Did you just accidentally capture a murder on film, or a sound of evidence for one? Can the truth be found on details or does it just send its seeker to the path of obsession? There's a trio of films much studied and appreciated that riff on a very similar subject. I think it appeals to film directors, as the job often includes getting easily distracted on the moments they weren't set out to capture. That's why this idea lingers on, and what's more it epitomize the styles and ides of each of their respective auteurs. Each could also not have been done in a different time, they are the image of the 1960's, 1970's and 1980's.
So, let's talk about Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966), Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974) and Brian De Palma's Blow Out (1981).
Blow-Up (UK, Italy 1966)
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
One of the essential depictions of the image of 1960's Swinging London, Antonioni's most famous film sees David Hemmings as a wealthy, self-centered and womanizing photographer. Much of the film we also see odd and off-putting public performances of Flower People through his eyes. Like in many of Antonioni's films, much of the mood and ideas are put between the lines. Even as Hemmings' Thomas tries his best to be a hip mod, it is obvious that he does not feel comfortable or let his guard down.
But his boredom and uneasiness also allow him to push boundaries and operate on a morally gray area. As he's secretly photographing a mysterious woman in the park, it seems that his camera captures something odd. The woman confronts him later on and demands the roll. The instance haunts Thomas and as he's studying his secret negatives he starts seeing things by blowing up smaller and smaller elements to bigger pictures. But we as an audience also never get any closure or reinsurance of the fact throughout the film.
The obsessions related to the sexual nature of how Thomas uses the camera makes the film basically about the male gaze and voyeurism. Antonioni had a knack of combining his themes to the plot. Empty hedonism and sex where his every whim is filled still doesn't satisfy, and by pushing morals, the main character is left a giant void. These days, one could also see how his masculinity turns more and more toxic, as he treats women disposable and has the entire world revolving around his wants and needs. The film is a fascinating look at details and visually wondrous, but the strictly male navel-gazing it provides is a bit out of time by today's standards.
★★★★
The Conversation (USA 1974)
Dir. Francis Ford Coppola
As Antonioni was exploring life in the 1960's, then Coppola took the idea to the paranoid 1970's and brought a more political aspect to the proceedings. It is probably still the best movie ever made about surveillance and the endless hole of compromizing ideals it leads to.
It's not to say Coppola is stealing the idea from Blow-Up, rather he's using it as a key influence. A most notable difference is that as Antonioni's film was about a wealthy and cool young artist, Coppola centers around a sweaty and mousey middle-aged man that considers himself a public servant. Actually Gene Hackman's Harry Caul is a surveillance expert, and with his company, follows around those his clients point out to him with very little regard on the moral aspects of his work.
By contrast to his job description, Caul himself is very much an introvert, careful of his own privacy and keeping his private life private (I wonder what he would make of the modern day when American and Chinese apps follow your every move and sell them to the highest bidder in a bat of an eyelash). But as he is very much a loner, there's a perverted aspect of him following young couples around and listening their conversations. One particular conversation might contain some damning information, but it is not clear and could be interpreted multiple ways. Nevertheless, Caul is horrified to learn that the couple he is listening in might be stalked by a murderer.
Coppola's film has an amoral man grow a conscience but as one would expect, he is not rewarded from it but rather, having his whole life come crumbling down and things going from bad to worse quick. He blows his few relationships, work and most of all, his safety, which means all his posturing around privacy concerns was basically for naught as his enemys could still get to him. Coppola is also careful not to make his film into your basic thriller, but having the tensions come from very slow development of the plot, and as Antonioni, reading moods and implications from between the sparse lines of dialogue.
It's a jazzy and alienating, often frustrating and deliberately off-putting film. The use of sound is brilliant and I think would warrant a seeing seemingly such a small-scale character drama in theatres. This is one of those films you get to appreciate properly only second or third viewing. It is very multi-layered, but I think well worth the effort.
★★★★ 1/2
Blow Out (USA 1981)
Dir. Brian De Palma
Easily the most garish of the trio, De Palma was never afraid of "borrowing" stuff from even well-known cinema, so his answer to the same theme takes more out of the previous movies, as well as Michael Powell's Peeping Tom. Visually, though it looks more like it's director. As the ideas stretch far beyond just plucking them from previous work, it is among the director's finest works with particularly a climactic image lingering on long after the curtains have closed.
John Travolta plays Jack Terry, a character that is something like an amalgam of Hemmings' and Hackman's characters. On surface he may seem like a brash and cool film sound engineer, but below he's tormented and traumatized, as well as feeling empty and lonely. He is recording ambient sound at a park one evening as a car crashes into a pond. He manages to pull out a woman, Sally (Nancy Allen) and helps her to a hospital. But it turns out she was dealing with an important political figure and thus someone might be out to get her. Terry finds evidence on the sound he recorded that the car crash was not an accident.
The film makes fun of the misogynism of murder movies and by-the-numbers stalk-view that De Palma and many of his copycats have used. The movie opens with a film-within a film that seems like a cheap Halloween knock-off and a sub-plot of the film concerns on trying to find the right kind of scream to be used on the film. De Palma presents himself to be more detail-oriented. The actual film has a murderer stalking women too, played by thorough iciness by John Lithgow. But the movie goes out of its way to show how pathetic and disgusting this messy killing actually is, not just stalking girls in a house with a bread knife. De Palma uses plenty of underutilized tricks to emphasize the suspense, such as exciting camera shots and suspending expectations. He is a true follower of Hitchcock in that, carefully limiting on what the audience knows and what he shows.
But in its core, it is a tragic love story of a man who has lost his wife being unable to protect another woman he has developed feelings for. It has similar qualities also to Vertigo in this regard, with the love being really as much about obsession. The final punch of the film also depicts a more cynical end to the character arc than the more open-ended predecessors allowed. In a way all of these are about a man being destroyed by thier obsession in multiple ways. The film also draws parallels to the political decay of the loss for truth and the withering of cinematic artistry in a way I'm not really enclined to agree with, but find fantastically entwined within the plot. De Palma is just as angry as Coppola was, but comes to different conclusions on the same issues.
The cycle of inspiration carried on, as the film itself proved very influental to Quentin Tarantino (particularly Death Proof, which features the same love theme) and Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio.
★★★★
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