Blow Up, Blow Out

 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.

★★★★

Death of the Bohemian: The Great Beauty and Only Lovers Left Alive

I saw two movies this week that dealt with similar kinds of subject matters: Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty (La grande bellezza) and Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive are both movies about the connection between historical art and the modern day. Both feature bohemians that have lost their way somewhere along the way. And they are not so much plot-driven films as mood pieces, dashing out various scenes presenting ideas and pondering them. So, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at both movies from these angles. Since this analyzing means dealing with some plot points, it should be reminded here that this post may contain spoilers.

The Great Beauty opens with a scene showing Japanese tourist so overwhelmed by the ancient city of Rome that he has a heart attack. This is cut to a outrageous megaparty where tattood strippers lure men in glass booths and drunken upper-class art connisseurs dance in line to the music of hot DJ's mixing traditional sounds to modern beats. In the middle of all this hullabaloo, the birthday-celebrating Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo) is introduced smiling with a cigar in his mouth, looking like Silvio Berlusconi. He has done this kind of partying for a long time.

Not until someone close to him dies does he realize that he should perhaps want to spend his life also as a creator, not just a partyer. He starts to consider writing another book, but he has trouble getting the inspiration, which he calls "The Great Beauty". But he has trouble spotting it, due to the banality of the performance pieces he tends to visit, and being so used to classical architecture (his own penthouse apartment has a view over the Colosseum).

Only Lovers Left Alive deals with two immortal vampires, Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton) who have been lovers for centuries. At the start of the film they are "living" seperately, however. While Eve binges on old literature and lives somewhat happily in Tangier, Adam is brooding in his Detroit home, composing music but sheltering himself away from fans. In his desperation he has produced himself a possible exit from this bleak world: a bullet made out of hard wood, that would effectively work like a stake when shot through the heart of the vampire. When the pair reunites, there's plenty of discussion on whether the world has gone astray or if the world's problems are just a permanent glitch.

Adam has a bleak outlook on the future. Humans (or zombies, as vampires call them) are on the verge of self-destruction which has manifested itself also in contaminating their blood. Eve, as an elder vampire, has seen the worst history has to offer from floods and plagues. She shrugs off the problems as long as she herself is living comfortably. The brooding Adam, however is waiting for the global climate crisis to reach the point humans start World War III over fresh water. He has lost his faith on humanity, his idolized poets, authors and scientists throughout the ages being mostly long gone, and left only humanity's self-doubt over their abilities and their subsequent refusal to figure out a way to save themselves.

During The Great Beauty, Jep keeps being disappointed when a potential source of beauty turns sour. A grace-fallen love interest he seeks to redeem dies on him, modern art consists of meaningless performances trying to gain the attention of rich buyers and even spirituality is reduced to status-seeking. People don't pray but rather take similar photographies of themselves with a priest that's to be a strong contender to be a pope or an ancient nun that's to be pronounced a saint after her death, Jep's companions try to hint to him to try to search the Great Beauty from within, not just looking from the outside. It isn't until the grotesquely old nun spells out to him how important "roots" are, does he fully get it and remembers entirely the night he lost his virginity.

So, The Great Beauty has an optimistic look that one may find one's muse when looking at moments of beauty at one's roots. Only Lover Left Alive is far more pessimistic. Art-loving vampires have trouble functioning at a celebrity-crazed culture that insists every popular creator is to be fitted into a spotlight. It prevents the sort of art bohemia of yesterday when poets could feed from one another (so to speak). Even though Adam tries to keep his musical creations to himself, they seem to find a way to leak out and to be played in underground clubs around the world, much to his dismay. He is in it purely from a love of the instruments. He also helds a popular hipster opinion that nothing popular can't be too good, since at the end he hears a Morroccan singer, he comments that she's far too good for fame. Adam seems to find that the more attention things get, the easier it is for money-hungry people to push it to the limits and totally ruin it.

During OLLA, the vampires suffer one indignity under another and are increasingly pushed to the edge. As much as they loathe the modern humans, the more they find themselves to resemble them as their back is pushed against the wall. Even Eva's comforting outlook starts to show cracks. They can't plan for the future when their current needs start to weigh too heavily. Blood is a sort of drug in the movie. When the supply of pure, good stuff runs dry, the desperate vampires have to start taking risks in acquiring it on the streets. The safest bet seems to be drinking from young lovers, since what else is pure in this world any more?

In the end, The Great Beauty is a movie looking back, trying to get people to make the right choices to feel good about their lives in general. It has the stance that happiness can't come from mere self-indulgence or hedonism, one has to have spiritual experiences as well and remember the parts of life that matter. But if this balancing act is reached, it doesn't see why a rich life can't go on as it used to.  

Only Lovers Left Alive has a much bleaker outlook.It sees that the fractured world can't anymore produce a sphere for artists to meet and discuss and create. The future of the vampires is either self-destructive retroactivity (as with Mia Wasikowska's Ava) or death. The demise of John Hurt's cultural vampire Marlowe (revealed to have ghost-written Hamlet as well as other world-famous writings and poems over his multiple lifetimes) represents the death of the culture. This is a sign of how dog-eat-dog the world is about to get as things get more and more difficult for everyone. There's no room for new ideas in the world if the only idea that's going to matter is the instinct for survival. Jarmusch's film is nothing short of heralding total apocalypse. it's a good thing that the film has a sense of humor about it too, or it might be harder to swallow.