WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED? BLOW OUT, BLOW UP, and THE CONVERSATION **** (out of ****)
		THE CONVERSATION Starring Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Harrison Ford, Cindy Williams, and Frederic Forrest Directed, produced, & written by Francis Ford Coppola 1974 113 min  PG BLOW OUT Starring John Travolta, Nancy Allen, John Lithgow, and Dennis Franz Directed & written by Brian De Palma 1981 107 min  R
BLOW UP Starring David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, and Sarah Miles Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni & written for the screen by Antonioni and Tonino Guerra, from the short story by Julio Cortazar, with English dialogue by Edward Bond 1966 NR (should be R)
“Blow Up” is one of those direct masterpieces, about the very nature of film and photography, whose existence was inevitable.  The movie asks:  is the filmmaker’s duty to recreate reality or to impose his will upon an artificial reality?  Is man such a social animal that a fact is not a fact if there is no one else, no external source, to corroborate it?  Is the filmmaker an impartial observer or is there an element of violation in everything he does?  Can we know reality by recording it, or is each record imperfect, requiring an infinite amount of refinement before we can know what “happened?”  Do any of our symbols have any value or meaning outside of their context? The first half of the film portrays the artist as violator.  Our artist-rapist is represented by a nameless photographer (David Hemmings) who is as dashing as he is reprehensible.  When we first meet him, he has just photographed the residents of a homeless shelter, not because he cares about their plight, but because he knows it will look good in his book.  He gets a big starlet (real-life toothpick model Verushka) into a nearly-orgasmic frenzy in a photo-shoot, then discards her once he is finished.  Next he is dictatorial and verbally abusive to the emaciated women in another fashion shoot.  He reduces them to a kind of unwilling harem, arrayed in unnatural clothes in awkward poses.  In everything he does, the photographer is creating an artificial reality.  Even when he wants to get some “nature,” he can only go so far as a public park, in which field and forest have been unnaturally tamed and regimented for our escapist pleasure. Filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni reminds us that the movie itself is a fake reality by framing his figures with furniture—a frame within a frame.  He gives us point-of-view shots that we may think belong to the photographer but, when we look closer, are not.  In the person of the photographer, “Blow Up” is ambiguous:  he is scum, yes, but he’s also handsome, suave, impeccably dressed, improbably cool, and, as all men truly wish they could be, surrounded by adoring slave-women without minds of their own. In the second half, “Blow Up” turns into a mystery.  The photographer keeps enlarging one of the pictures he took in the park and begins to wonder if he has inadvertently captured a murder on film.  The meticulous and mostly silent interlude in which he enlarges each image and constructs a primitive movie out of them is engrossing.  We hear the same wind in the leaves during the enlargement process that we heard in the park.  Again, Antonioni seems to be stepping outside the movie, as if to point at the series of images used to construct a story and says “yes, this is what I’m doing as well.”  The photographer begins to have something of a moral rebirth, but is it too late?  In his Great Movies review of “Blow Up,” Roger Ebert refers to the photographer as Thomas.  Where he found or heard this name is anyone’s guess.  But, if it’s true, I think it no accident that Hemmings shares a name with someone else famous for not believing until he saw. As the photographer, David Hemmings is so brilliantly cast that you might not even notice.  Vanessa Redgrave is the woman in the photo, who tries seducing him to get the negatives.  He only wants to toy with her.  But the real star is Antonioni, the film’s director and co-screenwriter, who enhances the film’s ambivalence by creating an atmosphere that is dreamy and documentary, aimless and meticulous.  “Blow Up’s” exposé of swinging ‘60s London seems to be art as recreating reality.  There’s pot-smoking and hard drinking between bouts of meaningless sex with bored and emaciated models.  During his half-interested flirtation with Redgrave, the photographer is willing to turn on and off the jazzy go-go score by Herbie Hancock.  And there’s the Yardbirds concert that is at once frozen and exhilarating, where a stiff crowd studiously watches the band rock out. But the interludes of precise camera movements, abstract color, and the appearance of mimes is definitively an artist’s artificial vision.  As Hemmings enlarges photo after photo, the blurred and splotchy images take on an abstract beauty that is no doubt intended to remind us of the abstract paintings a friend of his is working on.  They’re beautiful in the way a scratched-up Guy Maddin film is beautiful.  It’s also a great film for anyone who likes the pacing and patience of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. “The Conversation” replaces “Blow Up’s” ambiguous photograph, which may or may not contain a murder, with a secretly recorded conversation that may or may not contain the description, premonition, or fear of a murder.  From far across a public plaza, an expert eavesdropper and wiretapper captures the furtive talk of a pair of young lovers.  “He’d kill us if he knew,” one of them says.  And the surveillance expert wonders, who is “he?”  Is “he” the man who has hired the expert?  Will giving “him” the recording lead to the deaths of these two young people? Page two of "What the hell happened?"                                         Back to home.