LGM Film Club, Part 418: Blow-Up

Watching Antonioni’s Blow-Up continues two recent themes–checking off films I should have seen years ago and films from the counterculture era that are shockingly sexist.

As a general rule, I am not a big Antonioni guy, especially after the mid 60s. The early Italian films are pretty good generally. Red Desert is alright I guess. But Zabriskie Point is terrible. The Passenger is a complete mess. But I had never seen Blow-Up. If you haven’t seen it, it’s the story of a fashion photographer who takes other pictures on the side and thinks he’s seen a murder, possibly committed by Vanessa Redgrave, blowing up his pictures to prove it, or not. Mostly it works, despite or maybe because of the diffidence of David Hemmings in the lead role. At the time, people loved it. The film was notorious for showing sex. But let me quote Roger Ebert’s return to the film in 1998 to sum it up:

There were of course obvious reasons for the film’s great initial success. It became notorious for the orgy scene involving the groupies; it was whispered that one could actually see pubic hair (this was only seven years after similar breathless rumors about Janet Leigh’s breasts in “Psycho” (1960)). The decadent milieu was enormously attractive at the time. Parts of the film have flip-flopped in meaning. Much was made of the nudity in 1967, but the photographer’s cruelty toward his models was not commented on; today, the sex seems tame, and what makes the audience gasp is the hero’s contempt for women.

Looking back at films like this, what’s remarkable is what was not seen or perhaps could not be seen at the time of its release. Like The Graduate, what is so clearly obviously is that this is another male lead who hates women. But basically no one talked about this in 1966. Watching it today, that’s the big takeaway. The weed party and the orgy were titillating at the time I suppose, pretty silly today. The story is kind of interesting, but the women’s parts, even Redgrave’s, are limited by the sexism at the heart of the film. No, today, you wonder if Hemmings would like to kill a woman himself.

On the other hand, you do get excerpts of Jimmy Page-era Yardbirds.