To commemorate the publication of the first biography of Vanessa Redgrave, and as an accidental bonus, with the Cannes Film Festival starting tomorrow, Nathaniel has this week selected the 1967 Palme d’Or winner Blowup for the latest episode of Hit Me with Your Best Shot. A film that, by happy coincidence, I finally watched for the first time just a few weeks ago – top-tier Michelangelo Antonioni films are precious dewdrops, so you don’t burn through them too quickly (I’m still holding off on L’eclisse) – and so I’ve had more time than usual to think about what shot I wanted to pick. Though, truth be told, even on my first spin through, I knew what I wanted to go with from pretty much the moment I first saw it, and nothing has shaken me off of it yet.
This is that shot:
The film has the unfortunate reputation for being a catalogue of Swinging ’60s fashions and sexual mores, as if Antonioni was just some imported knock-off of Richard Lester or John Schlesinger. And it’s not not that, but it’s much more a film about the arrogance of perspective, and as critical and indictment of the camera eye as anyone who made his living on the backside of a camera could possible make. It is about a fashion photographer, played by David Hemmings (whom I, for one, will always remember with deep gratitude as the protagonist of Deep Red), who thinks he’s accidentally photographed a murder while bothering an attractive woman (Redgrave) in a park; the genre framework is there to give the movie some momentum and a hook, but much like the missing woman in L’avventura, any resemblance between this development and a conventional thriller is strictly an illusion. Like most of Antonioni’s work (this particular film was shot by Carlo Di Ponti, a great cinematographer in his own right, but the director’s personality overwhelms all), it’s about the relationship of people to spaces containing them, but it also has a special indictment of the gaze – a reasonably new concept in 1966, and one that had not yet been yoked to specific gender theories yet. It’s about the alienating effect that the gaze has on the gazer, whose tendency to bifurcate the world between “myself” and “the things I only see through my camera lens” leaves him without an inner self. The drama of Blowup has absolutely nothing to do with sex and little to do with solving a murder; it’s about confronting the photographer with the fact of his visual separation from the rest of humanity.
A lot of shots play into that, throughout the movie; I am a little embarrassed, therefore, to have picked something so conventional within Antonioni’s filmography. But it’s a real beauty, don’t you think? For one thing, it does the frames-within-frames thing that I’m such an easy lay for about as well as it ever has been done. But that’s the least of the triumphs of this image.There’s the metaphor, for one: if we think of it as a glass pane at the far side of a big white rectangular box, it more than slightly resembles a studio light with a lightbox attached, giving the impression that the photographer has been caught inside his own equipment. But even discounting that slightly strained impression, it’s still about him being trapped inside his art. This is the set for a photo shoot, you see, an oh-so-modern one full of hard lines of geometry that reduces human beings to graphic forms without any kind of organic nature. And this same series of glass panels that he uses to strip the humanity away from other humans is now turned into a prison for him; of course, physically, he can step in front of the glass, but during the course of the shot (which shows him moving through a glass maze in zig-zag pattern), he doesn’t (it cuts just a few frames after the screen capture I posted). And even if he did, Antonioni’s camera has caught him in one more level; all that dead white, a signature gesture from cinema’s greatest director of negative space, has put not just the photographer but his studio and his equipment, all of his art, inside of a box of arid, empty nothingness.
If there’s a single idea that sums of Blowup better than that of a camera that creates a dead void around the camera user, I can’t imagine what it might be.