On Screen
SIMON, JOHN
ON SCREEN By John Simon A Bit Overblown MICHELANGELO ANTONIONl's Blow-Up, to paraphrase my old boss Archibald MacLeish. means more than it is. A film, I feel, should be before it means, should...
...are rather alike: unnatural and unwholesome...
...Lovely, make it come, luv, for me, for me...
...An essentially ironic relation between illusion and reality, why not...
...Life, like art, Antonioni appears to say, can be figured out only a posteriori...
...it's like finding a clue in a detective story...
...but we are in for some nasty surprises: the final truth does not ring true, or, rather, what rings true isn't the truth...
...She drawls, "I am in Paris...
...she merely smiles, mysteriously, bitchily...
...She wants to talk to him about her problem, while he can go on only about the body in the park...
...It may all sort itself out in the end, but just what is that initial "it...
...while people, grotesquely costumed and environed, seen in reflections or through semi-transparencies, become dehumanized and reified before our eyes...
...illusion and reality, seriousness and play have become identical...
...He now proceeds to develop the real film, and, in studying the blow-ups carefully, notices something fishy...
...He finds the writer at what proves to be a marijuana party, and urges him to come inspect and photograph the body with him...
...He thinks she has ducked into a rock-'n-roll club, and looks for her there in vain...
...Rethink it...
...she has been tailing him, and will tail him into bed to get them...
...we learn, actually had the grass dved for this sequence...
...The essential point of the film is Pirandellian: The real and the imaginary encroach upon each other and become, finally, inseparable...
...But Huysmans' dilettante still had to dislodge himself a bit...
...In the studio, strange photographs have their strident aliveness...
...The foolish business of taking suggestive pictures is converted into, indeed usurps the place of, sexual fulfillment...
...Our hero, all pseudo-passion spent, collapses on a nearby sofa...
...The mimes start collecting money for some cause or other and touch him for a bill...
...ultimately, equally disoriented, their sacred symbols equally inefficacious...
...when he is out inspecting the cadaver, he is frightened by what sounds like the click of a shutter—he may have been transferred to someone else's incriminating film...
...Hopscotch, it has been said that it must be read twice to be read at all...
...Suddenly he begins to hear the non-existing ball: Its puck-puck grows louder as the camera comes in for an overhead shot of the bemused photographer, forlornly heading for home...
...Unlike in a detective story, I haven't a clue...
...Then he drives to a lunch appointment with a literary friend who is writing the text for his picture book...
...and the photographer's praise of his undeveloped park pictures, "very peaceful, very still...
...He gets rid of them and drives off to an out-of-the-way antique shop he wants to buy...
...Saved, is a notable contribution to the theatre of cruelty...
...the exhausted photographer falls asleep...
...Occasionally there is even a piddling, nibbling proto-kiss...
...He refuses, takes some shots of her running away, and returns to the antique shop...
...A dalliance begins that might lead to a little more than a quick sex bout, when they are interrupted by the delivery of the propeller...
...Similarly, when the neck of a guitar over which teenagers fought like ravening beasts ends up in the hero's possession, he can only throw it away...
...but our callous hero, whose car it is, is just as indifferent then as a bit later, when the placard is swept out of his fast-moving car...
...The wife looks at him longingly even as she is being made love to by her husband...
...A synopsis of the wispy plot is unfortunately unavoidable...
...Evfm more striking is the echo of colors...
...Much more, much more...
...Then it all sorts itself out...
...There is nothing for me to make human contact with and become genuinely drawn to...
...The cold colors thus juxtaposed create the same kind of eleaant detachment in the studio as in the park, and help suggest that both photography as lovemaking, and lovemaking as a subject for shooting (with camera or gun...
...The photographer is driving to a party where his writer friend is, but...
...In his filthy bum's attire, he rushes to his work, photographing first a sexy model (played by Verouchka, a sexy model) in a series of extremely erotic, scantily clad poses...
...all things end by floating into one another...
...Aaainst this lowering viridescence...
...When a group of absurd models in bizarre get-ups, posing among square transparent screens inside a ghostly white parallelepiped????the whole thing looking like a cubist-surrealist hallucination —fail to achieve the desired expression of breathless hebetude, the photographer barks at them, "Start again...
...Shades of des Esseintes, who sets out for England but, on a rainy night in Calais, as he dines on mutton chops at an English-looking inn, concludes that he has had the English experience...
...So, too, the lines spoken by the actors????the ably devious Vanessa Redgrave, the suitably subliminal Sarah Miles, and the (regrettably) charmless David Hemmings????are mostly balls of caprice batted about by backhanded drives...
...the pseudo-sexuality of the photography session takes on an even more stylized, artificial look...
...But there is a hitch...
...A film, I feel, should be before it means, should have a reality of its own before making metaphysical pronouncements...
...The staging and editing do not make clear whether intercourse occurs, but the girl leaves, having received a roll of film...
...Fusing????or confusing????similitudes suffuse the whole work...
...The film is a phoney, as is the phone number the girl gives the aroused photographer...
...Even if people are lost souls, as those in the film certainly are, their relationships to one another, to their surroundings, to the work of art in which they figure, should be firmly apprehended and made convincing...
...Now the mimes from the previous morning arrive in the park, and two of them proceed to mime a tennis game, while the rest mime engrossed spectators...
...Related to this notion is that of the interpenetration of opposites, whereby the grave and the trivial, the earnest pursuit and the game, become interchangeable...
...All that happens is that one of the performers, angered, stomps his electric guitar to bits, a melee ensues as the kids fight over the pieces, and our hero somehow ends up with the biggest chunk, runs out with it, and promptly discards it...
...he is a highly successful photographer who has spent the night taking pictures for his forthcoming book of photographs...
...Later, he meets her at the pot party and exclaims, "I thought you were in Paris...
...He is visited by the painter's wife who tells him she can't leave her husband for him...
...When the hero is photographing his model, he is dressed in pale colors (blue, beige), she in a black quasi-nightaown, and the flat backdrops are of a dark, brooding blue-areen (this device of surrotindino characters with a large, flat, monochrome expanse was well used bv Antonioni before: the white hoso'tal walls for the demented girl in La Notte...
...She tells him she's off to Paris...
...He wanders into the apartment of his painter friend and finds the couple copulating...
...It is almost Baudelaire's forests of symbols where "les parfums, les couleurs ei les sons se repondent," except thai here nature is not a temple...
...And when the painter's wife comes to see the photographer and looks at the one remaining blow-up that the ransackers neglected to destroy?possibly because the corpse, in desperate magnification, shows only as a vague blur of dots????she exclaims, "Looks like one of those paintings...
...So, too, when the hero visits the painter, he admires an abstraction of his which, to quote Francis Wyndham, has "colored dots arranged to give an effect of explosion...
...The girl has a curious way of both leading the man on and dancing away from him...
...He saunters over to a neighboring studio where an artist friend refuses to sell him one of his abstractions...
...But when the hero is in the park, shooting the temptress and her victim, his own attire echoes all the colors from the studio session (black jacket, blueish shirt, white trousers), while the surrounding vegetation repeats the same, somewhat lurid, blue-green coloration of the backdrop...
...conversely, the illusory tennis game has been willed, believed into existence...
...she is deliciously, narcissisti-cally satisfied...
...The shop owner is out, and the photographer wanders into a neighborhood park, taking pictures of pigeons and such, until he comes upon a couple, a young girl and a middle-aged man, in a rather quaint love-ballet and starts avidly photographing them...
...Our hero returns to his studio and finds it ransacked, his photographic evidence of a crime stolen or destroyed...
...He gets back to the park at dawn, but the body is gone...
...Most obviously so at film's end: the corpse has vanished as has all evidence of the murder ????the very real killing has been rendered nonexistent...
...Those who march for peace and those who disturb it are...
...Our hero calls his writer friend with the startling revelation, but his story is not believed...
...So when our hero looks at his blow-ups of the park scene, the soundtrack rustles with wind-stirred leaves...
...Now really give it...
...the photographer at one point asks the girl whom he has himself just kept waiting an hour...
...He tells the writer that the idyllic shots of the lovers in the park will be a perfect conclusion for an otherwise violent book...
...Back at the studio, the photographer is met by the girl from the park...
...All along, he rattles off clucking, hectoring, spasmodic verbiage, which, in its accelerandos and crescendos as well as in its ambiguity, is the very deverbalized language of intercourse: "Lurch, lurch more . . . That's great...
...Dialogue becomes a perfunctory caress or a sudden blow...
...He drives back to his large studio cum apartment in a charming mews...
...But the angry tone tells all...
...even the typical mod passers-by, who next pick it up, discard it with utmost indifference...
...A noise, as of a camera clicking, frightens the photographer and he drives away...
...Amid all this a twinge of real jealousy occurs: "Whom the hell were you with last night...
...The man's body is indeed there...
...He is interrupted by the return of the mini-skirted would-be models, drifts into a mini-orgy with them, packs them off, and goes back to the by now nocturnal park...
...And for those to whom Paris is a drug-orgy, why shouldn't a drug-orgy be Paris...
...Yeah, yeah, yes...
...The two basic statements of the film seem to be the painter's comment on his works, "They don't mean anything when I do them, just a mess...
...When the girl from the peace march sticks her "go away" placard into a Rolls convertible, she thinks she has planted her banner on the enemy's stronghold...
...The metaphysics of Blow-Up are in limbo, which may not be a bad place for metaphysics, but is no place for people...
...He washes and changes, and proceeds to shoot a group of fashion models in suggestive mod clothes and weird groupings...
...These fruging gum-chewers rethink...
...Antonioni...
...The girl now falls back on the floor and feebly stirs her limbs to relax them...
...a bunch of ragged men emerge from a flophouse...
...When everything is evanescent, wraith-like, superficial ????even the genuinely fleshly orgy with the miniskirters is finally unreal because locomotion is substituted for emotion????only nebulae whirl into other nebulae, atoms into other configurations of atoms...
...It is the real that has to become illusory, after all, and the illusory real...
...After a series of hectic magnifications, detections, further magnifications, it emerges that a man with a gun was hiding in the bushes...
...Or even think...
...en route, he glimpses the mystery girl...
...Quite consistently, the film depends to an unprecedented degree on noises, and may be the first in which the climactic revelation is a sound: the dull but loud and persistent whacking of a nonexistent tennis ball...
...I believed Pirandello, and I am prepared to believe Antonioni, particularly since his photography, design, and direction are all spectacular...
...or, if so, the temple of a god who is malign, oblivious, or dead...
...He gets closer and closer to her as he photographs away, and disarranges and disarrays her more and more...
...As our hero drives home, a peace demonstrator sticks a sign into his car, but the sign is presently blown out of the convertible...
...Characteristically, in a world where sensations, colors, sounds, and the perfume of available (which is to say all) flesh take on the functions of ratiocination and discourse, the word becomes debased and obsolete as a caudal appendage...
...the red interior of the shack for the "siesta" in Red Desert...
...Or take the session when the young man photographs his luscious model...
...The girl finally sinks back supine and the man straddles her as he and his camera swoop down for a clicking climax...
...Now give it to me...
...When the imaginary ball is hit out into the park, he actually mimes picking it up and tossing it back onto the court...
...She must have those negatives...
...Go, go, and again...
...Our hero finds himself caught up in the imaginary game...
...The film, by the way, is based on a story by Julio Cortazar, of whose novel...
...today's trips, in a cigarette or sugar cube, come to us...
...Neither can help the other...
...As one's husband makes love to one, one's face clutches that of a lover...
...Through the plate-glass window someone has been spying on them, but disappears when followed...
...The friend, high on the stuff, refuses...
...Apparently he killed the man in the tryst, for something like a body appears in the shrubbery in the pictures of the girl running away...
...We see this at the very beginning: The idle, roisterous mimes turn out to be collecting for some "worthy" cause, while the grim, shabby young man emerging from the flophouse with nothing but a small, grimy parcel unwraps an expensive camera from it and gets into his luxury car...
...with which he wants to end his violent book to make it "ring truer...
...A battery of models and personnel awaits him...
...One of the latter gets into a Rolls Royce...
...There you have it: sex, murder, artistic creation????nothing but the same swirling shapes and colors slightly rearranged...
...He haggles with the owner, a young girl who is tired of the business and wants to travel (everyone wants what he hasn't got), and buys from her an old-fashioned airplane propeller...
...Afterward I find something to hang onto, like that leg...
...When the hero discovers the painter and his wife during intercourse, the camera pans to those explosive dots again—rather like the colored lights Tennessee Williams' Stella says she sees when her husband makes love to her...
...More of that, as fast as you can . . . Very good, marvelous, great...
...Dawn in London: A noisy group of mimes or revelers, their faces painted white, rides in a jeep into a building complex...
...As the photographer is about to leave, the girl, who has just caught on, runs after him and tries to beg, buy, or wrest the film from him...
...He casts some yearning glances at the artist's wife, and returns to his own studio where two silly, pushy teenyboppers intrude on him in the hope he will photograph them...
...The grand philosophic stance is not, as in Pirandello, attached to characters and plots that have a life of their own...
...and the English adaptation is by Edward Bond, whose play...
Vol. 50 • January 1967 • No. 2
