Blow Up

(with commentary)

For some reason, I was kind of excited when I saw there was audio commentary with auther Peter Brunette on the Netflix DVD I have, even though I have no idea who Peter Brunette is. I just tried watching it, but I could only make it about a third of the way through. I had to stop when Peter said, "presumably the line about queers and poodles wouldn't have made it into the script these days." Come on. Why not? Because he finds the line offensive, or because he assumes that everyone would find the line too offensive, or because he thinks everyone's more enlightened these days, or because he thinks the PC police would have stopped it? I mean, I assume this guy's supposed to be some kind of film historian or something, but does he watch any movies that actually come out these days? Of all the things in this movie that wouldn't make into a "Hollywood" film these days, why choose that to single out? Especially when I don't think there'd really be much fuss about the line anyway. What world does Peter Brunette live in?

The other problem with the commentary was just the general problem that many movie commentaries seem to have, which is that he kept talking about the film in such a way to avoid "spoilers," but why? Who is going to watch the movie for the first time with the commentary on? I think if you're doing a commentary, you can safely assume that anyone who listens to the commentary has already seen the movie at least once. So talk about the movie that way.

Peter Brunette, although he seems like a pleasant and intelligent enough guy, fell back too many times on his little critical tricks. Also, although he paid lip service to the complexity of the presentation of photog guy, he seemed incapable himself of anything but disgust for him. Even ordinary things like how he flips the camera from one hand to another, Brunette couldn't point out how suave it was without the word "suave" having some pretty obvious disgust quotes around it. Also, the fact that the junk shop leaves him utterly speechless is a little disappointing. He can't seem to talk about it because he doesn't know what it "means," because it doesn't fit into any of his critical tricks. Although I'm not saying this is the ultimate thing about the junk shop scene, it seems to me like at least one worthwhile conjecture is that photog guy is there because he thinks junk is interesting. Maybe Brunette couldn't offer that or another opinion because there wasn't anything easily condemnable about his interest in the junk shop? Who knows... Actually, it seemed to me like a simple case of not being able to offer any idea about the junk shop because he couldn't think of anything "profound" about it.

I really was hoping for an interesting commentary, though. Pretty much everything Brunette said about the film was obvious, surface-level criticism. "He's setting up a binary between the merry-makers and the poor people." Not only is that obvious, but it doesn't really expand on any of the oddness of the merry-makers. Or the fact that if that's all it is, it's a completely unbalanced binary, because the merry-makers veer so close to the completely surreal that the almost seem like they have to have some kind of rhetorical weight, whereas the poor people who come immediately after do not seem at all surreal. So while there's certainly an intentional juxtaposition of the merry-makers to the dour faces of the poor, they can't simply be a binary; they're not equivalent enough.

I worry, though, that by being so dismissive of Brunette but so emphatically in love with the movie that I'm setting Antonioni up to be "the master" just as much as Brunette so nauseatingly does in his commentary. Well... The film is a truly singular example of a spectacular film. Brunette's commentary is mediocre commentary. Nothing too disturbing about that formulation, I think. Or I want to think right now.

Another annoying thing Brunette did: all that talk about the camera being this "cold, medal" thing that was "mediating" between photog guy and the supermodel, or some such nonsense. Now, it is interesting that photog guy does seem to get some kind of emotional distance from reality through his camera, but that's more a psychological thing that's specific to him; there's nothing less real about taking a picture of something than just looking at that thing. Yes, it changes the way you're interacting with that thing, and just as with photog guy here it is possible for a person with a camera to use the camera for some kind of emotional distance from what they're photographing, but that's a psych thing, not an ideological thing. But simply taking a picture of something does not make your experience of that thing somehow less authentic. It merely is another aspect of your experience. The garbage Brunette spewed about the "cold, medal" camera was just lazy falling back on crit speak.

Blow Up

2nd time

Memory is weird. I didn't remember at all the scene when photog guy goes and actually sees the corpse in the park, even though this time it seemed like a very striking scene. I wonder if it was so striking because I didn't remember it? When he went to the park the second time, I thought it was the scene when he went and found nothing, so the sudden presence of the corpse was rather alarming.

Also, at the end, I was sure there was a shot of a tennis ball bouncing away, or something like that. I was sure of it, in fact. I kept expecting it, and the whole time was composing this sentence in my head, "The final shot of the tennis ball bouncing is the only misstep in the whole movie." Does that mean, then, that there are no missteps in the whole movie?

I can still remember things about when I watched this for the first time, with Joe, who didn't like it at all, but it was one of those movies I didn't think all that much of at first. I thought there were some kind of intriguing things about it, but mostly was kind of boring. But letting it float around in my head for a while really worked apparently, because I knew well before I watched it this time that I'd like it a lot if I ever saw it again.

Seeing the scene with Vanessa Redgrave "dancing" to the music this time reminded me of something else I'd seen, but probably what it reminded me of was that very scene. The way she moves is amazing. Of all the near-explicitly surreal moments in the film, that is by far the best. I almost want to call it Lynchian, even though this was way before Lynch. I can't think of anything like it an any other movie I've seen, though.

Listing to the "music only" track right now. What a strange feature for a film with almost no music through the first five-thirteenths of the movie.

At present, Wikipedia has this to say about the movie:

"Ultimately, the film is about reality and how we perceive it or think we perceive it. This aspect is stressed by the final scene, one of many famous scenes in the film, when the photographer watches a mimed tennis match and, after a moment of amused hesitation, enters the mimes' own version of reality by picking up the invisible ball and throwing it back to the two players. A tight shot shows his continued watching of the match, and, suddenly, we even hear the ball being played back and forth. Another version of reality has been created. Then, at the very end, Hemmings, standing all alone in the green grass of the park, suddenly disappears, removed by his director, Antonioni."

I don't know why I find that such a stupid explanation of the movie. Is it "the film is about"? I don't know. But it not only seems really pretentious to me, it also fails completely to capture or explain what is so compelling about the movie. I mean, I guess whoever wrote that isn't a professional critic or anything... But I do imagine that it's probably a paraphrase of what's written an many Film 101 textbooks.

(later) The scene when Vanessa Redgrave disappears into the crowd is one of two Antonioni moments that I know of that are technically amazing. I have no idea how he did it. I slowed down the DVD, and I just can't figure out at all where she goes, how she disappears, etc. Maybe if I knew more about technical aspects of film it would be easy. Maybe it's a simple thing. But I can't see it. It doesn't look like it'd be possible for it to be a simple splice of one shot with her into one shot without her; there's too much else going on. The other scene is in The Passenger the final long shot looking through the window where the camera moves forward and somehow passes through the bars of the window, even though I know the camera must be too big to make it through there. How did he do it?! Brunette, of course, is no help, but he does point out the interesting (though obvious, but I had meant to write it here) point that when seeing that scene for the first time the viewer does wonder just as much as photog guy presumably does if he's actually seen Vanessa Redgrave standing there before she disappears. She's only there for a couple of seconds, and it of course takes a couple of seconds for us to recognize her, and then she's gone. And watching this movie in a theater when that was the only way it could be seen, wow that would've been frustrating. I would've had to pay to see it again and if what I really wanted to know was if she was there the I would've had to sit through the rest of it and try to remember exactly what to look for, and then it would've been over so quickly again, and I wouldn't have been sure if she really did disappear or if I just kind of lost her in the crowd of other people, and there would've always necessarily been a lot of time in between every time I was able to see it. What an incredibly frustrating bit of film.