Blow Up | David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave

Blow Up | David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave | Antonioni rocks

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Blow Up

	Blow Up David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave Warner Home Video, 2004 average customer review:based on 157 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Taking photographs of a couple making love proves deadly when the photographer enlarges the image and discovers murder. The film and pictures are stolen from his studio and the body vanishes. In this elegant balance of deciet and trickery, the photographer must question the reality of what he has actually seen.

Tennis anyone?

Today, I will be writing a review of Michaelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film Blow-Up. It will be a meandering discourse as a means of distraction, a way of blurring my own awareness of the daily slough of lies and hate in which we drown (the news).

Please take your seats.

First, a simple question. Are you happy? It is a question much in the news. Mike Leigh's new film, Happy-Go-Lucky, is about a persistently cheerful woman. In the current off-Broadway play, Boys' Life, an adult/adolescent male tells a girl he is trying to pick up, "Nobody's happy. That's the way things are supposed to be."

Recent studies show that people are happy in Denmark and in most Latin American countries, regardless of income. Money has very little to do with happiness, despite what Joe the Plumber may have been conditioned into believing. (Sorry, I reverted to the news there for a second.) And, I was taught in Sunday School that "happiness is not promised."

The best series currently on television is Mad Men, set in the early 1960s at an ad agency on Madison Avenue. These ad men have plenty of money and clearly are not happy. The men and women smoke and drink constantly, while holding meetings or holding their kids. The secretaries endure endless sexual harassment as a matter of course. Women pregnant out of wedlock hide their children in shame. Black people mostly operate the elevators.

(Republicans consider these the "happy days," speaking of which, have you seen Andy and Opie and the Fonzie's endorsement Obama?).

Then as now, the country was on the cusp of change. A great spiritual dissatisfaction with conformity erupted with the birth of a counter culture and a global explosion of culture and consciousness.

And that brings us to Blow-Up, Antonioni's famous depiction of London in the 1960s. Blow-Up is about what happened after the culture of conformity collapsed. The commentator on the DVD notes that Blow-Up is the most philosophical movie MGM ever released. Existentialism still is a part of the vernacular and the characters in the film - like those in Mad Men - are struggling with the Beats, Jean-Paul Sartre, music, art, meaning, and reality itself. The war in Vietnam loomed over everything, even when it was suppressed into the background.

Blow-Up emerges out of the time that was lampooned in the Austin Powers movies, a time of gawdy colors, hip nonconformity, overboard pop and op fashions, marijuana parties, sexual license, rock and roll.

The most famous scene is that of the photographer (played by David Hemmings) shooting fashion model Verushka, straddling her as the two of them achieve a simulated sexual crescendo, the camera lens substituting for a phallus.

Antonioni's first color film, Blow-Up created something of a sensation when it was released, not the least for a scene of an orgy with the photographer and two teenage girls, rolling naked on a curtain of purple paper. I know that's what caused my high school friends and me to sneak into the Thunderbird Theater. But I digress.

There are innumerable iconic scenes and styles in Antonioni's masterpiece, which is itself as much a visual work of art as any of the photography or paintings depicted in the narrative. Even the opening credits - across an expanse of artificially painted green grass - set the stage for a consistent canvas of broad strokes of color. Every scene is a composition, every shot a thought.

We first meet the photographer as he is secretly taking images of down and outers in a homeless shelter. Later, he thinks he is filming a man and woman having an affair in the park, but later - upon developing the film and blowing it up over and over - concludes that he may have witnessed a murder.

Or did he? Was there a dead man in the grainy enlargement? Or just a blurry image no different from the abstract, meaningless paintings made by his artist friend?

Images may hypnotize and deceive, but so do the sounds of the film. We hear the wind blowing in the trees - the only sound during long stretches of "silence" - during the opening credits, during the episode in the park, and again at the very end of the film, a haunting, ominous reminder of our ultimate powerlessness over nature and our own natures.

Then, in shocking contrast, the photographer stumbles into a dank rock and roll cave, where an impassive audience stands inert while The Yardbirds crank out a churning number, "Stroll On." There's Jimmy Page, biting his lip and hammering out an explosive locomotive riff! There's Jeff Beck, smashing his guitar against the amp!

Vanessa Redgrave, the woman in the clandestine affair in the park, offers herself to the photographer in his studio, trying to get him to relinquish the roll of film. He teaches her how to listen to jazz, how to smoke against, not with, the flow of the music.

And then there is the model Verushka again, as the photographer runs into her at a stoned party. No one will listen to the photographer's claim of having witnessed a murder.

"I thought you were supposed to be in Paris," the photographer says to her.

"I AM in Paris," she claims, delivering the best line in the script as she walks past, statuesque and in a reality all her own.

And that is the point. Nothing is real, one way or the other, in Blow-Up. In the final sequence, a mime-playing band of hippie pranksters start a game of tennis in the park, using an invisible ball. The photographer observes. The sound of the wind in the trees is all that can be heard. Or can we hear the ball bouncing in the court?

The ball is hit outside the fence to where the photographer stands. The pranksters wait for the photographer to pick it up for them. Will he? Will he play along, rejoin the living in acceptance -- or even celebration -- of life's illusion?

Is he, like the philosopher Chuang-tse, a man who dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he is a man?

I could now attempt to draw a parallel to the contemporary situation, during which we have spent eight years in the throes of lies and illusion, at the same time war wages on in a distant country. But I'm giving that a pass.

I will add, however, that the main character in Mad Men is a dissatisfied ad exec named Don Draper, someone who in fact discusses Antonioni with the woman he's having an affair with. He also is a phony, having assumed the identity of a fellow soldier who was killed when they served together in Korea. Even his wife doesn't know his real name, his real story.

This, perhaps not coincidentally, is the exact premise for Antonioni's subsequent film, The Passenger, starring Jack Nicholson, who plays a reporter interviewing an African warlord, who assumes the identity of a man who dies in his hotel room. But let us save that discourse for another day.

Last week, I got a letter from an old friend in Chicago, someone with whom I tromped through Lincoln Park, dodging tear gas, during the Festival of Life at the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968, 40 years ago.

He wrote, "Tonight on TV we saw the Chicago 10 documentary. I swear I saw you in several scenes about halfway through. You are front and center in one scene wearing your helmet (I think it's you). In another, an interview with Allen Ginsberg, you are just to the right in the background. That is definitely you."

I rented the DVD from Netflix and watched the scene over and over. That was definitely me, standing behind Allen Ginsberg. I think. It all seems so long ago. Was it all a dream? Are we in Paris? Am I a butterfly? Are we happy yet? Is the election over?

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Antonioni rocks

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.

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Awesome and inspiring!

The passion and art of photography are melded in this film so well. David Hemmings is brilliant. What a player, sorry I meant actor ;-)

Mind you, things aren't always what they seem in this film. Watch the film to know what I mean!

Top movie! 5 stars.

Misguided censorship ruins the DVD

Michelangelo Antonioni's view of Britain in the 1960's was a groundbreaking film that appeared at a time of turmoil and change in the lifestyles and mores of the Western world. Britain ruled supreme in pop music (Beatles, Stones, Animals) and in fashion (Mary Quant, Twiggy, Carnaby Street). The jazz stylings of Herbie Hancock were used as the soundtrack for the film, but the live Rock performance in the film was performed by the post-Clapton Yardbirds with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. To reflect the London fashion scene, Antonioni used the German model Verushka in a simulated photo shoot that has been called the sexiest scene in film history.

(As an aside, Verushka's real name was Vera and her father was one of the German army officers who attempted to assassinate Hitler in 1944; with the failure of the plot, he was executed and his family was interred in labor camps.)

When I first viewed this film in 1967, I was enormously impressed. The photography was brilliant and the audio was the first "surround-sound" I had ever encountered. (During the park scenes, I kept looking over my shoulder to see what birds had gotten into the theater!) When I again saw this film about 1975, it looked dated and out of fashion. Now, more than 40 years later, I see that it is a true period film that reflects much of the character and thinking of the time.

David Hemming's character in the movie (known as "Thomas") is not satisfied with his success as a fashion photographer and wants to become a "reality/documentary" photographer in the genre of Dorthea Lange or Henri Cartier-Bresson. To this end, he pretends to be a street person and spends a night in a doss house, a sort of cheap barracks accommodation with shared sleeping and bath facilities. Thomas sneaks his camera into this establishment in a paper bag and surreptitiously photographs the other guests as they shower and dress in the morning. The clicking and whirring sounds of his camera and the stop-action showing the photographs that were produced constituted the opening scenes of "Blow-Up". Thomas intends to use these and other such photographs in a book that he hopes will establish him as a "real" photographer. For some incomprehensible reason, this entire opening sequence has been deleted from the Turner/MGM DVD release. Instead, the movie opens with Thomas leaving the doss house in the morning, after the original opening photography sequence. In the original movie, Thomas then returns to his parked Rolls-Royce, places his camera in the glove box and drives away. We viewers are surprised; is he stealing the car? This scene has also been deleted. In this DVD release, he suddenly and inexplicably appears, already driving the Rolls down the street.

With the deletion of the movie's opening scenes, it is difficult to make sense of some of the later scenes in the film. At one point, Thomas meets with his publisher (an early appearance by Peter Bowles, later known for his performances in "Rumpole of the Bailey", "To the Manor Born" and "The Irish RM") and reviews the photographs he had taken at the doss house. This is the only brief chance viewers of the DVD have to see anything of the opening scenes.

Those opening scenes are important because they set the theme of the film. Thomas first appears as a down-and-out man, but turns out to be far from it. Viewers are put on notice that they can never be sure what is real and what is make-believe. This continues through the film's final scene, where the make-believe of the mimes' tennis game becomes more real than the murder that Thomas accidentally photographed.

The DVD is marred by additional deletions. Thomas develops the roll of film he shot in the park, studies the photos and sees something. (We viewers never really see what it is.) He makes a series of larger and progressively blurrier enlargements. Finally, he makes his largest blow-up, examines it, and instead of hanging it out in the open as he had the others, he conceals it between a pair of cabinets. This seems a fairly long sequence in the original film and it is only later that we learn of its significance. Of course, the name of the film comes from this scene. I can only assume that Turner/MGM felt this sequence was boring and deleted most of it from the DVD. When Thomas later finds his studio has been robbed, we don't even know what was taken or why he has this one enlargement left. There are other odd little deletions here and there in the DVD; perhaps there were some bad frames in the original film from which the DVD was made. When I purchased the DVD, I expected the half-second flash of full-frontal nudity of the 17-year old blonde actress to be deleted; it was sensational at the time, but not really a critical element of the movie. What I did not expect was the evisceration of the basic theme of the film by the deletion of the important opening scenes.

I might describe this DVD as a "Bowdlerised" edition, but perhaps "Turnerized" may be more correct. The DVD includes commentary by Peter Brunette, an academician. author and presumed expert on the films of Michelangelo Antonioni. I have carefully listened to his commentary twice through, and can only conclude that he never saw the original film. His comments refer only to this DVD edition. At one point in his commentary, Mr. Brunette notes that the clothes worn by Thomas at the doss house mysteriously disappear. Yes they do, because of another nonsensical deletion!

I would not normally recommend a DVD with so many deletions, but it seems that this flawed DVD is the only version of the film that is currently available. To see it in this form is better than to not see it at all. I give it 3 stars instead of the 4+ that the original film deserves.

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