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DVD TUESDAY: Blow-up and the Dark Side of the Cool, Swingin' 1960s
Blow-Up courtesy Warner Home Video
DVD Tuesday: Alienation, miniskirts and Swinging London: The late Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-up wraps a mystery in an groovy existential enigma.
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My tiny tribute to the late Michelangelo Antonioni – who died last week on the same day as fellow film great Ingmar Bergman – is making Blow-up (1966), the film that spaked many a heated argument about what it all meant, this week's DVD Tuesday pick. And of course, the photo-shoot sequence featuring star David Hemmings and pioneering superstar model Veruschka regularly turns up on lists of the sexiest movie scenes, so there's something for everyone.
Based loosely on a short story by Argentine experimental writer Julio Cortazar, it's set in London in the mid-1960s, when London's scene — music, fashion, art, clubs — was the coolest in the world, Blow-up revolves around a successful fashion photographer (coldly impish Hemmings) who discovers evidence of a murder when he blows up the casual snapshots he took in a public park of a young woman (Vanessa Redgrave) apparently meeting her older boyfriend. Or has he? By the time he's blown up the tiny part of the picture where he thinks a body lies so it's large enough to examine, the grain is so big that the image looks like an abstract painting. Maybe he's just seeing a body because he thinks that's what's there. And in circles where consciousness altering drugs, head games, distrust of the apparent and general disconnection are de riguer -– which is to say his circles – the story about the murder in the park is a hard sell.
The first time I saw Blow-up was a little more than a decade after it was made, which was long enough for all that counter-culture, mod London stuff to look dated to me. Almost 30 years after that, the grooviness is distant enough that it doesn't bother me and the film's sense of atmosphere of hipster alienation seems prescient rather than passé (I still hate the mimes, but now I think you're supposed to hate the mimes). Star Hemmings, who died in 2003, never looked better than in Blow-up (he became a positive gargoyle as he got older) or fit a role better than photographer Thomas, reportedly based on David Hamilton, a photographer turned filmmaker famous (or perhaps notorious) for his gauzy, eroticized images of young women. Hemmings was one of the iconic faces of '60s movies, as was Redgrave, whom you may recognize as Julia's (Joely Richardson) self-centered, pop-psychologist mom on Nip/Tuck (Joely is Redgrave's real daughter, as are movie actress Natasha Richardson). Together they were the epitome of hipness – beautiful, bored, soul sick and so, so impossibly cool. Hidden in a small scene involving two would-be models you can see Jane Birkin, soon-to-be international style icon, in one of her earliest roles: The insanely sought-after Hermes Birkin bag was named for her. And the club band is The Yardbirds, featuring both Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck.
Blow-up's weightier elements, its themes of alienation, disgust at a culture of surfaces and reckless rejection of the reassuring, regimented world of previous generations, are obvious. Not because Antonioni was crude, but because he was ahead of the curve: What was radical then is all too apparent now. Discuss over espresso.
Things to consider:
Who do you consider the greatest filmmakers? When did you first see their films and what impression did they make?
In the 1950s and '60s, many moviegoers sought out challenging films, and Hollywood sought out people like Antonioni — MGM financed Blow-up in hopes of appealing to a younger audience that was rejecting what we now call "popcorn movies" as stupid and irrelevant. What's changed?
Does entertainment inherently mean "turn your brain off"?
Previously in DVD Tuesday:
Hot Fuzz
300
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetée
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! — Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
http://community.tvguide.com/thread.jspa?threadID=800073953#comments">Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick
Also: This week's new DVD releases
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Aug 7, 2007 3:57 PM
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Miranda Richardson is not related to the others.
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Aug 7, 2007 4:49 PM
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Greatest filmmakers? Ay-yay-yay. That's a toughie. These "who's/what's your favorite" lists are so mercurial. Let me just go top-of-mind:
Hitch
I mean, no other director gives me that "feel", the "charge" I get from his films. Even when he just did the storyboards and showed up to OK the shot from his limo, his mastery shines through. Rebecca, North by Northwest, The Birds. So much fun. So much to see.
Renior
He directed what may be my favorite film of all, The Grand Illusion, as well as the incredible Rules of the Game. With themes of class, race and nationalism, he made me really think about who we are as a society and how we treat one another. Plus the cinematography. To die for.
Billy Wilder
The sheen and gloss of his black and white films put me right inside the frame. He makes me interact with the characters on screen. I feel like I'm right there.
OK... running low on time... still so many more to go... Preston Sturges, Howard Hawks, Kubrick, Altman... and that's just off the top of my head. I am sure I have forgotten many of my faves... so many to love. I cannot Sophie's Choice any of them!
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Aug 7, 2007 5:39 PM
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Maitland...major points for the note about Beck, Page and the Yardbirds. As you most likely know Beck soon split the band and left Page with touring obligations which he fulfilled with a band called at first The New Yardbirds which morphed into one called Led Zeppelin.
It's tempting to say that young people or movie audiences in general have moved away from more challenging fare in favor of "popcorn" movies as opposed to the way they felt back in
the late fifties and sixties. But I think the proporption is likely not that different.
Unconventional or experimental fare may still be too out there for many but the definition of such work has expanded. And many film makers have found a way to adapt some of the elements of "progressive" film making into mainstream releases. Innovative, or at least unconventional camera techniques and non-linear storytelling are used in films that may not quite be popcorn flicks but still have popular appeal as well as a little intellectual heft.
Since you deal here with the passing of some cinematic giants what do you have to say about the passing of Laslo Kovacs? I have seen his name onscreen for so long that I was surprised to find out that he was only 74. In fact his credit was so prevasive that at one time I thought he was like the MPAA and that every film had to pass through his hands before release.
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Aug 8, 2007 5:10 AM
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David Hamilton may be famous or infamous, but I think that the photographer in Blowup is usually assumed to be based on David Bailey.
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Aug 8, 2007 10:44 AM
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I think it's hard to come up with one favorite. I almost have era or genre favorites, like Hitchcock. I'm a fan of directors when they spit out masterpieces, like Bergman's Fanny and Alexander or Renoir's The River. Some times I like them over and over again like Robert Altman, Terry Gilliam or Tim Burton. I feel blessed we have so many creative minds giving us a new way to look at things and old movie chestnuts preserved to help us go back and get a glimpse of how it used to be.
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Aug 8, 2007 2:27 PM
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