The Hi-Desert Cultural Center is proud to present a special screening of ENO, the first-ever generative documentary film in a one-night-only event featuring an introduction by Orian Williams, one of the revolutionary film’s producers.
Lost, Lost, Lost: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up and The Swinging Sixties
The American film director William Friedkin, a devotee who introduced Blow-Up to audiences numerous times over the course of his life, described the film as “a mystery without a solution.” The struggle to reconcile image and reality is part of why Blow-Up resonated so strongly with audiences in 1967. Unsettled and searching, Thomas presents as an archetypal lost soul of the era.
In Ways of Seeing, John Berger’s landmark 1972 treatise on visual art in the media age, he says that when we “see” a landscape, we situate ourselves in it. An art school staple, Berger’s book suggests that a photographer’s way of seeing is reflected in his choice of subject. It’s not a stretch to imagine that Berger, along with millions of others, saw Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up when it was released in 1967 and took something essential from its portrayal of a jaded fashion photographer in search of a landscape.
After coming up empty-handed at a second-hand store in his search for photographs, he weaves through the streets of 1966 London on a quest to make his own. His wandering eye takes him to Maryon Park, a vast green expanse where he intrudes upon a scene that, at first glance, appears to be a woman meeting her lover in a park. A crisis is set into motion when he raises his camera and begins to shoot, drawing the woman’s attention and vocal objection. “You can’t photograph people like that,” she scolds him. He responds, “Who says I can’t? I’m only doing my job. Some people are bullfighters, some people are politicians. I’m a photographer.” The camera becomes an instrument of power in his hand, a power that we’ll repeatedly see exercised over the women he encounters. Confident in his right to take a woman’s image, he fails to recognize what he’s captured—and what this transgression may cost him.
The American film director William Friedkin, a devotee who introduced Blow-Up to audiences numerous times over the course of his life, described the film as “a mystery without a solution.”
Far from solving a crime in the manner of an Agatha Christie story, Thomas struggles to figure out whether what he’s captured with his camera is anything at all. In one of the film’s most memorable sequences, Thomas blows up his images on huge pieces of paper and hangs them on the walls of his studio, enlarged and magnified to the point of grainy abstraction. In this sequence, which unfolds like an old-fashioned photoplay, Blow-Up joins the company of other landmark films that break open our understanding of vision and the captured image, in the company of the sliced eyeball in Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou.
The struggle to reconcile image and reality is part of why Blow-Up resonated so strongly with audiences in 1967. Unsettled and searching, Thomas presents as an archetypal lost soul of the era. He’s a fashion photographer who has achieved all the materials of success: a fancy car, a spacious and modern studio in London, fine art on the walls, and easy access to women. And yet for all that, he’s frustrated and jaded. He seems ripe for the kind of late-1960s spiritual journey undertaken by other materially successful seekers of the age, from Ram Dass to The Beatles. He openly resents the fashion photography that finances his lifestyle and stalks the streets looking for landscapes and portraits of “real” people for his book of serious (non-fashion) photography. Thomas meets with his publisher twice, showing him his book-in-progress, and expresses the hope that its success will make him free. “Free like him?” the publisher asks, pointing to a portrait of a madman in the street. It’s not clear what his idea of freedom would look like, or that Thomas has any special feeling for his subjects beyond their authenticity, which he extracts with his camera. When it seems possible that he has captured a murder in Maryon Park, Thomas doesn’t go to the police or make any of the moves a concerned person might make; he behaves as though he has stumbled onto a potentially valuable asset. While he yearns for freedom, escape from the material world remains elusive.
But what a material world it is!
While Blow-Up is undoubtedly a critique of material pursuit and consumption, it also happens to be a beautifully made document of London’s culture at a critical moment in time, serving as a thoughtfully curated survey of the fashion, art, music, and faces of Swinging London. The first fashion shoot scene in the film, with Verushka and a team of models dressed by costume designer Jocelyn Rickards, is an essential visual document of the decade, as is the club scene with The Yardbirds, which culminates with Jimmy Page smashing a guitar in frustration over feedback. The smashed guitar feels like a groundbreaking moment; the gesture wasn’t yet a rock n’ roll cliché, and the crowd transforms from statues into a wild mob as they scramble for the instrument’s broken neck. Thomas manages to snatch it, only to discard it on the sidewalk once he’s outside. It’s merely the latest in a series of material things he has to have, only to lose interest and discard once acquired. This seeker’s attention is exclusively devoted to the things he hasn’t yet found.
The outliers in this lost and searching world are a troupe of mimes, who gallop and cavort through the film’s beginning and end, living in a sort of parallel reality maintained by their collective game of make-believe. At first glance, they seem like a whimsical detail meant to add a little psychedelic color and contrast to the dark and brooding vibes exuded by Thomas. But they are so much more: they represent an alternative to the unhappy reality he’s wandering through, and to the prospect of escape offered by the drug scene we see glimpses of elsewhere in the story. Reality could be a shared hallucination, or it could be a game we’re all agreeing to play together. By the time he’s made up his mind about the meaning and value of his photos, Thomas is primed to change the game he’s playing, even if it means disappearing into the landscape.
MATTHEW CARON
Elvis, the award-winning 2022 musical spectacle by master showman Baz Luhrmann, remains fresh and vital in 2025. Looking back at the criticism of the film, high praise as well as dim dismissal, everyone seems to have undersold the theme of the artist as chattel in the entertainment industry, which has only become more urgent in the two years since.
The American film director William Friedkin, a devotee who introduced Blow-Up to audiences numerous times over the course of his life, described the film as “a mystery without a solution.” The struggle to reconcile image and reality is part of why Blow-Up resonated so strongly with audiences in 1967. Unsettled and searching, Thomas presents as an archetypal lost soul of the era.
Filmed in only 16 days and earning the coveted Best Actor award at Cannes, Perfect Days tells the story of a quiet and alert man who lives in solitude in one of the world’s densest cities, vacillating between beatific contentment and cold dread.
As soon as David Byrne walked onto the screen with his boombox, the energy in the room was electric.
Throughout Francois Truffaut’s 1973 masterpiece Day For Night, a callow movie star played by Jean-Pierre Leaud asks “Are women magic?” The most agreed-upon interpretation is that Leaud’s character, Alphonse, is really asking whether movies are magic.
No event found!
