Is Anotnioni's breakthrough English language film, 1966's BLOW-UP, a masterpiece, or a dull meditation on artifice? A sober intellectual's wrongheaded attempt to duplicate the confusion of a drug experience, or the most fucked up brilliant film in the world?1966 was a fabulous time to be young and pretty in London. All you needed was for some pop-eyed freak to toss you a capsule of LSD or mescalin or, failing that, smoke some hash with you and BAM! You were one of the cool kids. The crazy scene reached out to meet you. The whole happening thing was... happening...
Words didn't work on it. Only art.
Nowadays when I go to an art gallery--even in Soho--I'm kind of amazed at all the tourists, even the Europeans, struggling to seem 'overwhelmed' by the bland conceptual art. When I worked at the Cohen Gallery dealing with Chagalls and Dubuffet mixed media oils for hundreds of thousands of dollars, hung-over, I always wondered what in the hell could people see in them that I didn't. What a lot of rot, I thought. Then one Tuesday I came back from a very long psychedelic weekend in Vermont and staggered into work, suddenly I got it. Or at any rate, the tiny little lines that made up Chagall's endless drawings of chickens and Fiddlers on the roofs finally seemed interesting, alive and swirling like a bunch of little spiders weaving wedding gowns. The Dubuffets seemed to drip mud and anger and primal gravitas. My eyes, in short, were open.
Antonioni seems to have been born with such open eyes, and so in the newly turned-on 'scene' of 1966 swinging London he found an audience that had at last caught up with him and his obsessive delight in the signifier-dissonance of industrial age object-making.
I love Antonioni when I'm strung out on deep art, man, but in the wrong mood--the blase' -entertain me mood-- I find him pompous, didactic and dull. You're either on board or you're not with such things and a film that's a deep spiritual experience one night is a snooze the next, ala Kubrick's 2001. I'm also really attuned to the engagement level of those I'm watching a film with, and BLOW-UP, more than anything, is the film to make a lot of guests shift in their seats, sigh, and check their blackberry, and then I too am over it. So I watch it alone, late at night, when the Chagalls are squiggling and the air breathes around me.
But hey - it abides. Deep Red fans will love it as much as that film's director does for David Hemmings alone, who really sinks his teeth and body into the part of a fashion photog. Strutting and cocky and brutal with his unstained white pants and ruthless artist's open eye, he shags a lot of mod birds and drives a snazzy pint-sized convertible, the kind you step down to get into, which is clearly the inspiration for the one driven decades later by Austin Powers.
But it's not all eye-con-ography and groovy gear; a snail's paced mid-section finds Hemmings in his dark room "blowing up" part of the Hyde Park background until the pixels are shilling-size. There's no music. Ugh, it's unendurable! With her working class Garbo hair and stoop shoulders, the Vanessa Redgrave who trails him desperate to get the negative seems to have wandered in from a different movie, and for a hot minute the film seems poised to follow her instead. Paranoid alien hunters who spend their lunch hours as I do, looking for alien artifacts on topographical NASA photos of the moon will surely relate both to Hemming's obsession and my frustration. Either way, the bird flies off, but Antonioni's still in the dark room... now the pixels are the size of grapefruits and yeah, there's a body there, all right. Maybe, isn't there? If there is, he'd be a fool to get involved and we begin to feel like the only one who wants to keep watching is Coppola so he can go make The Conversation and De Palma so he can make Blow-Up, and Argento so he can make Four Flies on Grey Velvet. The rest of us just want to get on out of that goddamned studio and soak up the sutltry London air.
Once we finally do get out, the film breathes back to life; Hemmings winds up at a packed club where the Yardbirds are playing and a cutting contest between Jimi Page and Jeff Beck causes the latter to smash his guitar and hurl the remains into the crowd (this was a year before Monterey Pop, mate) The crowd flies into a mosh pit feeding frenzy to get the guitar neck and, ah can't spoil it, an Antonioni film should never be explained or described beforehand. If you haven't seen it just get it over with and remember this: if you don't know what the hell is going on you are far closer to 'getting it' than someone who does.Clicking with the artsy counterculture youth would never come this easy again for old Antonioni, though it wouldn't for Dennis Hopper either (i.e. The Last Movie), but Blow-Up is a deliriously perfect meeting of the minds, the sardonic humanist whose a world too wise to ever judge his shallow hipsters in films like L'Aventura, La Notte, and L'Eclisse intersects with the hip youth zeitgeist and they matching each other's intellectual aspirations in poker-faced absurdity like two mimes who don't know each other working the same beat and magically clicking into a perfect spontaneous two-man show.
But lightning never tastes as good the second time, no one ever gets as high as they do the first time. Antonioni moved from London to Southern California for Zabriskie Point (1970) but here he seems always either a step behind or ahead of the stoned desert youths. Is he collaborating with these kids or just filming them and wondering where his translator wandered off to? Even a kinky nudist theater group rolling about in the dust can't kick up any resonance. The songs are great, though, Pink Floyd, the Dead, I have the LP!
Plus, Antonioni seemed to be losing his sense of humor by Zabriskie and that's something other disillusioned intellectual auteurs like Godard and Fellini never seemed to do. One should get funnier as one gets older! There's a fork in the road for every creative artist once they reach a certain amount of success: do you begin to believe your own bullshit or continue to believe only in your own absurdity? It's all up to you, man. Depression vs. enlightenment; freedom vs. ego prison. In 1966 people were just beginning to realize there was even a difference. There was no precedent for what they were doing, so it wasn't cliche. Optimism was actually in the air, something we can hardly imagine today, and yet, Antonioni was already giving up.
But we're talking Blow-Up, so that first hit of LSD scored by the pretty young Londoner is still pulsing in 1966 electric pink and Antonioni still has his deadpan jubilance and sick sense of humor. Here is a man who creates and critiques art at the same time and yet somehow keeps it alive, and if your mind is swirling like a spider riot of Chagallian ink and Dubuffet mud when you watch it next time, you just might disappear.
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