Blow-Up (1966)

by Andrew Sarris, from The A-List

Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up is the movie of the year, and I use the term "movie" advisedly for an evening's entertainment that left me feeling no pain (or Antonioni) whatsoever. It is possible that this year's contributions from Ford, Dreyer, Hitchcock, Chabrol, and Godard may cut deeper and live longer than Antonioni's mod masterpiece, but no other movie this year has done as much to preserve my faith in the future of the medium. If you have not yet seen Blow-Up, see it immediately before you hear or read anything more about it. I speak from personal experience when I say it is better to let the movie catch you completely unawares. One of its greatest virtues is surprise, and the last thing you want is to know the plot and theme in advance. Unfortunately, most of the reviewers have given the show completely away. Judith Crist coyly conceals the plot gambit in Gambit but she spills the beans in Blow-Up with no qualms whatsoever. Why? I suppose she considers Blow-Up too esoteric for audiences to enjoy in the course of mindless moviegoing. It's a pity since, purely on a plot level, Blow-Up provides more thrills, chills, and fancy frissons than any other movie this year.

The excitement begins with the opening credits, which are stenciled across a field of green grass opening into a pop blue rhythm-and-blues background of dancing models perceived only partially through the lettering, which, among other things, implicates Antonioni in the script and heralds Vanessa Redgrave, David Hemmings, Sarah Miles, and a supporting cast of unknowns. The billing is misleading. Miss Redgrave and Miss Miles make only guest appearances in what amounts to a vehicle for David Hemmings and Antonioni's camera. Blow-Up is never dramatically effective in terms of any meaningful confrontations of character. The dialogue is self-consciously spare and elliptical in a sub-Pinteresque style. Fortunately, the twenty-four-hour duration of the plot makes it possible for Antonioni to disguise most of the film as a day in the life of a mod photographer in swinging London town. What conflict there is in Blow-Up is captured in the opening clash between vernal greens on one plane and venal blues, reds, yellows, pinks, and purples on another. The natural world is arrayed against the artificial scene; conscience is deployed against convention.

The film itself begins with more obvious contrasts. A lorry loaded with screaming revelers made up in garishly painted mime faces. Cut to derelicts trudging silently out of flophouse with bundles and belongings. One would suspect Antonioni of facile Marxist montage in his cross-cutting between mimes and derelicts, between noisy merriment and quiet morning afterment, but one would be wrong. The mimes are merely an Italianate mannerism in London, and the derelicts are simply the grubbier side of a photographer's visual concerns. Nevertheless, the cross-cutting functions by itself without any explicatory dialogue or commentary. Even the protagonist is identified for us only by degrees. Antonioni can afford a leisurely exposition for two reasons. First, we are going to be looking at Hemmings all through the movie, and a slightly mysterious materialization will not hurt him at the onset. Secondly, the emphasis throughout is not so much on the protagonist himself as on what he and his camera see and on how well he blends in with the background. Gradually we are filled in not so much with a plot as with a routine--a day in the life of a candid cameraman.

Blow-Up abounds with what Truffaut calls "privileged moments," intervals of beautiful imagery while nothing seems to be happening to develop the drama or advance the narrative. Very early in the film, the camera confronts the photographer's long black convertible head-on at a crossroads. Suddenly the entire screen is blotted out by a blue bus streaking across from right to left, followed quickly by a yellow truck. That sudden splash of blue and yellow defines Antonioni's mood and milieu better than any set of speeches ever could. Wherever Antonioni's camera goes, doors, fences, poles, even entire buildings seem to have been freshly painted for the sake of chromatic contrast or consistency. Part of Antonioni's ambivalence toward his subject in Blow-Up is reflected in the conflicting temptations of documentary and decoration. After painting the trees in The Red Desert a petrified gray, Antonioni feels no compunctions about painting an outdoor phone booth in Blow-Up a firehouse red. If reality is not expressive enough, a paintbrush will take up the slack. This theory of controlled color is carried about as far as it can go in Blow-Up before its artistic limitations become too apparent. Antonioni is heading in a dangerous direction, but the Pirandellian resolution of the plot saves him on this occasion from the stylistically bloated decadence of The Red Desert

The ultimate beauty of Blow-Up is derived from the artistic self-revelation of the director. Blow-Up is to Antonioni what Lola Montes was to the late Max Ophuls, what Ugetsu was to the late Kenji Mizoguchi, what Contempt was to Godard, what French Can-Can was to Renoir, what Limelight was to Chaplin, what Rear Window was to Hitchcock, what 8 1/2 was to Fellini--a statement of the artist not on life but on art itself as the consuming passion of an artist's life. As David Hemmings moves gracefully through off-beat sites in London, his body writhing to meet the challenge of every new subject, we feel that Antonioni himself is intoxicated by the sensuous surfaces of a world he wishes to satirize. Curiously, he is more satisfying when he succumbs to the sensuousness than when he stands outside it. The unsuccessful sequences--the rock 'n' roll session, the marijuana party, the alienation conversations between Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave in one scene and Sarah Miles in another--all suffer from the remoteness of cold chronicles recorded by an outsider. Antonioni is more successful when be forgets his ennui long enough to photograph a magnificent mod fashion spectacle that transcends the grotesquely artificial creatures that lend themselves to the illusion. Even more spectacular is the teeny bopper sandwich orgy that digresses from the main plot. An entire generation of miniteasers and inhibited exhibitionists are divested of their defenses in a frenzied choreography of bold beauty and heartrending contemporaneity. The stripping away of pink and blue leotards may explain why the Metro lion has decided to skulk away from the opening credits like a timid pussy cat scared of the Production Code.

The fact that Antonioni can be entertaining even when he is not enlightening makes the eruption of his plot all the more stunning. It starts simmering in the midst of apparent aimlessness. The photographer-protagonist wanders out of an antique shop, drifts by chance into a park where he ignores a grotesquely sexless park attendant jabbing trash with her pike, passes by a tennis court where two children are playing a clumsy brand of tennis, photographs pigeons afoot and in flight, then stalks a pair of lovers up a hill. At a distance, it looks like a tall girl pulling at an older man in what later will be recalled in retrospect as a spectacle of carnal Calvary. Here Hemmings becomes a weak-kneed voyeur as he scurries behind fences and trees with his telescopic lens. This is raw, spontaneous Life in an ominously leafy setting. Vanessa Redgrave, she of the incredibly distracting long legs and elongated spinal column extended vertically through an ugly blue-plaid minisuit making her look at a distance like a seven-foot girl guide, in short, Vanessa Redgrave via Antonioni rather than Karel ("Morgan!") Reisz, runs up to Hemmings to plead for the pictures, but everything in the movie has been so fragmented up to this time that we accept her trivial invasion of privacy argument at face value. Hemmings refuses to return the negatives and later tricks her into accepting bogus negatives while he develops and "blows up" the real ones. What seemed like a tryst in a park is magnified into a murder. Death, which has hovered over Antonioni's films from the very beginning of his career, makes its grand entrance in a photographer's studio through the eyes of a camera that sees truth whereas the eyes of the photographer only see reality. This then is the paradox of Antonioni's vision of art: The further we draw away from reality, the closer we get to the truth. Vanessa Redgrave, an irritating, affected personality in her "live" scenes, comes to life with a vengeance in the "blow-up" of her photos.

From the moment of his artistic triumph, the protagonist becomes morally impotent. He has discovered truth, but is unable to pass judgment or secure justice. He returns to the scene of the crime that night and finds the corpse of the murdered man. He visits a neighboring artist and mistress only to find them furiously flagrante delicto. He returns to his studio and discovers the theft of his blow-ups. He is physically frightened when he hears footsteps and begins to cower in a corner of his decor. It is only the artist's mistress (Sarah Miles) treading as beautifully as ever on her cat feet and in her transparent dress. He tells her about the murder, but she is too preoccupied with her own problems to give him much help. The rest of the film threatens to degenerate into one of Antonioni's shaggy-dog Odysseys to futility when the photographer returns to the scene of the blown-up crime. The wind is blowing. The body is gone. The leaves flutter with chilling indifference. Then suddenly the mime revelers from the opening sequence reappear in their loaded lorry and disembark at the tennis court. Two mimes play an, imaginary game with somewhat clumsy gestures while the others watch with silent, swivel-headed concentration. Antonioni's camera begins following the action of the imaginary ball back and forth across the net until it is "hit" over the fence near where the photographer is standing. He walks back to the spot where the "ball" has landed and throws it back. He then begins swiveling his head back and fourth and even hears the ball bouncing. He smiles at his own susceptibility, but suddenly an expression of pain flashes across his face. The camera cuts to an overhead shot of the photographer, a self-judgment of both contempt and compassion. Antonioni, the ex-tennis player who once sold his trophies to live, has come out in the open with a definitive description of his divided sensibility, half-mod, half-Marxist. Unlike Fellini, however, Antonioni has converted his confession into a genuine movie which objectifies his obsessions without whining or self-pity. As befits the classical tradition of moviemaking, Blow-Up can be enjoyed by moviegoers who never heard of Antonioni.