From The American Scholar (August 25, 2022). Here are the oepning paragraphs of my latest “Talking Features” piece:
When it was released in 1966, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up blew the minds of student cineastes and literary intellectuals at Columbia University—including me. Having just entered the college as a freshman, I sat at the feet of the elders at The Columbia Review and King’s Crown Essays and took a crash course in cinema as an art form.
In avant-garde circles in general, there was a cult around such European directors as Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Agnès Varda. Antonioni’s Italian-language movies—L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L’Eclisse (1962)— offered an attractive blend of enigma, ennui, eros, existential fatigue, and Monica Vitti.
L’Avventura has a beginning and middle, but no true end. The character played by Lea Massari disappears; her disaffected lover (Gabriele Ferzetti) and best friend (Vitti) try to find her, and the film arrives at no resolution. It would be as if, having done away with his heroine 45 minutes into Psycho, Hitchcock failed to provide an explanation and a compensatory story to make up for her absence. The ambiguity in L’Avventura goes up a notch in Blow Up.
Antonioni based Blow-Up, his first English-language feature, on a story by the Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar. He set the film in London, “mod” headquarters in the heyday of the Beatles, Carnaby Street, and psychedelic nightclubs. David Hemmings plays Thomas, a nervy fashion photographer with artistic instincts. Besides taking pictures of professional models who resemble heavily made-up mannequins, he spends his time fending off wannabe models, visiting an antiques dealer, and going to pubs and clubs.
There’s a very hot scene featuring Jane Birkin and Gillian Hills trying on clothes and playing sex games with the photographer. In an American movie, such scenes would have a bearing on the plot. Here they are all red herrings, though they do contribute to the movie’s powerful atmospheric effects.
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