Shoot To Kill

By the mid-1960s, Michelangelo Antonioni had established himself as one of the titans of international cinema. His loose trilogy  — L’Aventuura (1960), La Notte (1961) and L’Eclisse (1962)  — had minted his style: languid, unapologetically intellectual examinations of modern discontent, disconnection and (triple word score) ennui, shot in pellucid black and white usually involving middle-class types wandering through modernist architecture in search of meaning. They were the epitome of '60s arthouse: flicks that had cinematic beatniks knowingly namechecking Sartre and Camus while secretly pondering a new set of bongos. 

But with Blow-Up, his first English language film and only his second shot in colour, Antonioni shifted his, ahem, focus, at least a little. Here was what looked at least like a thriller, an audience-friendly murder mystery. A high-rolling London photographer, albeit one suffering from the trademark Antonioni existential discontents, snaps a few pictures of a couple in a wooded park. Developing them later he becomes convinced that he has witnessed a murder, a suspicion that only grows when the woman in question turns up and agitatedly demands the negatives. 

All the apparatus of the classic Hitchcockian noir is in place: a crime, a femme fatale, and a looming sense of danger. But Blow-Up refuses to behave, to deliver the resolution or answers to which audiences were accustomed. The woman vanishes, the body vanishes, the pictures vanish. The reassuring comforts of genre seep out of the movie, snatched away, leaving our hapless protagonist, and the audience, bewildered and unmoored. The mysteries that Blow-Up intends to probe are, it turns out, much more interesting, and universal, than a mere corpse in a copse.

Blow-Up has its origins in a three-picture deal with MGM cut for Antonioni by Italian mega-producer Carlo Ponti, a former partner of Dino De Laurentiis, who had also produced Dr Zhivago for the Hollywood studio. For the first, Antonioni looked to a short story by Argentinian writer Julio Cortazar about a translator who believes he has photographed a kidnapping. Switching the action to London, and introducing the apparent murder, Antonioni first offered Sean Connery the role of the perplexed photographer (a character clearly at least influenced by socialite snapper David Bailey) but he rejected it when Antonioni refused to send him a completed screenplay. Antonioni moved on to Terence Stamp who departed the production at the last minute. A good thing it turned out since his final choice was a masterstroke. David Hemmings, later to have an uneven film career and at that time a relatively unknown stage actor, has the perfect face; that of a slightly ruined choirboy (he had in fact been a noted boy soprano), simultaneously alive, slightly debauched and terminally bored.

Antonioni filled out his cast with figures who were as much signifiers of the times as the draylon furnishings. Vanessa Redgrave  — alert, nervy, mysterious  — is perfect as the might-be-a-femme-fatale. A young Peter Bowles, not yet straitjacketed into telly toff-roles, is laid back as Thomas’s occasionally stoned agent. Supermodel-du-jour Veruschka gets a turn pretty much playing herself. (Further period-appropriate casting included girl-about-town Janet Street-Porter gyrating half-arsedly in a club and yes, that’s Geoffrey from Rainbow as a delivery man.)

Antonioni suffuses the whole film with a hallucinatory, fever-dream feel. The terraced houses that Thomas roars past in his Roller are an eye-burning red, the grass in the park where he may or may not photograph a murder, was dyed a lusher, slightly unnatural shade of green, while over it a (deliberately) unreadable neon sign, flickers mysteriously, like something that has arrived out David Lynch movie from the future. 

While Blow-Up would subsequently become a founding exhibit in the iconography of Swinging London (Austin Powers draws on it much more greedily than he does 007), Antonioni’s camera is alive to the rot and decay under the surface, to the superficiality of the whole raging scene. The paint in Thomas’s cavernous studio (where he enacts the film’s most famous sequence, an eleven-minute tour de force in which he endlessly enlarges his photographs in search of clues until they resemble abstract paintings) peels from the walls.  The nightclub where he fights over a smashed guitar only to lose interest in it immediately has a shabby, temporary feel. The old London of bomb sites and slums is in the midst of being erased, replaced with the strident brutalism that would define the era before it itself becomes reviled. Everything is temporary, set to fall away and reveal . . . what?

Blow-Up would form the first entry in Antonion’s second trilogy with Zabriskie Point (1970) and The Passenger (1975) both in their ways disappointing follow-ups. But Blow-Up endures. Its obsessive, anxious mood would bleed into the paranoid political cinema of the 1970s  — Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974) and Pollack’s Three Days Of The Condor (1975) would both nod to its conspiratorial tone  — while Coppola and De Palma would mine it wholesale for The Conversation (1974) and Blow Out (1981).

But while they have, to some degree at least, been dated by their contemporary concerns, the irony is Blow-Up, firmly nailed as it is to a specific time and place, has emerged as fundamentally timeless. Above all, it is a mood piece, a gateway to a kind of dream-cinema. It’s a sparking live-rail to that profound, bewitching sense of unease that’s unique to a certain kind of movie. It’s the ringing phone in Once Upon America, a frightened guy in a diner in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.

“We know that underneath the revealed image is another that is more faithful to reality,” Antonioni once said, “and beneath this is still another, and again another under this last. And on up to that true image, of the absolute, mysterious reality that nobody will ever see.”

“A pile of pretentious crap,” declared Mike Leigh. And certainly for some Blow-Up, like the rest of high-octane Antonioni, is an exercise in frustrating navel-gazing. (On the other hand, Bergman, generally unimpressed by his Italian colleague, declared it a masterpiece.)

But if it hits you right Blow-Up leaves you, like Thomas, returning again and again to its beguiling, haunting images  — pictures that seem to have some meaning that you can’t quite yet see  — staring at the screen, ever more closely.