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Cinema: The Things Which Are Not Seen

5 minute read
TIME

Blow-Up. An open Land Rover loaded to the head lamps with deliriously screaming people roars through London town. Painted and caparisoned in madcap masquerade, they leap down from their green go-devil and race through startled crowds like advance men for oncoming chaos. They crash into pedestrians, jostle a Guardsman on sentry duty, all but knock down a pair of passing nuns. Finally, they gang up on a baby-faced brat (David Hemmings) in a convertible Rolls, a mod bod with a pop mop who has plainly gained the whole world without losing his cool. He flips the revelers a fiver and then Rolls away as the camera follows him to see what it can see of life in the swinging generation.

What it sees becomes a far-out, uptight and vibrantly exciting picture. Blow-Up is the first movie made in English by Italy’s Michelangelo Antonioni, the most sensitive and profound of cinema’s anatomists of melancholy (L’Avventura, La None, Eclipse), and in the film he risks a screeching change of creative direction. His earlier films inhabited languid interior landscapes and unfolded with the large, slow motions of the soul; his new movie makes the London scene with a Big Beat abandon that almost shakes the film off its sprockets. But the change of means does not signify a change of meaning. Antonioni presents for public inspection a slice of death: the same cold death of the heart his stories invariably describe. Yet in Blow-Up, Antonioni’s anti-hero holds in his possession, if only for an instant, the alexin of his cure: the saving grace of the spirit.

The anti-hero is a successful pop photographer, and the first third of the film simply follows the little snake as he glides around London taking pictures of naked old men and of models who might as well be. Among the models is Vogue’s Verushka, whom he woos with his camera until they both collapse in erotic exhaustion. On a side trip to Woolwich, he happens to notice a pretty little park where a handsome couple is amorously straying. Nothing better to do, so he follows them, shooting on the sly, till the girl (Vanessa Redgrave) catches him at it and indignantly demands the roll of film. When he refuses, she offers him a roll in camera for the roll in the camera. Wondering why she wants the picture, he contrives by trickery to take the girl and keep the film.

Up to this point, Antonioni has made fascinating scenes but very little sense. Then all at once, in a brilliant episode of cinematic exposition, the photographer simultaneously develops his film and his dilemma. As shot after shot is blown up, both the photographer and the audience perceive without a word of explanation what the camera had accidentally recorded and the girl has desperately tried to conceal: the murder of her companion in the park.

The discovery presents the stupefied photographer with a complex of questions that nothing in his fribble life has prepared him to answer: what does he care about the dead man? about the law and the community? about death? about life? about humanity? about himself? In a cerulean funk, he pounces ignominiously on the first excuse he can find to forget about the whole bloody mess. When two squealing teen-agers invade his studio, he strips them stark naked on the screen and plays baby-satyr as the girls flop around like pretty pink porpoises in a vast blue sea of backdrop paper. Later he discovers that the murderers have made off with the incriminating photographs. The anti-hero is relieved of his fateful responsibility — why is he then suddenly so sad?

Blow-Up will undoubtedly be by far the most popular movie Antonioni has ever made. It has Vanessa Redgrave, an actress who may well become the Garbo of the ’60s, and what’s more it has Vanessa in (almost) topless form. It has Actor Hemmings in a grincingly accurate portrait of the sort of squiggly little fungus that is apt to grow in a decaying society. And it has color photography (by Italy’s Carlo Di Palma, who shot Antonioni’s Red Desert) that often does for the bricks of London what Guardi did for the stones of Venice.

Nevertheless, Blow-Up will have its detractors, and many of them will wonder why Antonioni offers no explicit explanation of what happens, why he arbitrarily transforms an ingenious thriller into an opaque parable. But the transformation is not really arbitrary, and the parable has a point. In the last scene, the riotous masquers of the opening reappear to play tennis with an invisible ball, and one of them hits it over the fence. Wonderingly, the photographer picks it up. Holding the invisible in his hand, he looks like a man who has glimpsed for the first time something of what St. Paul may have meant by “the things which are not seen”—a man suddenly made aware that there is more to life than what the senses can perceive or the camera record. Deliberately, he throws the ball back onto the court. And the game goes on.

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