FROM EUROPE WITH ENGLIS
Sklar, Robert
From Europe with English by ROBERT SKLAR T^he films of Europe's great directors, often works of intricate visual beauty, have always come to American viewers with dubbed-in English soundtracks or...
...Interpreters of the film, both those who praise and those who condemn, have taken their stand for or against this exotic surface, the exciting, youthful world of "swinging" London...
...This type builds the surface world and lives off it...
...Antonioni's difficulties in Blow-Up axe repeated in a more obvious way in Truffaut's less successful Farenheit 451...
...Thus most have overlooked the central subject of the film...
...David Hem-mings, as the photographer, was faced with as difficult a task as Antonioni...
...Only now, in Blow-Up, something must go on within him as well...
...For Antonioni likes to make films on two distinct levels...
...I'm only doing my job," he shrugs...
...With their cameras trained on England's green and pleasant land, Truffaut and Antonioni succumbed to pastoral sentimentality...
...He had begun by treating beautiful women as "bloody bitches," as objects...
...Creating an inner life for him seems to have posed one of the most challenging tasks of Antonioni's whole career...
...ROBERT SKLAR is a free lance critic and an assistant professor of history and American studies at the University of Michigan...
...The photographer of Blow-Up is the most prominent male character of any Antonioni film, and yet he conforms fully to the male type who played the foil for Miss Vitti over the years...
...He gives his viewers rich visual and thematic surfaces they can hold onto—a bustling stock exchange during a panic, the workings of a modern factory, love intrigues, and mystery...
...He spends his days taking pictures of fashion models, and in his spare time fends off girls who want to be models...
...Antonioni and Hemmings seek to create their inner world of consciousness this way, by fusing concrete surfaces and meditative depth together in one whole, a silent world of visual imagery...
...Beautiful girls—¦ I'm stuck with them all day long," he complains...
...Truffaut provides a simple answer in a diary he has published on the filming of Farenheit 451...
...Beautiful women are his raw material...
...The girl notices, runs down, confronts him...
...Their companions follow their strokes...
...Why, then, did these two excellent directors lay themselves open to difficulties by moving from familiar to unfamiliar ground...
...I'm a photographer...
...but ignorance does not explain weaknesses in the language they know best, the language of vision...
...both its qualities and its faults bring into sharp focus the major themes and techniques of his controversial career...
...The photographer's new mystery, and the mystery of Blow-Up, is the mystery of women...
...The more serious flaws of Blow-Up are the flaws in the heart of the film, the visual world that contains its meaning and beauty...
...soon the camera swivels in movement with the pantomime game...
...Now two of those directors, as if to offer some relief, have made their first films in English...
...Others are politicians...
...His smile fades...
...He refuses...
...A jeepful of mimes stops there...
...His book, "F...
...He is alone at last in his inner world, alone with a mystery deeper than the murder mystery he has been pursuing...
...It puts his style to a test...
...Yet its flaws make one wonder if English pulls down old barriers, or puts up new ones...
...they are all the more glaring because around them Antonioni is moving closer to human silence —not a movie without sound, but a movie without words, a silence that speaks through a character's interior life and the camera's visual monologue...
...The photographer has returned to the park...
...But his deeper interest lies in human consciousness, in the inner life of the mind...
...Blow-Up is Antonioni's first film without Miss Vitti since 1957...
...I'm fed up with these bloody bitches...
...In L'Avven-tura, Eclipse, and most recently, Red Desert, Miss Vitti's personality and acting conveyed the inner depths...
...They opposed the garish colors of artificial city and suburban life with the cool greens of harmonious nature, and thus made their visual worlds almost as simplified and didactically obvious as their language...
...Neither Truffaut nor Antonioni knows much English, and that may be the reason why they allowed such inferior dialogue to pass...
...the distant throb of a jet or bus—while the photographer moves through the dark, and later in his studio blows up the photos that reveal a mystery...
...She demands his pictures...
...The weakness of the dialogue intrudes on their effort, but words were meant to play only a minor part in the movie...
...Most people would pay me to have me photograph them...
...But to him they mean no more than paper might, or metal...
...He is taking pictures in a park for a book of photographs, and spies a young girl pulling an older man up a hill...
...Blow-Up has only one sustained character, and he is a "mod" fashion photographer whose mind lives on, and seems inseparable from, that surface world...
...But he does not take a new tack completely...
...he is the professional, the technician, the engineer...
...The photographer, of course, does not handle stocks or steel...
...Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Laocoon," will be published by Oxford University Press this month...
...But don't rejoice yet that subtitles may disappear...
...The best parts of Blow-Up are beautifully silent in this way—wind rustling leaves...
...Quite likely a similar circumstance lay behind An-tonioni's shift to London...
...From Europe with English by ROBERT SKLAR T^he films of Europe's great directors, often works of intricate visual beauty, have always come to American viewers with dubbed-in English soundtracks or printed subtitles cut like marring scars across the bottom of the picture...
...The visual surface of Blow-Up is richer by far than anything Antonioni offered earlier, particularly since he has made full use of color for the first time...
...It's not my fault if there's no peace...
...a boy and a girl begin a game of tennis in pantomime...
...water splashing in a darkroom...
...Then he meets a girl who doesn't fit his categories, and Blow Up's dramatic tension begins to build...
...In the end he does as a plain woman bids him...
...The photographer picks up the "ball," bounces it in his hand, smiles, and tosses it back...
...Then the "ball" sails over the fence where the photographer is standing...
...Lines like these are the weakest part of Blow-Up...
...And when both films are looked at together, their mutual problems seem clearly to stem from their English language and setting...
...He runs after them, snapping away...
...Francois Truffaut's Farenheit 451 is a weak film by a young director who had previously created a string of brilliant and original successes in France...
...Blow-Up is not about its surface world of "swinging" London or its surface mystery, nor is it a treatise, as some have suggested, on the nature of illusion and reality...
...The girl walks toward him, looks at him with her plain, painted face, points imperiously with her finger...
...whirring of pigeon's wings...
...It took him nearly four years to get money for Farenheit 451, and he finally got it on the condition that he make the film in England...
...He had to play a man without feeling, and yet show that an inner world existed there...
...In both films the dialogue is stilted and lacking in subtlety...
...Some people are bullfighters...
...The camera pulls back abruptly, showing him a tiny figure, alone in his solitude, in a vast field of green...
...In the past, that evocation of an inner life had been taken care of by the actress Monica Vitti...
...In this film without Monica Vitti, Antonioni demonstrates his sense for women by fragmenting and masking the female sensibility...
...Blow-Up, by the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, provides far more interest and pleasure...
...Blow-Up is one of Antonioni's most significant films...
...Still, for this viewer at least, Antoni-oni redeems Blow-Up with a beautiful final scene that succeeds in fusing the surface world with the inner life he hoped to portray...
...It is dangerous to moralize on film in a language or a landscape not one's own...
Vol. 31 • May 1967 • No. 5
