "Little Odessa") we experience Vanessa as a critically ill, death-nearing person (they didn't need to paint the face largely for this role). A way back to the "Blow-up"-striptease-performance surely would not be applicable for her today (image reasons), particularly because she briefly had been busy with lesbian ambitions. Nevertheless she is a mother of two daughters (Natasha and Joely Richardson) and one son (Carlo Nero, from a second partnership). In 1990 she argued around for the Marxist British labour party; she appeared in Sarajevo or donated 2002 a large benefaction, in order to support a Czech, anticommunist person, 2004 she agitated like a British counterpart of the US Heroe Jane Fonda against the Iraq war of the Bush administration. Times they are a-changin ' - however: everything Vanessa Redgrave begins, unquestionably is filled with power and possesses strength emittance ...Movie Review: Anonioni shows much and tells little.
Summary: 5 Stars
Blow-Up, as the title suggests, is about the pictures. David Hemmings is the photographer putting together a book about the down-and-out in London. He decides to provide contrast for the end of his book by taking some shots in an idylic London park. He sees in the distance Vanessa Redgrave holding an older man in what appears to be an embrace. Hemmings begins photographing them and then is spotted by Redgrave who demands the negatives. Hemmings refuses.
Redgrave shows up later at Hemmings' studio. He gives her what he says are the negatives, but we find out moments later he has kept them and proceeds to develop his pictures.
The closer he looks at the blow-ups of his shots, the more intrigued he becomes with what he sees, which is a gun pointed at Redgraves' lover and then later a grainy shot of what may be a body. Hemmings goes back to the park, finds the body, and then returns home. Later his studio is vandalized and all his pictures are stolen.
This plot line appears thin for a two hour film and many Amazon.com reviewers are bored to death with what they think is a pretentious movie about people impossible to like and a story bereft of action and dialogue.
The Hemmings' character is impossible to like and that is just the point. Director Michelangelo Antonioni is more interested in what Hemmings' camera sees, and that is a world invisible to the naked eye. Hemmings' camera gives us frozen moments in time that are decisive moments in the lives of his characters. Only by looking closely with great patience can we unravel the mystery of life and death played out in a park on a sunny afternoon.
Blow-Up is a great mystery story and the mystery goes deeper than the murder in the park. Can we trust what we think we see? Clearly not. For those who would like to further their understanding of this question, I recommend Akira Kurosawa's great film Rashomon. Can we trust what the camera sees? Perhaps, but not from the long distance lense of Hemming's camera. He needed to go back to the park to confirm what he thought he saw.
Antonioni is a skillful director; he shows much and tells little, and he is careful to give us everything we need to make up our own mind. Our challenge to is see without prejudice, without projecting our own images and perceptions onto the blown-up pictures before our eyes. Highly recommended
Movie Review: Never ceases to fascinate!
Summary: 5 Stars
I used to check out the video of this from my local public library (not the kind of thing one finds on the shelf at Blockbuster), and found myself going back to it again and again, over time. I was drawn into its pace, its quiet, its wandering. Now, the DVD - not a perfect package, certainly, but well worth the price. Cheap-o case, slim "extras" - what the hell is with that "music-only" soundtrack, anyway? It really is just the visual of the film playing with the added music (what little there is), no dialog or other sounds, not even the Yardbirds stuff!While the audio commentary is potentially off-putting (be prepared for obligatory academic fussing about male dominance, "male gaze" etc), the guy manages to stay focussed on what's on screen at the moment, and even comes through with a few worthwhile observations - particularly the film's motif of things losing their meaning when placed out of context (the one photo left behind after the burglary, the broken guitar fretboard taken from the club). While a regular viewer might observe the photographer being kind of snippy (and - gasp! - rude) toward his models, the critic complains of his "brutal" treatment of women; when Hemmings is taking pictures of Veruschka, and then stops when he feels he's done taking pictures, our audio professor sniffs at the photographer/male oppressor using and discarding the poor, sensitive, victimized model. Sheeesh! What was he supposed to do, cuddle her?
I suppose it is a relevant topic in the context of Antonioni's other work, but the guy takes too much delight in skewering the main character, who we are supposed to like, after all. (Pretty much the same thing happens with the critc's commentary on the Criterion DVD of "Straw Dogs").
Overall though, the commentary is not too intrusive, and the more relevant insights, and the power of the film itself, offset any rhetorical groaners one might hear. I'm not sure if I ever noticed the apparent glimpse of the Vanessa Redgrave character on the street at night, quickly vanishing in the crowd. The use of the director's camera-eye to separate itself from the main character's point of view is another element to the sense of mystery. About the only moment in the film that doesn't ring true for me is the catatonic audience at Ricky Tick's - one cannot listen to the Yardbirds (live, no less) in such a state.