The disturbing wrongness of Antonioni's Blowup

Alyssa Rosenberg's response to my earlier post reminded me that I never got around to finishing the discussion of Blowup I started in this one, but before doing so I want to note something that my students teased from the film yesterday.  Antonioni structures the film around a series of moments in which the sound and actors and actions are at odds with the world.  The first involves the mimes at the beginning of the film:

Why is that mime's mouth open?  Because she is yelling.  The second scene occurs slightly after this shot:

The blonde on the left is willing to have sex with Thomas in exchange for photographs, but the brunette in the center is not.  So what happens?  The blonde helps Thomas strip her friend and he proceeds to rape her.  How does she react?  She laughs while resisting.  The third scene occurs at the Yardbirds' concert:

As Keith Relf sings about "strolling on" and Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck dual it out on guitars, the crowd remains eerily immobile.  The fourth (and most famous) instance finishes up the film:

Having retrieved and returned the imaginary ball for the (now silent) tennis-playing mimes, Thomas stares at them and begins to hear an actual tennis match.  Why Antonioni created this disconnect between the sound and the onscreen actions in a film that obsesses on the visual is not a question I can answer at the moment.  But it is significant that the screaming mimes, giggling victims, unmoved attendees and impossible tennis all contribute to the overweening sense of wrongness that permeates the film.  What do I mean by that? 

In addition to the above, there is the opening sequence in which Antonioni violates the 180° rule by having the van full of mimes exit to and emerge from the right:

Followed by an eyeline match between people in different areas of the city:

To a bizarre series of cuts in which the camera seems to flip along the vertical axis as Thomas faces the camera:

Then turns his back to it:

Only to be facing it again immediately thereafter:

It feels as if he walks into the camera, which then somersaults to catch his back before darting in front of him to catch his face again, almost as if Antonioni is doing to Thomas, his subject, what Thomas will shortly to do his:

It makes a certain amount of narrative sense for the camera to dance in this fashion, if only because it places the audience in the role of the model being surveilled, but the result of this odd sequence of shots is a profound and deliberate disorientation.  The audience is unclear where it stands with relation to the diegetic world depicted onscreen—which it now occurs to me may be the point.  Just as Thomas relates, through his camera, to a world that has ceased making sense—as evidenced by his non-evidence of a crime he can't prove was committed—so too does the viewer relate to Thomas' world. 

Or something along those lines.  Next time I promise to stop trying to solve the film and discuss how it establishes an operative definition of "slowness" for my course.

Comments

[Vance Maverick]

If I remember right from Pauline Kael's review, Antonioni made it clear in interviews that he was trying to send a moralistic message of disapproval of Young People Today -- she slams him amusingly, but lets it distract her from the actual qualities of the film. (The relationship of the moralism of La Dolce Vita to the evident relish with which it presents the evidence is easier to understand.)

[SEK]

Antonioni made it clear in interviews that he was trying to send a moralistic message of disapproval of Young People Today...

By saying that if they didn't start behaving, their elders would prank them with dead bodies? It may be moralistic, but it's also a bit mixed.

[Vance Maverick]

Right. I don't think Antonioni was in full control of what he was doing -- he tried something that didn't exactly work. His movies are full of interest but shouldn't be presumed to be coherent. (L'Avventura, I'll admit, is engaging from start to finish, while also full of good stuff.) So when we ask, "why is the movie weird in this way?", the answer we get isn't guaranteed to be satisfying.

[Vance Maverick]

His moralistic aim might also have been to bring it home to older and wiser viewers how low the youth of the day had sunk.

[SEK]

I don't think Antonioni was in full control of what he was doing

Or, as my students said yesterday: "Alright then, so what's up with the propeller?" Later, one of them emailed me and asked whether his trip to purchase the propeller (and subsequent one to the park) might mean he was going to see the elephant, which makes a certain sort of sense, except that screaming mimes, the logic is a little loopy. (You can't quest after something you don't know is there, after all.)

[Ahistoricality]

Not being familiar with the film, the one thing that jumped out of the "doesn't fit" examples is the giggling during the sexual assault. While it's incongruous with our expectations of victims - who should struggle virtuously and protest vigorously, and vice versa - involuntary laughter is a known phenomenon in psychologically stressful, even assaultive situtations.

[Devremülkler]

Very nice post. I love it. Waiting your new posts. Thank you...

[MOUCHE]

Um, would it be inane of me to ask why is Thomas in the factory scene? I've seen Blow-Up but I admit I hadn't noticed him then (being his first appearance in the film and all that, he was just another face that didn't really stick). But why is a famous fashion photographer punching card looking weary the shot right before the one he's riding a sportscar?

[SEK]

Because he's a fashion jackass and they're trying to establish his assholishness ... I think that covers it, no?

[00001001]

uh oh, cyber-Ezekiel takes on the old nasty eye-talians, and their naughty naughty bits, with....rockers....and sex!

What's really impressive, like...Meyer Lansky style impressive is that you managed to swindle UC AND the little jerk-off leftist blog gangs, convince 'em you were like...Real Intellectual. You were destined for say Radio Shack mgmt trainee, but now...Professional comic-critic,AND comma corrector .

Now call the CIA or somethin' Snitchman

[SEK]

And you are ... ?