[Thor Joachim Haga]

PART IV:

Blow-up

When Antonioni begins a collaboration with producer Carlo Ponti, the doors open for English-language productions, but the films are not streamlined for that reason. He still retains his uniqueness and his fascination with places and their staging.

Blow-up (1966) is perhaps Antonioni’s most famous film, and one of the most accessible, but it is also crammed with significant surfaces. This is particularly evident in three aspects:

The first is London itself, which, like La notte and L’eclisse, oscillates between noise and silence. On the one hand, “the swingin’ sixties” are depicted with enthusiastic curiosity – rock concerts, demonstrations, hashish parties and liberated sexuality, reckless and noisy like the carnival-clad jugglers at the beginning and end of the film. Here Antonioni adopts his more documentary perspective. On the other hand, we experience the city more quietly through the photographer Thomas (David Hemmings) and his excursions into the local area. He is surrounded by gray brick buildings, pierced by only by a few bright surfaces in red, blue and green – as in Il deserto rosso a painted/manipulated tool that “stretches” reality and our perception of it, the thematic core of the film.

The second aspect is the photo studio itself, which is a mini-universe in itself. This is Thomas’s realm, where he reigns as a sole ruler, completely dominating both his employees and the models he photographs. This is supported by the many intersecting horizontal and vertical lines; as if it were a cage. Or in the consistent use of black and white surfaces, almost like a negative. When Jane (Vanessa Redgrave) visits the studio, she passes a black, transparent glass plate, and is thus “caught” in Thomas’ figurative lens.

The third aspect is perhaps also the most exciting: the park scenes. Here Antonioni tones down the color contrasts and makes it more naturalistic, more “real”. During all three visits to the park (and perhaps especially the last one), he slowly observes with calm pans; a suggestive environment where the viewer – like Thomas – is asked to orient himself in the surroundings: The green trees, bushes and lawns, the various geometric lines of the park’s path system, all shrouded in a grayish morning mist. We hear the sound of birds chirping and a gentle wind in the leaves; there is no rhetorical music. We even search the picture frame for traces of the murder that Thomas allegedly saw in his ‘blowups’ of the photographs, both from Thomas’s point of view and in the overall settings. It is as if Antonioni has now transcribed his entire idea of whimsical perception into an entire place; into an entire existence.

Philosopher Susanne Langer has highlighted this need to read emotions, opinions, and reality into artistic expression (and vice versa); an idea that aligns well with Antonioni’s general philosophy about place:

«Every good work of art has, I think, something that may be said to come from the world, and that bespeaks the artist’s own feeling about life. This accords with the intellectual and, indeed, the biological importance of art: we are driven to the symbolization and articulation of feeling when we must understand it to keep ourselves oriented in society and nature /…/ So reality quite normally furnishes the images; but they are no longer anything in reality, they are forms to be used by an excited imagination» (Langer 1953: 253)

This cognitive coherence is something Antonioni explores further in his next film, although it now takes a more political turn.

Zabriskie Point

Antonioni’s schizophrenic encounter with “America” in Zabriskie Point (1970) has a surprisingly relevant resonance today – a US torn between left and right, between capitalism and socialism, between construction and demolition. It is also a considerably more dishelved film from the director than what we are used to, with handheld cameras and long close-ups of faces, especially at the beginning of the film during the meeting with revolutionary students. But it is first and foremost a satirical description of American society, divided into two very clear parts with clearly staged shots.

The first deals with the United States as a country of progress – industry, commercialization, self-aggrandizement. It is also a kick against Bergman’s statements, because here there are not many lingering shots – on the contrary, there is an aggressive ‘flow of floating images’: Antonioni pumps out short bursts of advertising posters, infrastructure, skyscrapers and waving flags while trying to capture the energy of the American industrial landscape through his imagery. It is still about the alienation of modernity, but formulated as a political slant rather than an existential crisis.

In (typically) stark contrast is the film’s second part, set in the barren desert landscape of Death Valley – the valley of death – around the lookout point Zabriskie Point, where the young couple Mark (Mark Frechette) and Daria (Daria Halprin) explore each other and themselves. This is a rusty landscape bathed in wreckage and ruins – a country in disintegration – but it is also the real-life deserto rosso, a lunar landscape where forces are “pushing up from below and eroding away the earth”, as Mark says at one point; a clear reference to the student uprising that is supposed to replace the traditional narrow-mindedness.

Antonioni keeps the camera at a proper distance as he watches the two young people in the swaying, layered desert dunes, but leans closer as they become intimate with each other. Suddenly, we also see a host of other ‘imagined’ couples in a heated embrace around them, in the film’s well-known “orgy scene”. Dozens of young bodies in the sand give “life” to the dead and peaceful valley. Eventually, they will sprout from the barren earth, like the giant, taut, almost phallic cacti around Daria when she learns that Mark has been killed.

The confrontation between the old and the new reaches its climax in the finale. The architect’s mountainside residence, which is carved organically out of the mineral; the established, is blown to shreds while the products we have become so familiar with in the advertising posters early in the film sail gracefully through the air to the ethereal tones of Pink Floyd. Like a redemptive pop-bonbon, the two opposing forces have finally collapsed into each other. The revolution is a fact.

Chung Kuo – Cina

In 1972, Antonioni was one of the first Western filmmakers to enter Maoist China – initially invited by the Chinese government but later condemned by the same authorities. The result was the ambitious television documentary Chung Kuo – Cina, divided into three hour-long parts. The film is difficult to obtain today, as it has neither been restored nor released in a satisfactory manner, but in my opinion deserves its place in the director’s golden age, and within his place-oriented gaze.

Just as cinematographers Vilmos Zsigmond and László Kovács filmed the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 by hiding their cameras in shopping bags, Antonioni also chooses to secretly film parts of his journey through the country – always with a careful guard from the authorities. As Antonioni puts it (via narrator Giuseppe Rinaldi) – “the aim is not to understand China and the Chinese people, but to showcase it”; that is, safely within the director’s documentary, searching gaze.

The first and last parts deal with the big cities of Beijing and Shanghai. We constantly see large, open city spaces with Chinese people dressed in sober, semi-uniform dress codes – often on bicycles (the working class takeover of society). Sometimes we visit special environments, such as a municipal workers’ town or a lively food market (filmed with a hidden camera) in part one or a local teahouse in part three. These sections have much in common with his early documentaries – a panning search in the frame, before picking up something (often faces) and then following it closely throughout an entire scene, without much narration.

Yet part two, about the Chinese countryside, is the most substantial. The provinces are characterized on the one hand by picturesque nature – always shot from a long distance – but at the same time by pervasive poverty. Sometimes the picturesque also has a pragmatic function, like the winding canal through a steep village. Despite the misery, everything is well organized in communist small communities.

The film’s most striking scene is right here – a visit to a deserted mountain village, in many ways a new variation on Antonioni’s “Noto town”: The film crew arrives at seemingly deserted streets, with clean, bare brick walls and black window holes. But gradually the astonished locals peek out from behind corners and doorways. As the narrator says, “here we are the strangers.” When the lens catches their faces, they turn away or retreat. It borders on uncomfortable ‘exoticism’, but it’s really more about Antonioni’s curiosity about places and people; a form of cultural alienation seen from both sides.

…to be continued