Blow-Up: Sickness of (Z)eros

Shooting blanks

Obviously this deserves a lot more attention than what’s about to follow. It’s one of the quintessential art house films, it’s what made Antonioni even cooler with the English-speaking world, and it’s one of the most engrossing bits of cinematic existentialism ever composed. Like in L’Avventura, the mystery within the film is never solved; only the search is given attention, with a heavy emphasis on subjectivity. As the main character gets bored and wanders, so also does the camera. (At least in Blow-Up the main character at the beginning is still the main character at the end.) It’s not a stretch to think about the lyrics, “Strawberry Fields/ Nothing is real” while watching this film. Much of it takes place in a green park, a weird, enclosed and also public space that’s literally on a different plane than the rest of reality, whatever that is. It’s a postmodern Eden with a sort of stairway to Heaven one takes to get there.

Dislocated

Once there, happenings are a strange mix of poetry, reality, and myth. A serpentine woman tricks a man into his own murder, and a none-too-innocent bystander watches most of it transpire, developing an obsession over it precisely because the woman begs him to let it go. He never reports the murder, and ultimately he doesn’t care. He ascends into his loft where he develops and blows up photographs of the episode, clearly a reference to a similar character in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. If Laura Mulvey is right, the darkroom in that film stands for a kind of repressed id, a realm where the character can be himself in all of his shame and where he grants access to no one. (See also Norman Bates’ basement in Psycho.)

Tint-Id

It’s in this realm where he accesses the grainy, distorted, yet supposedly “real” photos of what took place are developed (an interesting, revealing word). As quickly and easily as the photos come into “being,” they also disappear without a trace. Just as L’Avventura was a double entendre, capturing notions of the “adventure” as well as the “fling,” so also is the title of Blow-Up. The photographer enlarges the photographs, but in so doing he annihilates them and, somehow, himself. We, like the nameless main character played by David Hemmings, only see the photos in his upstairs, private, windowless space. Their disappearance, along with their graininess, make him wonder what really happened, if anything. At the film’s conclusion, the character’s disappearance over the ultra-green (unreal?) grass call into question his existence and what the spectator has seen, or thinks s/he has seen. After all, preceding his dissolution, he gave up on reality. He takes part in a faux game of tennis with a group of hedonistic mimes. Outnumbered, when they depend on him to pick up the non-existent stray ball, he cooperates. So the question of what is real evaporates along with his very being.

Fetch & fade

If L’Avventura illustrated the sickness of eros, Blow-Up depicts the sickness of existence itself. What narrative there is in this film is at the mercy of the character’s whims. His point of being, and therefore his state of being, is in question from the beginning. He takes periodic breaks to become one of the fools that bookend the film. He acts unpredictably and egocentrically, knowing no other ethic. The lack of the real centrality of his ego, however, the problem of his self and identity, ruptures the heart of his ethic.

Goner

The photography that is central to the film contains a primal element, self-referentially alluding to cinema itself. Early shots in the film confirm this rather explicitly. The protagonist, before we know him to be the protagonist, departs a factory in the early morning in the midst of a mass exodus of workers. What is happening on screen, along with the placement of the camera, points back to the first-ever motion picture: Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory by the Lumière Brothers in 1895. Whereas that early film featured a static camera that did not stray from the group and did not discriminate from among the workers, the camera in Blow-Up does the opposite. It remains motionless only briefly, then wanders toward a particular individual who essentially sneaks into the film, where he doesn’t belong. This foreshadows his later sneaking into a murder where he doesn’t belong. In all of this, the acts of filmmaking and photographing are given a sinister edge. Any idea of the camera’s objectivity is obsolete, as it becomes clear that there are powers behind the operation of a camera. As in Peeping Tom, the operators are also powerless, however, wrestling with their own obsessions and fears.

Poser leaving a factory

Making out

Bored; how was it for you?

Russian dolls meet Nietzsche

Where is the "I"?

The Fall

Who's who?

Magnifying nothing

Obsessed with the copy

Spectre

Enveloped

Disappearing

Death = all that's real?

Self-confirmation

There's a lady who's sure...

 

 

Le Amiche: (Juxta)Posers

Having never seen a pre-L’Avventura Antonioni, wasn’t sure what to expect with this one. Was determined, entering into it, not to give it any kind of privileged “Antonioni” reading. Really wanted to look at it simply as a text, a film, a whatever, apart from favoring a distinctly auteur-ial bent. So much for that. Watching Le Amiche, one wonders if Antonioni’s so-called “new film grammar” heralded in L’Avventura was simply the first time someone else noticed it. There’s certainly a unique visual grammar afoot in Le Amiche, although maybe not as developed as in Antonioni’s 60s films. The foregrounding and backgrounding of characters is constant; so much so that it almost becomes odd when two or more characters aren’t separated by depth of field in a shot. This distance keeps characters disconnected by cinematography and body language. While on the same plane of existence they’re never quite on the same page. Often other mis-en-scene emphasize the distance, such as colors, postures, lighting, and states of being (living and dead).

Netted

Images of alienation are ubiquitos, though that’s an Antonioni buzzword. Too, the “sickness of eros” is everywhere. Like the quadrilogy in the early 60s, Le Amiche centers on female characters who are bored and/or sick with regard to love. And like those later films, there is no one at all in this film with a healthy love life. The whole world is diseased. Contemporary eyes are prone to see just rampant stereotyping: women who base their identity on their men and men who get bored with their women after a little sex. These films of Antonioni’s, however, have an unflinching frankness about the details of erotic boredom and its consequences.

Juxtaposed

What may separate Le Amiche most from later Antonioni is its harshness. The film begins with a woman attempting suicide and failing. It ends with the same woman completing the act after an inability to move past the circumstances that caused the initial attempt. The film refuses a cheap solution, rather focusing on the darker, perhaps more real half of existence that many films would rather suppress. The ultimately successful suicide may be darker than necessary for Antonioni to get his point across. This narrative element is rendered darker still with many characters in the film joking about the woman’s ineptness even to kill herself. Further, the film does not end with the suicide, but continues just long enough to emphasize the rest of “le amiche” and their men. Just because one life has ended doesn’t mean that the story, and its very real-world correlations Antonioni draws, are over.

Universal opening

Doubled foreground

Demoted action

Spaced out

Stoned countenance

Light & darkness

Backwards

Un'avventura

Don't take no credit card to ride this train

Quickies, Vol. VI

Waterloo Bridge (dir. James Whale, 1931): A refreshingly different pre-code film from the afore-discussed Red-Headed Woman and Baby Face, this one sticks to your basic melodrama motifs, very D.W. Griffith style but minus the epic scope. WWI bombs dropping on London form the catalyst for the melodrama, ending up with feel reminiscent of A Farewell to Arms (which came a year later) and the like.

The Dangerous Thread of Things (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 2004): Typical but atypical Antonioni. Great to see some of those big shots of alienation and juxtaposition again, along with perfectly square and perfectly diagonal angles like only a Neorealist who loves Eisenstein can pull off. Dialogue is atrocious. This probably would have worked better not as a silent film, but without any talking. Hard to see what the big guy is getting at, but apparently he sees his “sickness of eros” as having some kind of hedonistic cure.

Broken Blossoms (dir. D.W. Griffith, 1919): A case study of any issue within a hundred miles of gender, this one is a tight, cohesive, and theoretically pornographic (in its etymological sense) excuse to watch a bunch of people die: the macho male “ideal,” the helpless damsel, and the aww-aren’t-you-sweet foreigner who attempts to rescue said damsel before coming to his own pathetic end. So much for proselytizing Buddhism and spreading world peace; the poor devil goes from missionary to creep, in the end making life even worse for poor Lucy and her pure-evil father/husband figure Battling Burroughs. We have Griffith to thank or to blame for so many of these now-common features of narrative cinema. Check it out here.

Zabriskie Point

“Making a picture in America brings with it one single risk: the risk of becoming the object of a discussion so wide in range that the quality of the film itself is forgotten.” Though Antonioni said this about Zabriskie Point, and about making a film in the US, the principle is much broader than those topics alone. This was considered Antonioni’s “flop,” but of course prevailing factors may have led to that conclusion, rather than the film itself leading to it. Antonioni’s first stint in America, after the mammoth success of his first English-language film (Blow-Up), was undoubtedly overhyped. Antonioni chose a quintessentially American topic to illustrate a quintessentially human condition. But by depicting the youth counterculture movement of the Sixties, Antonioni was accused of naively identifying himself with the youth rather than “The Man.”

The documentary-style opening to the film is rather unlike Antonioni’s previous films, which are more like canvasses for his repainting of reality in highly aesthetic visuals. Similarly, his use of color is less overt than it was in Blow-Up, which was less overt than it was in Red Desert, his first color film. But to label Zabriskie Point as a “counterculture” or “protest” film does great violence to Antonioni’s work. In the same way that Antonioni portrayed mod London in Blow-Up not as London per se, but as his version of London, so Zabriskie Point depicts America and its youth movement at the time as Antonioni saw it, and as he saw it through the eyes of the youth themselves. Blow-Up was shamelessly and wonderfully shot through the eyes of David Hemmings’ character the photographer. Antonioni was considered a genius for shooting a film through the lens of a photographer within the film. But in Zabriskie Point, by removing the somewhat literal camera device from within the film, it seems that many have missed the subtlety that Antonioni would have his viewers watch through the eyes of another, for a particular perspective.

In superficial terms, this may be the most “realist” of Antonioni’s films, at least since L’Avventura. Whereas in the past, Antonioni mainly went with trained actors (at least for his protagonists), this film’s main characters were not only completely untrained but went by their given names (first and last) within the film. Likewise, the student group within the film went by the actual name of the group they were playing. The beginning scene signals a documentary feel that will pervade much of the rest of the film. Below the surface, however, the film is fairly typical of Antonioni’s previous works. To equivocate Zabriskie Point with all that he did before would do it a disservice, though. I noticed a major difference between this film and Antonioni’s others from before. The depiction of love was the purest and most optimistic yet. For once, a couple was not falling in love illicitly or in a one-sided manner. L’Avventura had a man and woman becoming infatuated with one another while they were supposed to be searching for his girlfriend and her best friend. La Notte had an unhappy marriage with a tortured woman and an unfaithful man. L’Eclisse had a single woman eventually allowing herself to be seduced by a man with a wandering eye. Red Desert may have featured a relatively stable marriage, but the husband and wife were all-too-willing to participate in an orgy, and the wife allowed herself put herself within reach of another man. Blow-Up‘s main character was utterly dispassionate, and saw woman only as an opportunity to play or as a means to his own ends. The one marriage shown in the film had a husband objectifying his wife and a wife who couldn’t think about him even in the most intimate moments. In Zabriskie Point, the two young innocents have a Romeo-and-Juliet-like affair, but of a purer sort. Their love is not unrequited, but it is impossible, considering the scenario in which the young man is caught. Though something resembling an orgy does appear in the film, it is relatively monogamistic, with a couple brief exceptions. (It was a time of free love, after all.)

Notes: fuzzy, unfocused, uncertain, flinching, disoriented camera of students in opening credits (similar to camera in opening credits of Red Desert). “Willing to die?” Fake “natural” scenery in city on buildings. Lots of billboards. Identifies himself as “Carl [sic] Marx” to police. Priest also booked, along with professors. Fake plastic people and animals in commercial being screened by Rod Taylor et al. “Sunny Dunes Land Development Company.” Outside RT’s office window is another building, American flag between. Shot of RT from below desk – tape recorder, RT, window, flag on next building. Can’t get sandwich, but gets a plane. RT’s office discusses “cost of blasting rock slopes.” Young boys chase her. “I needed to get off the ground.” Still shot of dead trees as they drive away. Barren but beautiful landscape. She says it’s peaceful, he says it’s dead. Antonioni as usual identifies with the woman. She says nothing is terrible when he says childhood was. Most reciprocated lovemaking in all of Antonioni? One with landscape – covered in dust. 90-degree shot switch after he aims gun at cop near outhouse – perspective changes radically. Investigative work by cops & press after plane robbery – unusual for Ant. Camera movement around plane after landing, shooting. She hears news on radio among cacti in desert. She avoids artificial pool, gets wet in natural falls. Explosion from many angles, repeatedly. Lawn furniture, Wonder Bread, newspaper, books, magazines – reminiscent of plastic commercial earlier.

Red Desert

It has been said that Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso) is Michelangelo Antonioni’s masterpiece. Maybe so. But each of his previous three has also been called his masterpiece. Antonioni himself made a shift with this film, but it was subtle enough that some have called it the end of his “tetralogy” instead of the first film to follow his famous trilogy. Aside from “Antoniennui” style, the main bit of continuity Red Desert shares with his previous three films is Monica Vitti. But as Antonioni had to point out, her character is the “exact opposite” of her character in L’Eclisse. Whereas in that film she played an internally driven character who could not commit to any relationship, her character in Red Desert is affected externally and is actually content within her marriage.

As the title implies, color is of great importance in the film. When Jean-Luc Godard interviewed Antonioni for Cahiers du Cinema, he asked if perhaps color replaced verbal language as the primary means of communication. Antonioni confirmed that it was. His first color film, Antonioni apparently painted both the man-made and natural surroundings to suit the mood properly for each scene. He wondered if it wouldn’t be more accurate to speak of “painting” a film rather than “writing” a film. Strikingly, the one scene in which Antonioni uses colors in the standard way is a story that Giuliana tells her son. The story is about a prepubescent girl (significant, considering the sort of scarring that Giuliana has experience in her adult life) who finds her own private beach. The water is transparent, the sky is blue, the rocks themselves appear human, and the only other sign of life is a beautiful frigate on the horizon. This contrasts with the rest of the film’s ultra-industrial setting, dark yet cold colors, polluted landscapes, and absence of real vitality. Where most filmmakers would use realistic lighting and colors for everything but the story sequence, Antonioni reverses it.

It has been pointed out by man, including Antonioni himself, that the film has to do with Giuliana’s inability to adapt. She lives in a world that is technological and industrial, but she longs for a more primitive and natural setting. She desires innocence, but the world is stained/colored by man. Antonioni’s point is to demonstrate the beauty is artificiality, or in “plastic,” as he and Godard have said. That there is beauty is a landscape never touched by man is intuitive. So he shoots scaffolds, beams, cement walls, smoke, and factories in a way as to exploit their extraordinary nature. Things like this are not found in the natural world. The world is moving in a technologically progressive direction, and we shouldn’t complain about that. Rather, we should adapt and embrace. Antonioni did well to point out that the problem with the world is not the technology, but humanity. All too easy it is to point our fingers at our own creations rather than back at ourselves, the real culprits of the malaise that dominates characters like Giuliana.

Antonioni points out a certain irony in the humanity-technology relationship. Almost whenever the two are pictures in the same shot, the human character is dwarfed by the machine or building. The person is always positioned at the mercy of man’s creation. The only exceptions are with Giuliana’s young son, whose robot is stuck in the “on” position while he sleeps (thus bumping into his bed constantly).

Many have also commented on Giuliana’s last words in the film. When her son points to the yellow smoke above the factory stacks, she tells him that the smoke is poisonous. Her son asks if birds die when they fly into the smoke. She replies that the birds learn not to fly into it. By pointing this out to her son, Giuliana begins to realize the solution to her paranoid schizophrenia. There are aspects of worldly existence to appreciate from a distance. A certain degree of interaction can be unhelpful and paralyzing. What is most remarkable to me about these final lines in the film is that they are so unique when compared to the trilogy. Antonioni comes much closer to actually answering the question or offering a solution in Red Desert than he did in L’Avventura, La Notte, or L’Eclisse. Certainly his next film, Blow-Up, offers anything but certainty in the end. And to be sure, Giuliana is not experiencing certainty or answers as much as an epiphany that her anguish can be avoided and perhaps even cured. For Antonioni, this is a strikingly bold statement.

Notes: opening credits: out of focus; barren, industrial; soprano singing. Camera slowly closes in on factories. Flames expelled from stack – continuity from ending of L’Eclisse? She buys 1/2-eaten panino – child doesn’t want any. Flame in background. Pan of blackened landscape, from industrial pollution – still smoking; garbage. Personless shots of factories. Married to important factory employer, but no food? Husband: “She always seems distracted when driving.” Much red from rust – matches Giuliana’s hair. Smoke/steam pours of of factory as two men watch; no explanation, but they whisper. Darkness: night and day. Husband tries to assure her of her temperature: “It’s normal.” He draws her close twice, she pulls away. She wants cool colors in her shop, to set apart pottery she will sell. She seeks out white walls to stand against; contrast, alienation. She sits next to cart – conveys lack of balance. Door frames. Huge scaffolds of red pipes. She wanders from crowds; prefers isolation. Industrial landscape different from natural one in L’Avventura? Dockhouse scene: red coming from inside small room – coldish white on outside; mattress is floor inside; upon entering, they only read, hang out; too bored for activity; aphrodisiac; she enters, is drawn only to mirror inside; “What do you feel” “Not much”; they all fall asleep. Two people in same scene often facing diff. directions. “You ask what you should watch. I ask how I should live. It’s the same thing.” As they watch through window a ship loading/unloading. Fear of infectiosu disease on boat sends her running away with others following. Four people disappear from her sight as fog rolls in; she panics, possible attempts suicide again? Boy’s drops: 1+1=1. 1st man in Antonioni who begins to understand? But he fails her – Corrado. “Why do I always need others?” Violating 180-degree rule constantly while in bedroom with Corrado. Shrouds herself in white sheet – red hair stands out – connection with dockhouse and red room. Writhing as if in pain. Man fails her – sickness of Eros. Though he is there, she wakes up alone. Dispassionate shots. Coda from beginning: Giuliana and son wandering around outside of factory. They exit the frame; shot remains on factory with industrial noises and yellow smoke.

L’Eclisse

L’Eclisse is the third film in Michelangelo Antonioni’s informal trilogy (or quadrilogy) from the early 60s, preceded by L’Avventura and La Notte. It probably isn’t mere coincidence that The Artist chose three feminine nouns for these titles, being that they are some of the only successful films made by a man from a woman’s point of view. Other capable exemplars include Krzysztof Kieslowski and Pedro Almodovar. The subtle masterpieces of the first two films are nothing when compared with L’Eclisse. Antonioni apparently knew that his audience comprised those who could not only endure but appreciate L’Avventura and La Notte, and therefore they could handle this one as well. As with the others, the film deals with themes of middle-class boredom, the malaise of eros, and objectification.

Similar to La Notte, reflective surfaces such as mirrors, windows, and water are featured. They serve not only to reflect but to refract, both framing the character into certain boundaries and forcing her to see herself as men see her. But whereas La Notte made greater use of vertical lines in general, L’Elisse narrowed them to pillars, usually of the ancient sort. Even in the stock market scenes, the antiquated stone pillars often separate characters even while they converse. There are a number of interpretations of this phenomenon in the film, but if nothing else it emphasizes a separation or division between formerly or potentially joined persons. If union occurs within the film, it is strictly sexual and devoid of emotional depth.

Vittoria (Monica Vitti, again) is a highly ambivalent human being, with strong similarities to her characters in the other films. Most of the time she is dispassionate, but she wavers at the prospect of relationship with another. She is non-committal to the extreme. She makes only two real gestures throughout the film, and when asked for her rationale for each, she can merely answer, “Non lo so” (“I don’t know”). The stock market sequences coupled with shots of “modern” Rome appear to be a fusing of the ancient/modern imagery from L’Avventura with the more cosmopolitan life captured in La Notte. The stock exchange may as well be one of Antonioni’s trademark deserts; even for the excitement that it generates, nothing really meaningful happens there. Vittoria’s attempts to see her mother are met always with contempt (“What are you doing here?”). Vittoria, in response, is not so much spiteful as apathetic and unaware that she connects with the man who holds her own mother financially ransom. This point alone would be exploited by another filmmaker, but Antonioni draws no attention to it.

Hanging on apartment walls in the film are large photographs and pieces of modern artwork. The photos point forward to Blow-Up, in which Antonioni maximizes the very technical process of developing film to his own aesthetic ends. The photos, depicting native Africans in traditional dress, prompt a brief and rare outburst from Vittoria by darkening her skin, wrapping herself in a sheet, and mimicking a stereotypically primitive native African. Here again the ancient/modern or primitive/civilized imagery surfaces. The only thing that holds fascination for her is extreme otherness. Bored with the life of rich modernism, she solaces herself in pretending to be the opposite.

There is hardly a better film to watch from 11:30 p.m. – 2:00 a.m. when plagued by insomnia. It gives one the opportunity to empathize with the frustrated restlessness of the protagonist. Antonioni has been criticized for filming a lot of “nothing,” and accused of pretense. It seems that if one tries to view his films with very modernist eyes, one will certainly be as bored as his characters. But if you can accept the images and allow them to create a mood, the rest of the details not only make sense but resonate very deeply with anyone who has experienced what the world calls “life,” only to marvel at the idea that there’s nothing else after that.