Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)

 

On a present-day viewing, Antonioni’s still-ravishing Blow-Up may seem to be primarily about come-uppance and control: decades before the “Me Too” wave of consequences, it depicts the clipping of the wings of an arrogantly self-righteous, almost professionally obnoxious male (the successful photographer Thomas, played by David Hemmings). We don’t know of course how far that extends – maybe a few minutes after the movie ends he shakes it off and snaps back into place – but Antonioni’s superb orchestration of the famous climactic mimed tennis game suggests a permanent shift in Thomas’ relationship to the world, leading to his final erasure from the cinematic image, rapidly followed by the final credits over the ground where he no longer stands. Building up to that, the film has a greater vein of fragility and futility than one may remember; the sense of conspiracy and unseen orchestration (evidenced for example in how his place is ransacked during a very brief absence) may bring to mind Jacques Rivette (as does Thomas’ labyrinth-like live-work space, one of the most endlessly fascinating interior locations in cinema, and one that likewise evidences an environment almost entirely shaped by his whims and desires). The film’s more then-modish aspects - the eye-filling fashions, the appearance by the Yardbirds, the glimpses of “swinging London” – render it spellbinding as cultural history, while also now seeming suffused in transience and alienation, perhaps most succinctly rendered in the moment when Thomas fights a previously deadened-seeming audience for a piece of the smashed-up guitar that Jeff Beck tosses into the crowd, but then finds on triumphantly emerging into the street that he has no use for it, and throws it away. Still, the film teems with the vibrant possibility of creation and connection in the here and now, even as that’s offset with an awareness of how little it may all mean later (the fact of Hemmings being only third-billed despite having by far the biggest role now seems like its own kind of taunt).