Blow-Up

In mod, where-the-action-is London, the ultimate cool is to be a fashion photographer. Fashion photographers, after all, live in converted carriage houses, make love to the world's most exotic miniskirted women, and play with cameras, fabulous toys of the jet-set generation.

This generation--call it mod, pop, turned-on, hip, or any of the other catch phrases of this label-happy era--asserted itself by establishing a new standard of moral behavior. The process obviously involved redefinition: in the '30's, photographer meant Stieglitz, Steichen, Dorothea Lange; now photographer means cool. But Michaelangelo Antonioni has other ideas.

Antonioni is intensely serious about life and about art. His new film, Blow-Up, deals with the difficulty of commitment to a worthwhile life through art. Antonioni's fashion photographer hero, a 25-year-old dissipated cherub brilliantly played by David Hemmings, has learned how to ride the crest of the mod culture wave; he got rich quick, drives a Rolls, and takes sex and marijuana with the casual detachment that marks him and his kind. He seems, as Time describes, "a little fungus that is apt to grow in a decaying society."

But unlike the other characters in Blow-Up, the photographer is not among the living dead in Antonioni's sterile London. Antonioni's photographer is in limbo, precariously balanced on the borderline between submergence in the frenzied non-involvement around him, and commitment to reality. Essentially weak, he inevitably succumbs to the daily temptations of his life and profession. For example, in the middle of examining the most important pictures he has ever taken, he allows himself to take part in a mini-orgy with two teen-age would-be models; on his way to the scene of the crime to photograph the corpse, he is diverted by a pot party and loses the opportunity to take the picture.

But the photographer is better than the people Antonioni chooses to show beside him, redeemed in part by his instinctive commitment, however minimal, to photography. Rejecting the current connotations of "photographer." Antonioni defines the term as one who lives (and matures) by watching. The photographer in Blow-Up can no more join the mods and lose himself in their sterile pleasures than join the Establishment and condemn them. His camera saves him by the skin of his teeth, and at the end of the film, Antonioni leaves him on an affirmative note.

The ending is consistent with the rest of Antonioni's work. In L'Avventura, Sandro and Claudia's romance fails to solve their individual problems, yet they will remain together; in La Notte, Giovanni and Lidia decide not to separate although they know their marriage will never be successful; Red Desert ends with Giuliana's realization that she must not commit suicide even if her life is filled with neurotic unhappiness. Unlike the films of Rosselini, Hitchcock, and Renoir, which follow characters in a state of emotional or spiritual crisis through a therapeutic chain of events, Antonioni's films are rarely concerned with major personal development or change. Instead, Antonioni fully reveals the nature of his character's dilemma, and then brings that character to a kind of stasis. In Blow-Up, the photographer may never fully resist the temptations of pop culture, but his commitment to watching will always prevent total immersion in mod sterility. The last shot of the film shows him with his camera, very much alone, sadly watching revellers representative of the behavior Antonioni condemns.

In examining the nature of photography, Antonioni carefully injects another theme, the more basic conflict between illusion and reality. The first scene of Blow-Up introduces the photographer as he leaves a flop-house where he spent the night; we learn that he had gone to photograph the sick old men who sleep there. This personal preference for social realism over fashion proves the photographer dedicated. But in photographing the tragedy and problems of other people, the photographer in Blow-Up substitutes this for an understanding and eventual solution of his own problems. The reality of the photographs becomes the photographer's only reality. Antonioni, therefore, sets up a paradox: photography is the spiritual redeemer in the photographer's life, preventing him, for example, from participating the pantomime tennis game that ends the film. At the same time, it is a means of escape into an equally dangerous world of illusion.

The theme of photography as an escape from reality is not a new one. In Hitchcock's Rear Window, the crippled photographer (James Stewart) uses his telephoto lenses to spy on his neigbors. He becomes involved with their problems in order to avoid coping with his own fear of life and an impending marital commitment. Through an ultimately therapeutic encounter with violent evil, Stewart can finally understand and solve his problems.

Like Hitchcock and Fritz Lang, Antonioni feels that violence is an integral part of contemporary society and cannot be ignored. His photographer, like Hitchcock's, is brought back to reality by means of melodrama: waiting for the owner of a junk shop he wants to buy, the photographer wanders through a nearby park. Ignoring a bizarre fat lady that 99 out of 100 photographers would have snapped without thinking twice, he photographs pigeons instead, then two lovers kissing. The girl sees him and pleads with him to give her the roll of film. Unsuccessful, she follows him to his studio and offers to make love to him if he will give her the negatives. He declines the offer, gives her a substitute roll of film, and develops the pictures when she leaves. In examining the blow-ups, he sees that he has photographed a murder: hidden in the forest is the girl's real boyfriend aiming a pistol at the man she is kissing.

To Antonioni, the discovery of the murder represents the intrusion of reality on the photographer's world. The blow-ups suddenly bring him face-to-face with potential involvement in the affairs of other people. He does not, actually, become involved: his nature rules out the possibility of calling the police, he cannot locate the girl, and his interest in the affair begins to diminish when he discovers that the girl has stolen the blow-ups--the only evidence of the crime. Still, for a moment, the detached photographer realizes his involvement sufficiently to consider the alternatives: calling the police, the girl, his friends. It is irrelevant that he fails to act on his discovery; Antonioni has shown that the photographer cannot use his camera as an escape from reality. Sooner or later, the camera will record something that will prevent his complete detachment from human problems, and will involve him personally.

This small conscious realization on the photographer's part gives his life more value, and enables Antonioni to have him finally reject the behavior of his friends. The ending establishes this conclusively: in the park, returning from his unsuccessful attempt to find and photograph the corpse, he sees the white-faced youths standing around a tennis court, watching two of their group "play" tennis with an imaginary ball and imaginary rackets. The "ball" is knocked over the fence and the group looks toward the photographer to retrieve it. He hesitates momentarily, then picks up the the imaginary ball and throws it back into the court. He watches the pantomime, hearing the sounds of an actual tennis match.

Unfortunately, Blow-Up is just ambiguous enough that one's interpretation of it depends largely on how one interprets the tennis game; when the photographer returns the illusory tennis ball he is not giving up hope and joining the revellers. The tennis game ending, like the five minute montage that ends Eclipse, is less a new scene than a visual synopsis of the events preceding it, most specifically the murder. The slow camera-panning back and forth following the imaginary ball refers to the panning back and forth along the blow-ups; the photographer is again faced with a situation that potentially could involve him personally.

When he throws the ball back, Antonioni again indicates the basic weakness in his photographer's character: he will too frequently succumb to the temptations of his life, probably never free himself from the pitfalls of a spiritually bankrupt society. The last shot, however, confirms his ultimate rejection of total involvement with the elements symbolized by the illusory tennis game. The ending makes a concise visual statement of the nature of the stasis the photographer has attained.

Continually fascinating when chronicling the unpredictable behavior of its photographer-hero, Blow-Up tends to wax ponderous and heavy-handed when characterizing his social environment. Antonioni sketches his mod London in black-and-white values, as entirely worthless. He depicts the young people at the rock-and-roll club and the pot party as incapable of individual emotional reaction, responding only in groups to escapist stimuli and the newest hip symbols (the electric guitar handle). This damning of a culture en masse is suspect; in setting his hero against a background of complete sterility, Antonioni has taken the easy way out, avoiding the challenge of creating a more perceptive analysis of the generation with which he is dealing.

The narrow-mindedness of Antonioni's conception would be more tolerable were it not for his continual use of sledgehammer symbolism. The visual venom with which he passes judgment on the vapid fashion models, the glassy-eyed crowd watching the Yardbirds, and the tennis players, frequently reaches laughable proportions (two people playing tennis without a ball equals two people living in a world of illusion, get it?). This defect in Blow-Up, mostly the fault of the screenplay, greatly reduces the total effect of the film. Blow-Up, when all is said and done, is a small film dealing with large themes.

In any case, Blow-Up is really fun to watch. The color is vivid and striking, Antonioni having fully indulged his penchant for painting the grass greener, the streets blacker, and everything else off-white or firehouse red. The pretty, self-conscious photography works to dazzling effect, particularly in some exterior long takes of the photographer driving through London in his Rolls.

Blow-Up's editing is weakest when the script allows Antonioni to be self-indulgent, the scenes in which he passes judgment on mod society. The cutting in the first photography session with Verushka, the mini-orgy, the rock and roll sequence seems purposeless and overly self-conscious. Antonioni's best editing is found in the sequences with dramatic purpose and direction: the blow-up sequence and the discovery of the corpse. Both deal with extended action--a lengthy process of printing and examining photo enlargements, and a long walk through a park--and Antonioni must use editing as a time-compressor, simulating the length of the event through montage, though actually presenting it in a much shorter period of time. This forces him to be economic, to use editing to convey the scene content. He succeeds admirably; the blow-up sequence and the park scenes are tour de forces of film-making, achieving an exciting interaction of style and content.

Although Blow-Up reveals a maturity of Antonioni's style, its simplistic vision of social decay shows him taking a sharp turn in the wrong direction. Blow-Up's surface brilliance tends to camoflage the intellectual excesses of a director in danger of running out of things to say. But Blow-Up is undeniably one of the most interesting films released in 1966, a striking presentation of a personal viewpoint with some pretty good film-making in the bargain.