Welcome to the Cult! In this column, I will be looking at the cult films and weird masterpieces of the 1960s and 1970s, analyzing each movie on its own merits as well as grounding it in its historical or culturally significant context. The term “cult film” is somewhat nebulous, so I’m narrowing my focus to fit two criteria: the film has to be culturally or artistically significant, and it has to be strange.
This month’s film is the international critical and commercial success Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 send-up of the British fashion scene. The last in a long line of films that punctured America’s restrictive Hays Code (a precursor to the MPAA guidelines in place today), Blow-Up is an odd, powerful film about the nature of art, the audience’s separation of reality from entertainment, and the audience’s culpability in the more perverse elements of cinematic storytelling. Like Antonioni’s earlier film L’Aventurra, the film questions the necessity of plot and considers how the nature of truth is effected by narrative, and like the works of the French New Wave, it is at once chilly, obsessive, and rambunctious in its invention. That the film, in its clinical, almost sexless treatment of eroticism and nudity, was both a popular hit and a moral outrage in 1960s America, shows how far filmmaking has come as a result of its more tentative steps towards a freer cinema.
What little plot Blow-Up has to offer focuses on London-based fashion photographer Thomas (played with smarmy, often farcical intensity by David Hemmings), a controlling, messy, and condescending man who inadvertently photographs a murder and finds himself losing control in the process of investigating the crime. Thomas’ personality is most firmly evoked in the film’s first half (in true Antonioni fashion, about an hour elapses before the crime is even discovered) as it explores the boundaries of his studio, a space Thomas has erected as a veritable shrine to himself. In the studio scenes, the frame is constantly cluttered by panes of glass, enlarged photos, film stock, and other obfuscating elements, as if the camera is watching Thomas from a series of voyeuristic, inconvenient vantage points.
At the opening of the film, it is clear Thomas and the camera are in sync, both approaching their art without repercussion; Thomas bullies and harasses his models, directing from behind the safety of his camera, while the camera intrudes on his workspace. As the narrative unfolds, the camera loses interest in Thomas’ story; whenever Thomas steps onto the drab London streets, cinematographer Carlo Di Palma focuses on anything but the protagonist, frantically documenting everything around him instead. These sequences, as well as long-held, uncomfortable wide shots of far off strangers, function to critique Thomas’ tendency for intrusion through mimicry. As the murder plot removes Thomas from his self-narrative and makes him a mere observer in something more enigmatic, numerous soundless sequences evoke his investigation as his photos take precedence over him in the frame. Thomas loses control and the camera loses interest. It is through this gradual, growing apathy that Antonioni gets at the core of Blow-Up’s thematic conceit: we, as an audience, are enamored with art, and while we seek to control and create it, it is ultimately the role of art to move and influence and outlast us. Whatever our role at the beginning of its production, we inevitably end up in the audience. Thomas’ humbling evokes this. In the final, haunting shot of the film, he stands alone in a field of grass. The wide, overhead shot emphasizes how small he is. Then he vanishes from the field, dissolving from the frame, and the film ends. Thomas is just another blade of grass, fallible and finite.
Blow-Up is frequently defined by restraint and gradual release, charting the unwinding of its protagonist, making it a perfect encapsulation of the time period it was released in. That Blow-Up destroyed the Hays Code is of course no mere thematic coincidence—the film, produced by MGM, was among the first major studio releases to feature nudity, directly violating the standard of decency the Hays Code hoped to uphold. Founded in the 1920s as a reactionary, surreptitiously Catholic measure against the increasingly explicit content of early Hollywood, the Hays Code was the most pervasive means of censoring content and restricting expression in studio pictures for decades. The Hays Code was maintained through the Production Code Authority, an agency founded in the hopes of self-policing Hollywood without the interference of government censorship—it had no explicit legal backing. While many films leading up to the release of Blow-Up would come up against the code (not least of which included the profane Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? another 1966 release from a few months prior to Blow-Up, as well as the works of director Otto Preminger), Blow-Up’s universal success became the final blow. Not even condemnation by the National Legion of Decency could stop MGM from widely distributing the movie, or stop the MPAA from revising the Hays Code in 1968 and ultimately abandoning the thing all together. Blow-Up, a British-Italian production, was the culmination of an American movement, both the latest in a line of experimental foreign films whose American release proved to be influential on the market and aesthetics of 1960s cinema and a tremendous step forward in reducing the censorship of American films.
Strange, immaculately designed, cold, calculated, and ultimately deeply affecting, Blow-Up is one of the most important cult films of all time, opening creative doors and relaxing taboo for mainstream cinema.
Further viewing:
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) – a profane, witty, disturbing adaptation of the Edward Albee play
Some Like It Hot (1959) – released without Code approval, Billy Wilder’s comedy was still hugely successful
Anatomy of a Murder (1959) – Otto Preminger’s explicit, challenging courtroom drama
L’amore (1948) – the Italian film which led the Supreme Court to grant movies First Amendment protection and limit government regulation of Hollywood- one of the earliest direct challenges to the Production Code Authority
Blow Out (1981) – Brian de Palma’s tribute to Blow-Up, starring John Travolta
CAMERON FAIRCHILD | KXSU Arts Reporter