BLOW-UP
Friday 11 January 2008
Friday 11 January 2008
Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966) was the most commercially successful art house film up to its time. Though filmed in England, and in English, it qualified as an art house film in other ways.
As previously mentioned, an "art-house" movie was a subgenre: a foreign movie outside generic Hollywood conventions, with a more explicit sexual and intellectual content, a less predictable narrative structure, and a marked cinematic style (compared to the invisible style of Hollywood films). Subtitles helped, as did nudity at a time when Hollywood still had a censorship code.
As American films broke away from conventional narrative style, and as foreign films increased their budgets, the term "art house film" was less useful. Today audiences debate the "meaning" of a Hollywood movie as they used to debate the meaning of a film by Ingmar Bergman or Antonioni.
Indeed, several scenes in Blow-Up became fashionable discussion topics, especially the blowup and tennis sequences: Was there really a murder? What was the meaning of the final imaginary tennis match and the photographer's participation in it?
Today Blow-Up might seem simplistic and shallow, or more obvious and less complex than Hitchcock's Vertigo or John Ford's The Searchers, movies once considered entertainment but now called art.
Thus artistic taste and evaluation change: Hollywood films and Rock music once dismissed as entertainment are now benchmarks of culture. Blow-Up is rarely mentioned, while Vertigo and The Searchers are endlessly discussed.
This is not to dismiss Blow-Up. The blowup sequence alone is one of the great sequences in film history. The editing and camera movement compel our involvement as the photographer becomes involved; while the silent soundtrack heightens the imaginary rustling of trees as the photographer views his "storyboard." The sequence, like the film, is a model of cinema as an art form.
As previously mentioned, an "art-house" movie was a subgenre: a foreign movie outside generic Hollywood conventions, with a more explicit sexual and intellectual content, a less predictable narrative structure, and a marked cinematic style (compared to the invisible style of Hollywood films). Subtitles helped, as did nudity at a time when Hollywood still had a censorship code.
As American films broke away from conventional narrative style, and as foreign films increased their budgets, the term "art house film" was less useful. Today audiences debate the "meaning" of a Hollywood movie as they used to debate the meaning of a film by Ingmar Bergman or Antonioni.
Indeed, several scenes in Blow-Up became fashionable discussion topics, especially the blowup and tennis sequences: Was there really a murder? What was the meaning of the final imaginary tennis match and the photographer's participation in it?
Today Blow-Up might seem simplistic and shallow, or more obvious and less complex than Hitchcock's Vertigo or John Ford's The Searchers, movies once considered entertainment but now called art.
Thus artistic taste and evaluation change: Hollywood films and Rock music once dismissed as entertainment are now benchmarks of culture. Blow-Up is rarely mentioned, while Vertigo and The Searchers are endlessly discussed.
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