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Blow Up/Zabriskie Point: an Antonioni double (spoiler but it doesn't matter)

Posted by dave c (A) on November 12, 2006 at 11:56:03

I saw both of these yesterday afternoon as part of an Antonioni retrospective (which itself takes up half - far too much - of the Italian Film Festival currently running here. Curiously the films are being show out of chronological order which make little sense to me, and thus Blow Up screened second, but it makes sense to consider them in date order.
Blow Up is London 1966. David Hemmings is a successful photographer enjoying the Swinging London of endless models whom he treats with total distain as he become detached from his life. Without too much of a spoiler, he realises there is a clue to a mystery in a photo he has taken, but right at the moment he finds it, all the pictures, film stock et al disappears from his studio, leaving him to ponder the nature of his reality. Re-appearing right at the end, a jeep-full of students collecting for charity, illustrate what he has lost.
The film is absolutely drenched in the feel of London at the moment the old gray, post-war 50s were being thrown aside as fashion music sex and drugs sweep everything away and as such it is wonderful period piece eve including a cameo from the Yardirds in the brief moment where they had both Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck on guitars.

Move on 4 years and let's go to California for Zabriskie Point, a film showing an unusual view of LA from a poorer viewpoint against the revolutionary rhetoric and hippy bland good vibes as a kaliedoscope of advertising fills the view and leaves our hero wanting to do something. HIs almost quintessentially American conceit that he can do anything ends in a small beer tragedy but in its aftermath, a girl of has fallen fro him sees the soulless, consumerist society around her violently (self?) destruct.
What starts as an incoherent babel of student politics focuses into the overthrow of everything in The American Dream as in the famous end sequence a luxury desert house explodes over and over, clothes, books, and most poingently the contents of a refrigerator fall across the screen in slow slow motion as Pink Floyd peak their freak-out period with Careful With That Axe Eugene.
THe music fits this film very well, The Dead's Dark Star seemingly a perfect fit for a swirling view of LA sprawl from a stolen plane.
These two films, bookending the late 60s, provide a near perfect pairing for anyone either wanting to provoke a discussion about that most self fixated of (half) decades or trying to understand what your parents thought was so important about it.
Antonioni's symbolism is both poetic and obvious (I think) although his layering is such that the films are always open to interpretation.
I would absolutely recommend this double feature to anyone.

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