Blowup (Carlo Ponti Productions, MGM, 1966)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I’d checked out the movie listings for Turner Classic Movies earlier in the day and at 7 p.m. decided to watch Michaelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (the title is usually spelled as two separate words, hyphenated – Blow-Up – but,though the hyphenated version appears on the poster art, the spelling on the actual credits is one word, Blowup), an experimental film from 1966 that was Antonioni’s first work for a British or American studio (MGM) and his first film in English. TCM was presenting it under unusual auspices: this film and the one they showed immediately before it, 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, were presented as part of a tribute to costume design in films based on an exhibit at the Costume Institute of New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Naturally, when I hear the syllable “Met” in connection with the arts in New York I immediately think of opera instead of fashion, but the Met hosts an annual fashion gala which I’ve read about and seen footage of on TV. The event looks like one of the most preposterous phenomena on earth, complete with what the costume designer that was one of TCM’s on-air hosts admitted were what he called “exercise clothes” – not clothes designed to be worn while exercising but clothes designed only for fashion shows with no particular expectation that anyone will actually wear these God-awful contraptions in normal life. The two hosts stressed that Blowup was very much a film of its time, and it’s hard to argue with that.

Its original inspiration was a short story by the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar (though he was actually born in Belgium) called “Las Babas del Diablo” (the word babas translates as “spit,” “dribble,” “drool” or “slime”), which I remember reading in a collection of Cortázar’s stories that also included “Axolotl” (a pretty obvious knockoff of Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” but told in the first person – an axolotl, in case you didn’t know, is the larval stage of a salamander) and “The Pursuer” (a short novel that’s a roman à clef about Charlie Parker – he’s called “Johnny Carter” in the story but it’s obvious not only from the story itself but from Cortázar’s dedication at the outset to “Ch. P.” – and one of the best treatments I’ve ever read on this giant of music). Cortázar’s story is actually a work of supernatural fiction in which every time the central character, a photographer, prints a negative of a particular picture he’s shot of a couple in a park, it changes.

Antonioni and his usual collaborator, co-writer Tonino Guerra – as well as Edward Bond, who’s credited with the English dialogue – used this tale to create a movie that, to the extent it’s about anything at all, is about photographer Thomas (David Hemmings) – I didn’t get a last name for him but this is an Antonioni movie and one of the things he couldn’t have cared less about is giving his characters full names. He’s obviously successful since he drives a Rolls-Royce convertible, and he’s mostly a fashion photographer but he occasionally drives out and shoots candids as well. The first thing we see in the movie is a bunch of what we assume were teenage kids speeding through the streets of London in a black Land-Rover (the car which for many years was the symbol of British imperialism, especially in Africa, since it was a four-wheel-drive vehicle, essentially their equivalent of the Jeep, and it was frequently used by British colonists to patrol the countryside and move supplies around), which establishes the film’s theme – to the extent it has one – of subversion and the clash of generations between staid old Britain and modern-day “Swinging London.”

For the first half-hour of the film we pretty much see Thomas in his studio, cavorting with various female models – first just one woman, played by Sarah Miles and wearing a nice knit dress that looks damned good, especially compared to the self-consciously “mod” clothes every other female wears in this film; then five women at once; and after that a pair of women (Jane Birkin as “The Blonde” and Gillian Hills as “The Brunette”) who come over expecting to have an appointment with him but he tells them to come back the next day. One odd thing about Blowup is how decorous it is: though Thomas comes close to having sex with his models – or with a woman who arrives later in the action – he never actually does so. Antonioni manages to capture the inherent sexuality of model fashion photography – though Thomas’s camera doesn’t have a particularly long lens (indeed, I should say cameras, plural, since he has quite a collection, mostly Leica-style 35 mm but also a Pentax SLR 35 mm, a square-format Hasselblad and even an old press-style camera that takes photographic plates instead of film), he nonetheless aggressively charges towards his models and it does start to look like he’s raping them.

Then he takes his trip to a local park, where he’s fascinated by a couple, a young woman named Jane (Vanessa Redgrave) and her older male lover, and Thomas takes clandestine photos of them until Jane catches him and demands that he give her the film. He immediately gets suspicious, thinking at first that there was a third person in the park and he nearly killed the other two. Jane comes over to Thomas’s home – it’s not clear just how she found out where he lived, but once again, this is an Antonioni movie and he was never a good one for explaining plot points. The two undress and it looks like they’re about to have sex when once again Thomas is distracted – this time by the two women who wanted him to photograph them. Thomas makes a series of blow-ups of the photos from the park, after he palmed Jane off with another roll of film instead of the one he’d actually shot and she palmed him off with a phony phone number, and he sees a hand that appears to belong to a corpse. He even takes a picture of his own picture using his press camera, which seems odd since one would think a photo of a photo would have lower resolution than the original, but eventually he becomes so convinced that someone was murdered during his impromptu photo shoot that he goes back to the park after nightfall. For some reason he doesn’t take his camera this time, so he actually finds the corpse but has no way of proving it later – and when he returns to the park the next morning with a camera, the corpse has vanished.

In between all this, Thomas is shown either driving or walking the streets of London, at one point driving his fancy car past a peace demonstration (judging from the drawing of a mushroom cloud on one of the placards, I assumed it was against nuclear war, though the slogan “Get Out!” suggests it might have been against the Viet Nam war instead, or as well). One of the demonstrators throws a sign into Thomas’s open car and he drives past a couple of police officers who look askance at him, but the sign falls out of hls car shortly thereafter and gets run over by a passing truck. Later he goes for a walk at night past a club where the Yardbirds are performing (the Yardbirds were the hugely successful British blues-rock band from the 1960’s that launched the careers of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, and the lineup seen here is Beck and Page on guitars, Keith Relf on vocals, Chris Dreja on bass and Jim McCarty on drums), and for some reason while the Yardbirds song “Stroll On” the club audience stands so stock still one begins to wonder whether the band is performing for a room full of mannequins. Then Jeff Beck smashes his guitar on stage – a trick originated by Pete Townshend of The Who and brought to full fruition by Jimi Hendrix in his infamous performance at Monterey, later lampooned by John Hiatt in his song “Perfectly Good Guitar” – and judging from the overall flimsiness of its construction, including a body apparently made of plywood, it seems to have been made deliberately so it could be smashed up during a performance, especially since he grabs another guitar almost immediately and continues the song.

Beck’s destruction of his instrument finally brings that stock-still crowd to life: they form what amounts to a mosh pit a quarter-century early and fight each other to retrieve the guitar’s neck with all the hunger of an old-time burlesque audience fighting over a stripper’s pair of underpants. Just then Our Alienated Hero leaves the club and spies the neck of Beck’s guitar, abandoned by whoever retrieved it from the mosh pit and then quickly picked up and abandoned again (is that Antonioni’s idea of a social comment on the transitory nature of fame?). Once Thomas goes back to the park the next morning and finds the body gone – and his photo-book editor, Ron (Peter Bowles), who’s the closest thing this movie has to a voice of reason, refuses to believe without photographic evidence that a murder happened at all. Then a disconsolate Thomas walks through the park, where he spots a tennis court and the black Land-Rover we saw in the opening scene (ya remember the black Land-Rover?) pulls up. This time we see that the young people in it are all wearing the white face makeup of mimes, and the two lead mimes (Julian and Charles Chagrin) play a pantomimed tennis game without rackets or balls. One of them hits the “ball” outside the court, and Thomas, getting into the spirit of the thing, picks up an imaginary ball and throws it back into the court. Then the film abruptly ends.

Blowup is a film very much of its time in its sheer meaninglessness and its careful avoidance of a through-line – one could have made an exciting suspense thriller out of this plot, especially given once the photographer realized that his own life was in danger from the unseen killer, but that was precisely the sort of conventional Hollywood storyline Antonioni was famously disinterested in. I’ve seen only two other Antonioni films in my life; in the early 1970’s I watched a TV showing of L’Avventura (“The Adventure”), about a group of rich people who go for a vacation on a yacht, only one of the women disappears – true to form for an Antonioni film, we never find out what happened to her and the other characters couldn’t be less interested. Then a few months ago my husband Charles and I watched an early Antonioni film, La Signora Senza Camelie (“The Lady Without Camelias,” a pun on Alexandre Dumas fils’ famous novel The Lady With the Camellias, which inspired Verdi’s opera La Traviata and at least two great films called Camille, the 1921 version with Alla Nazimova and Rudolph Valentino and the even better 1936 remake with Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor). The story is about a young woman who’s literally plucked out of nowhere to become a movie star, then attracts the personal and professional attentions of a producer who casts her as Joan of Arc, only the film flops and takes down both their careers, and she finally resigns herself to a career trading on her looks and ignoring her lack of acting talent. That film was everything L’Avventura and Blowup weren’t; it was grounded in real emotion, had a plot that made sense, and didn’t feature the appalling number of loose ends Antonioni not only left hanging in his later works but actually made into his style.