We all have movies we love.
Some of them are great movies. Some of them are terrible movies. Love does not care. Love is unreasonable. Love is blind. We love what we love, and the louder you love it, the better.
One of my favorite things is sharing a film I love with someone. Even if they don't love it the same way I do, that experience imparts something about you to that person. When you share something you love, you are sharing a part of yourself, and there is nothing more vulnerable or personal than that.
I don't think of these movies as the canon or the official library or anything that formal. These are all just movies I keep in my hip pocket, movies I've filed away as part of my own personal ongoing film festival as worthwhile and notable.
This is an ongoing list, one without an ending. This is The Hip Pocket.
Blow-Up
Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, David Hemmings, John Castle, Jane Birkin, Gillian Hills, Peter Bowles, Veruschka von Lehndorff, Julian Chagrin, Claude Chagrin, Jeff Beck, Chris Dreja, Jim McCarty, Keith Reif, Jimmy Page
cinematography by Carlo Di Palma
score by Herbie Hancock
screenplay by Michelangelo Antonioni and Tonino Guerra
English dialogue by Edward Bond
based on the short story “Las Babas del Diablo” by Julio Cortazar
produced by Carlo Ponti
directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
Not Rated
1 hr 51 mins
I think of Blow-Up as a quintessentially modern film.
That’s weird, though. When I take a step back and look at it from a broader perspective, we’re talking about a movie that was directed by a man born in 1912. The film was released over a half-century ago. This is a movie that is absolutely pinned to a time and a place, but because of when I saw it and what it meant when I first saw it, I have always thought of it as something shocking and new and bold. Of course, my own first viewing was over 30 years ago, so that speaks to the way a moment in time can feel frozen for us, and how deceptive that can truly be.
By the time I saw the film, there was a legend built up around it. The film was a landmark, a Cannes festival winner that helped shatter the stranglehold that the Hays Code had over film culture. It’s a film that had such a strong stylistic signature that you could feel its influence in other films for decades. On a personal level, though, the film was important for me because it landed on me at an age when I was trying to figure out what I thought of the world. I remember watching the opening of the film at that point, with all the young people running through the streets, and thinking about that feeling, that wild freedom, that rambunctious desire to make noise as a way of thumbing one’s nose at the prisons of convention. Now, at 51, I watch those scenes and mainly just think, “Would you look at those assholes?” It all just seems like a lot of very silly noise. I am struck by how removed I am from that first viewing, from who I was as that first viewer, and part of what makes a movie like Blow-Up so rewarding and rich as a subject to return to again and again is just how much room Antonioni leaves for you to have your own experience with what he’s made.
The first ten minutes of the film throw you in without any context or explanation, and it’s one of the games Antonioni is playing with you throughout the film. Where’s this guy coming from? What was he doing there? At first, he looks just as bedraggled as everyone else, and they’re all walking out of this flophouse, this shelter for homeless men. There’s something very furtive about the way things unfold, and it’s clear he is being sneaky for some reason. Watching him walk out of there and then climb into an expensive convertible, obviously, this guy’s playing some kind of game. At first, I thought they were being released from some kind of correctional facility, like he’d been in jail for a short time. Even once I figured out what the place was, it still seems like a disorienting place for the film to start, especially when you see the life he jumps back into.
I don’t think I’d call this a thriller, and one of the many things that makes the film special is the way it dodges any easy attempt to categorize it. Antonioni’s work before this was acclaimed, but it was definitely more oblique, an attempt to expand film language. He was part of a deeply experimental moment in popular cinema, and he managed to make real inroads in the international market with movies like L’avventura, L’Eclisse, and Il Deserto Rosso, turning Monica Vitti into a movie star in the process. He seemed almost allergic to the conventions of narrative, determined not to do things in any typical way. He wanted viewers to make connections between things, to decide for themselves what things mean. La Notte takes place over one long day and night as a married couple implodes, and while that sounds straightforward, that’s not the experience of watching the movie. Clearly, what Antonioni was chasing was the way life feels, the way whole worlds unfold in an evening or in a series of conversations or in a look across a room. Like James Joyce chasing the feeling of consciousness on the page, Antonioni was after the feeling of life itself, the chaos and the joy and the wild narrative coincidence of it all.
Blow-Up was his first English-language film, and it feels like the international audience was hungry for it. It’s hard to believe now when you look at how infantilized mainstream tastes have become, but the late ’60s were a period of enormous cinema literacy on the part of the audience. A movie like Blow-Up could be an event, and a director like Antonioni could make a genuine down-the-middle hit out of something that feels today like a great chilly little riddle that doesn’t really care what you think of it. I am jealous of anyone who was an adult during this period of cinema culture. It must have been thrilling to go sit with an audience that didn’t know what they were getting and witness one transformative masterpiece after another, casually tossed up on whatever arthouse screen you found.
It must have been equally thrilling for filmmakers to know that audiences would meet them halfway, that audiences wanted them to push and challenge our ideas about what a movie could be. Blow-Up meanders, but it’s not without purpose. It takes a while before we even know what he does, but that first big sequence of him shooting models says volumes about who he is as a character precisely because of all that gradual aimless wandering the film does before it. All of a sudden, this guy’s barking orders, all energy, completely in charge of what he wants. That’s not the person we’ve seen up till then, and that near-total personality switch makes it seem like this is the job, this is the thing he does to pay for everything else, and he has utter contempt for the job, the models, and the entire charade.
For a while, we just follow this unnamed photographer (I know he’s officially named Thomas, but the film doesn’t use his name at all) through his day, and there doesn’t seem to be any purpose beyond the observational. None of this works unless you cast the right person, and Antonioni lucked out with David Hemmings. There are some people who broadcast volumes of information even when they’re standing still, and there are other actors who you could give ten pages of dialogue and they’d never manage to communicate a real emotion the entire time. Hemmings gives a silent performance for long stretches of the film, and he’s magnetic. You can always tell what he’s thinking or feeling, like he radiates this inner life. That’s perfect for a film where there are long stretches with no dialogue at all, and Hemmings manages to be interesting with very little to actually do.
Take the scene at the park. By this point, we’ve spent a fair amount of time with him, and we’ve watched him at work. Now when he’s taking pictures, it’s a very different energy. He’s exploring now. He’s not ordering the world… he’s recording it. This is his art, not his commerce. This is where he can do something that is for himself, and the change in his energy is profound. There’s almost a little-boy energy to him here. You can imagine the way he fell in love with photography, then realized he had a marketable skill, and the way he has learned to hate that particular thing he does with a camera.
When he first spots Vanessa Redgrave, he’s got an idle curiosity about her at best. He’s certainly not fixated on her. He’s just taking pictures. It’s her reaction that suddenly adds value to the pictures he snapped, and it’s her persistence that turns things into a mystery. He snaps a few more pictures as she’s running away, and that’s where it becomes a genuine problem for him. It’s funny because the film both is and isn’t ambiguous. When I first heard it described, before I’d ever seen it, it sounded like you were never sure if there was a body or not. Then you see the film and there’s a scene where he very definitely finds the dead body right where he believed it would be. Then again, everything else that happens after that point makes it less and less clear what happened or what the photographer can prove.
The centerpiece of the film, of course, is the prolonged sequence where the photographer becomes convinced he’s actually got something. While I know there are photographers who still use a physical process, most of modern professional photography is now a digital endeavor, and these scenes where he blows up the picture, looking at different details, is fascinating. Darkrooms were a great gift to directors over the years. There’s something inherently visual about the process, all the chemicals, all the contact sheets hanging up to dry, the different light at different steps in the process. I may not know how to develop a picture, but I’ve seen enough movies where someone ruins them by opening a door that I know it’s a delicate chemical process that requires some finesse.
You can read this as a metaphor for the way filmmakers work. You have the actual day of the shoot, which is exciting, but you are often struggling with your performers or with the location or with the light or with some unexpected element. You don’t really know what you have until you get back into the editing room and you start to look at it. That’s when a film comes to life… or doesn’t. It can be invigorating or it can be defeating when you’re finally looking at what you got on film. Sometimes you’ll realize you got something you didn’t expect at all, and some detail that seemed unimportant on-set becomes crucial, the thing that holds the entire edit together. This sequence captures that excitement, the thrill of seeing something come into focus as you work on it.
There are two films that I think of whenever I think of Blow-Up, and taken as a loose thematic trilogy, I think they all play like variations on the same tune. Brian De Palma’s Blow Out is absolutely a riff on Antonioni’s work, although it’s a Hollywood sound engineer who is at the center of the event, and it’s a sound that he records that becomes the key to unlocking a mystery. De Palma leaned into the thriller idea that’s somewhat inherent to the premise, something Antonioni was never going to do, and you get a sense of the difference between them as filmmakers from how they approach this basic idea. Antonioni is interested in the feeling, the notion of sticking your hand into something and being unable to easily extricate yourself. There are more questions than answers at the end of his film, and that’s very much the point. No one ever explains anything to him. He never gets his satisfying conclusion where Vanessa Redgrave tells him who the man was or why he had to die or where the body went or who else was involved. There’s no big suspenseful showdown at the end. There’s no sense that anyone even knows there was a murder. Something happened. He captured it on film. And then the film vanished. So did anything happen at all? De Palma’s film is all explanation. We know who the guy who died was. We know why he died. We get enough of an idea of who’s behind it, mainly because we meet the guy who did it. Things are tied up neatly on a narrative level, even if the ending is brutal and ice-cold. There’s nothing ambiguous about what De Palma does.
Landing right between the two was Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, and I think it’s as good a film as Blow-Up, although it is chasing a very different point in the end. Harry Caul also works with audio, as a surveillance expert, and he captures something he wasn’t supposed to hear. As a result, his carefully structured life begins to unravel, and in Harry’s case, paranoia eventually consumes him. Like Hemmings, Gene Hackman gives a performance that depends largely on his reactions, and like Hemmings, he’s great at feeling totally natural, totally at home in the world of the movie. I love it when actors get comfortable with the nuts and bolts of the job of the person they’re playing. Watching Hackman work with his sound equipment, watching Hemmings work with his camera… they’re great because they make it feel like this is something they’ve been doing their whole lives. The expertise is character-defining and your actor has to really sell that for the film to work. I get the feeling the photographer in Blow-Out isn’t going to drop down the same kind of spiral that consumes Harry Caul. This may be something that nags at him, something he never fully forgets, but it’s not the defining event of his life. It’s just something that happened, some crazy rabbit hole he fell down for a few days, and it feels like once the evidence has been destroyed, he’s free of it. He’s lucky, and I’ve got to imagine that nine out of ten other filmmakers would have told the version of this story where he keeps pushing and things keep escalating and he eventually has a showdown with the guy who was standing in the bushes with the gun. The power of the film comes in no small part from its refusal to even entertain that kind of dramatic narrative.
Stylistically, I can see why the film might have felt shocking when it was released. By today’s standards, the sexuality is quaint. The film might get a PG-13 at most. Hemmings doesn’t seem to have much affection for any of the women in his orbit, at least none of the models, and the sex we see here is hollow, transactional. They want something from him, and he’s happy to let them think they’re going to get it. He’s good at keeping these women at arm’s length, and he knows exactly what is going on, exactly what they want. It’s interesting to see how he plays that same game with Vanessa Redgrave, although she’s after something very different. Everything between them plays like a negotiation, like they’re sizing each other up. He’s still not sure why she’s so upset about the pictures, and he likes watching her twist and squirm. There’s a cruelty to the way he acts, part of that same contempt we see towards his work, but neither of them is being honest with the other. He gives her the wrong film; she gives him the wrong phone number.
There’s a prolonged sequence in the film that I always felt not only dated the movie but distracted from the larger ideas. Now I’m not so sure. At one point, the photographer catches sight of her and follows her into a club where he ends up watching The Yardbirds perform. It’s pretty cool to see The Yardbirds, and they’re good. It’s a great slice-of-right-now moment, but he never sees her in the club and the scene doesn’t seem to be connected to the larger mystery at all. I think this is like the scene with the guy who goes to dinner with Frances McDormand in Fargo, though, deceptive and actually important to the theme of the film. As the Yardbirds play, Jeff Beck’s amp continually fucks up. Beck gets more and more agitated, and finally, he smashes his guitar and throws the neck of it out into the audience.
The photographer happens to be right there and he grabs the broken guitar neck. After all, this is Jeff Beck’s guitar, right?! He runs out of the club, several other people trying to grab the broken piece from him, and then finally stops once he knows that no one is following him. Standing there on the street, really looking at the thing, he realizes he has no idea what to do with it. He drops it on the sidewalk and walks away. We see another person pick it up, momentarily intrigued, but they drop it as well. What was a valuable instrument just moments earlier turned into a momentary totem, this connection to the performers, this memento worth fighting over, and then just as quickly turned into trash on the street, abandoned completely. He went into that venue for a specific purpose, but he forgot what it was because of the music and the flash and the crowds. This murder that he’s “investigating” is just like this… something that catches his attention for the moment, but insubstantial. Every clue he has just falls apart in his hands, and once someone ransacks his studio, there’s nothing he can show anyone, no proof that any of it happened at all.
The ending of the film, once he realizes the body is gone and so are all of his photos, makes an esoteric point about our place in something that is observed, and I think it ties back to the point made by the Yardbirds scene. There’s a tennis game between mimes with no actual ball, and the photographer begins watching. By the time they accidentally hit the ball to him and he picks it up and throws it back, his observation of the match has made it more real, enough that we begin to actually hear the ball being volleyed back and forth. The photographer may not have anything tangible he can use to prove what happened, but it was real to him. And in the end, as he walks away, even his own image fades away, impermanent, gone but hopefully not forgotten.
Antonioni never had another mainstream hit on this level, and one suspects that was perfectly fine with him. Blow-Up feels like that perfect storm, a moment where a singular artist pursued his own interests but in a way and at a time that allowed it to connect to the larger mainstream. Blow-Up was a hit because of the way it perfectly captured the feeling at that time that the world you were looking at with your own eyes was crazy, bubbling over with unseen violence and danger, but in a way you couldn’t quite quantify or prove. 1966 was just on the cusp of the ‘60s becoming what we think of as “the ‘60s,” and Blow-Up speaks directly to the anxiety that everyone felt, the tension between the new and the old, and it articulated it in a way that wasn’t direct, but that managed to nail the feelings anyway. It may be more mod than modern when we look at it now, but it remains a potent and fascinating picture, and my own appreciation of it has only grown over time.
This review was originally commissioned by Josh Cook, and it’s being provided for free to you as a reader. If you dig it, consider subscribing to Formerly Dangerous for only $7 a month. And if you buy a whole year at once, it’s even less!