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Do you see what I did there?
You might not have.
Or maybe you’re wondering.
Wondering if it happened at all.
Let’s roll it back and take a closer look.
The quote …
… the title ...
... ok ...
… here we are …
… we have John Travolta running,
then basically the end of the 1981 trailer for Blow Out,
tagged with a Roger Ebert quote.
… wait for it …
… the quote is about Blowup. Not Blow Out.
And your mind is blown.
Boom!
Of course, the quote makes for a versatile log line and would fit a great many films.
Still, it seemed appropriate: a bit of misdirection, to begin this curation for two of her masters.
One, a gadgeteer photographing a gadgeteer.
The other, a purposeful artist photographing a purposeless one.
And both of them auteurs.
I first glimpsed the auteur theory in 1987 when I realized the man who made Scarface also made The Untouchables.
So I explored the hell out of Brian De Palma’s filmography;
I formed the opinion that the films he made between 1980 and 1987 rival any such stretch from any director in history.
I discovered his early shorts.
I discovered his red period.
De Palma’s films just don’t look like anybody else’s.
Critics call them gimmicky; I call them cool.
The long takes, the split-screens, the diopters.
And Blow Out is by far his coolest film.
You have Danny Zuko, the campy film-within-a-film open, the revolutionary camera choreography ...
... Tony Manero, the watch garrote From Russia with Love, all those splits ...
... and Vinnie freaking Barbarino!
Then, sometime in 1990, I read Pauline Kael’s review of Blow Out in an old copy of The New Yorker.
She mentioned Blowup and one film led me to the other:
the homage to its inspiration.
Although if truth be told, Blow Out is based as loosely on Blowup,
as Blowup is on the Julio Cortazar short story the film cites as its source.
And, obviously, Blowup is much more abstruse and ambiguous than Blow Out.
Still, the films do have a few interesting common threads, and a few interesting differences.
Blowup is Antonioni’s most commercial film and his first English language one.
It was a huge hit internationally and its contributions to American cinema of the 70s cannot be overstated.
On the other hand, Blow Out, with its bleak ending, had a rather disappointing release.
Despite this, Blow Out managed to influence a generation of filmmakers;
I believe, because American audiences had never seen anything quite like it in a conventional theater:
much like Jane Birkin’s Beaver.
Pardon my language, but those are Jack Nicholson’s words, not mine.
You see, Blow Up is often credited as having created an appetite for European Cinema in America.
And, in the mid 70s, when that appetite seemed sated, Nicholson theorized,
“All the American audience’s supposed greater education, through Jules and Jim, 8 1/2,
“to more sophisticated formal approaches to viewing narrative seems to have evaporated.
"it now seems that the reason for the success of Blowup
"was that it included the first beaver shot in a conventional theater.”
It’s true that both films contain a fair amount of nudity;
but flesh is just one of the many colors dancing about on the palettes of De Palma and Antonioni:
these two sons of Italy, these descendants of Da Vinci,
and heirs to Titian with their delicate black and white brushwork on color canvas.
Both directors play rather patent games of red light / green light.
And De Palma’s patriotic mise en scène is almost palpable.
But, ultimately, in both Blow Out and Blowup, it is only in black & white, only in Art, that we may find Truth, such that it is.
And in further pursuit of The Transcendentals, these self-reflexive ruminations on the nature of film
have at their core almost identical sequences in which the protagonist composes a narrative of the ***
by reconstructing the media as a metaphor for the filmmaking process and how photography and sound recording
and video and audio editing can recreate significance from the raw stock of reality.
But for all their visual artistry, both films take great care with sound and silence.
Except for the credit sequence, all of the music in Blowup is diegetic:
from The Yardbirds to the American jazz pianist's score for the Italian director.
The first 12 minutes of Blow Out are similarly diegetic.
There is no music until after the crash when the Italian violinist's score for the American director floods in.
But, as is often the case, the most powerful scenes are the quietest.
Just as sound literalized film, transformed it from a subjective to an objective medium,
in both Blow Out and Blowup, the silence serves to reverse that literalization
and restore much of the metaphor lost since cinema’s early days.
Jean-Marie Straub, quoted D. W. Griffith as saying, “What modern movies lack is the beauty, the wind in the trees.”
Antonioni and De Palma regarded Griffith’s words, and crafted hauntingly beautiful films that rustle. And whisper.
These whispers warn of our malleable perceptions; and also, as David Alan Mellor puts it, the mutability of evidence.
In both films, the central characters experience hallucinatory flashbacks
whose fantastic nature bespeak an Internal Focalization.
Just listen.
You are not alone.
The photographer’s flashbacks are triggered by his photographs and are auditory;
while the sound man’s are triggered by his sound recordings and are optical.
Thus, especially in Blow Out, which often focalizes from Zero to Internal in the blink of an eye,
these glimpses into the characters’ psyche are clear indications that the auteurs deliberately structured
narratives with points of view that reflect the subjective perceptions of their protagonists.
And don’t get it twisted, kid; subjectivity is at the center of both films.
That is: auditory, optical, and cognitive subjectivity.
Although Antonioni was ultimately inviting audiences to question their perceptions,
while De Palma asked only that they question everything else.
In Antonioni’s swinging London, the question is:
Was the body real?
Even more, what is real?
And in De Palma’s highly political post-Watergate Philadelphia, the answer is: it doesn’t matter.
Even if you got it on tape.