The Reality of Fantasy

Blow-Up
Directed By: Michelangelo Antonioni
Screenplay by: Michelangelo Antonioni and Tonino Guerra
Inspired by a short story by Julio Cortazar
Copyright 1966
Released by: Carlo Ponti Productions/Warner Brothers Inc.
Cast: David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles

I carry no reason to believe that Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up (1966) is a great film, as opposed to film critic Roger Ebert’s claim and inclusion to his book The Great Movies. Maybe I’m just as cynical as the character Thomas exudes in the film, full of languor and deliberate sarcasm, attempting to live a life of incidental ennui and premeditated lethargy. Likewise, I can also attribute such to the fact that I haven’t seen a single Antonioni film except this. Although it’s not as bad as anyone could possibly imagine, but in my case it’s presumably a baptism that turned out pretty disappointing.

Yes. Unconsciously, that perhaps makes this film great. Well, to Roger Ebert, of course-in a sense, somehow succeeded in its primary purpose. Blow-Up is categorized as an artfilm, the description of artfilm being those that are not essential for mainstream release for qualities that goes beyond the normal quality of a typical theatrical production. There are a lot of distinctions this film radiates that its qualification in such sort maybe a consolation, after all. Antonioni, for instance is a master in this craft that Blow-Up (his first English-language film, to-be followed by The Passenger [1975], who stars a young but promising Jack Nicholson) seemed as his fitting preliminary to a range of non-Italian works.

I anticipated this movie having read Ebert’s review, of course, and somehow his article contributed to a bugging necessity to see the film-which he subtly (whatever he meant, it has a different appeal to me) insinuated as a likely amalgamation of mystery and surreality. From this impression, it enticed an uncommon compulsion to have a peek into the movie believing the greatness factor as the normal means to like it and concur to what Ebert had written. It did not. Besides I watched it once, and constrained my buttocks to stand at least two hours of filmic tediousness, marvelling (an irony, I know) how Antonioni managed to come up with such uncharacteristic masterpiece.

The film stars David Hemmings (an unknowing actor in my book) as a fashion photographer stuck in a mud of boredom and evident discontent, sporting a Beatleseque haircut, driving a Rolls convertible and perhaps, living a life uncertain if he’s happy with what he’s doing or not. Although his lifestyle may be the perfect mold of the majority of single people opt for in their continuing existence, Thomas, however is emanating the opposite. We could not pinpoint and recognize whether Thomas is pleased with how his world revolves, but there is a stark contrast as soon as he picks up his camera and starts shooting. Hence, I believe that this film is, at any point, a representation of irony.

This is further complicated when Thomas treks to a park and witnesses a couple. At this point, questions abruptly pop up: Are they fighting? Flirting? Playing? Or merely having a good time? This queries may not be for Thomas to answer (nor for the audience as Antonioni could have planned in anyway), however it is a sight to see that deciding to capture it frame by frame is precisely what he has in mind. Enter Vanessa Redgrave (the pouty lips and the checkered blouse-a mixture of concealed feminine alacrity and innate `Britishness’), the unwilling victim of Thomas’ candid excursion, caught in the Nikon (or Pentax or whatever) lens-a sedentary entrapment in a reel of negative. She goes after Thomas for the film he took of her and her companion, but when he refuses her, she follows him to his studio and uncovers herself in an attempt to seduce the troubled photographer to give her the film. He gives her the wrong roll and keeps for himself the right one. He develops the film and as it turns out what he saw in the park, may be or may not be a murder in progress…

It should’ve been a murder-mystery from this point on, exemplified the question of fantasy versus reality. What Thomas saw may be different from what his camera saw, and this is the beginning of a long journey towards achieving the appropriate answer. The answer could be found as the story develops, however, it asks us another set of complex queries-this time focused mainly on Thomas as the one investigating his discovery and not as Thomas, as merely a witness to a might-be act of misdemeanor: Is it really murder? Or a mere product of his feral imagination accentuated by his camera? It leaves the audience (us) a thing to ponder on, even as the `The End’ closing billboard appears-perhaps the `signature’ Antonioni scene whereas the character simply vanishes (according to Ebert Antonioni once said that it was taken directly from anything Shakesperean, "characters are simply spirits in a play that floats away in the end"), add a principal weight to the mystery the film tries to achieve, and eventually succeeded in achieving.

Although I managed to appreciate the film (thanks to the feature-length commentary on the DVD by Peter Brunette [author of the book, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni]) somehow, however not in the same degree of appreciation that Roger Ebert felt about it. I could not directly point out technical flaws that might be present in the movie, but I could simply be awed by how Antonioni dissected and presented the difference between realism and fantasy, of the grittiness and lightheartedness of the film’s atmosphere. I won’t stress out the factors that made me believe that this is not a great movie (nevertheless they say that Blow-Up is similar to Antonioni’s first triumph, L`Avventura [1950]), but from what I have noticed bore utter similarities to how David Lynch manipulated mystery and Takeshi Kitano in complicating ennui.

Michelangelo Antonioni is considered to be a master in classic world cinema, a title he shares with notable personalities such as Federico Fellini, Vittorio de Sica, Luchino Visconti, Francois Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Robert Bresson, and Ingmar Bergman, I still possess a huge respect for him. Even though I wasn’t that much impressed with my intial (and perhaps, my only attempt to view the film) bump with Blow-Up, I still regard it as probably, a masterful and downright approach to the surreality of films that only the best director, like Antonioni, could possibly accomplish.

Etchie Pingol
March 11, 2004
Office of Student Affairs
University of the Philippines Manila