Читать книгу Let Go and Go On and On - Tim Kinsella - Страница 5

prologue: BLOWUP

Michaelangelo Antonioni made his first English language film, Blowup, in 1966.

In it, David Hemmings is a fashion photographer eager to make some greater artistic statement.

He refers to all women as either “birds” or “bitches.”

The film begins with a Jeep, overstuffed with mimes in checkered patterns and top hats, all flailing wildly as the car zigzags.

But they aren’t exactly mimes because, crammed in there like it’s an open-topped clown car, they all scream and holler.

They park and run the streets giddy, attacking the traffic with laughter.

And unshaven, in torn pants and a torn coat, David leaves a factory alongside other silent workers, all crammed together to pass through a wet metal and stone gate.

Once he knows that no one is watching, David jumps into his convertible and gets his secretary on the C.B.

He sticks his camera in the glove compartment.

The smiling mimes attack him in his convertible, and he returns to a house busy with activity.

*

Models hang out in their underwear together, and change tops with the door open.

One model dressed in sequins is waiting for David.

A bottle of wine is already opened.

David approaches, teasing her with big feathers.

Her sides exposed fully, her ribs are like fingers.

Her shoulders and hipbones are pronounced and knobby.

David’s assistant loads the cameras and hands them back off.

The pace accelerates as David shoots, and he gets closer and closer to the model until eventually, they’re only a foot apart and he’s ranting.

– Good. Good. Great. Hold that. Again. Good. Work. Work. Work. Great. Arms up.

He mounts her and kisses her while continuing to shoot.

He says – Head Up.

His shirt is unbuttoned and she’s on her back on the floor.

Finishing, he relaxes as if he’d just climaxed.

He makes his assistant talk on the phone for him while he lies back on the couch and looks off into space.

*

David gets ready like he’s going on a date.

While he shaves, another assistant brings him a contact sheet to look at.

Throwing away the rags that he’d worn to the factory, he puts on white pants and a baby blue shirt, tucked in and unbuttoned low.

He’s gruff with the models in peacock costumes and jockey outfits. – No chewing gum.

Pulling at their legs rough, he says – Mouth open, eyes over here.

He shouts in their faces to get a startled reaction.

He bosses his whole world around according to how it fits within his frame.

Bored, he tells all the models and his assistants to close their eyes.

Then he walks off and leaves them waiting while he visits his friend next door, an abstract expressionist painter.

*

The Abstract Expressionist tells him – I don’t mean anything when I do them. Afterwards I find something to hang on to.

The Abstract Expressionist says – It sorts itself out. It adds up.

Sarah Miles brings David a beer and massages his head.

Maybe she is his wife.

The way the film is shot, everything is seen through stripes and behind layers, wood blinds.

The frame continuously changes shapes.

*

As David leaves the studio, Jane Birkin and her friend ask to speak with him.

They are aspiring models.

With his feet up on his desk, he rolls a quarter between his fingers while they talk.

He’s got sleepy eyes like Michael Caine.

*

He drives fast through streets in which first every building is painted red, and then every building is painted blue.

He stops in a neighborhood in which every building is stone.

In the antique shop full of headless statues and plaster busts and pieces of marble, the old man working there tells him – There are no cheap bargains here – and blows dust into David’s face.

So David grabs his camera and wanders into the park.

Little is happening, and the park is silent except for the birds and the patterned soft whack of a tennis game.

David chases the birds when they land, and shoots them as they take off away from him.

*

Vanessa Redgrave and an older man saunter up a slope into the bushes, and David hops and clicks his heels as he follows them.

The couple is playful and affectionate in a clearing.

Stepping over a fence to hide in the bushes, David shoots the couple.

He moves closer and stands behind a tree, and then he’s not very far at all and he’s shooting them.

They’re distracted by their kisses.

Vanessa looks around, but the man looks only at her.

For a long time it is silent, except for the breeze through the trees and the small clicking of the camera.

Finally, Vanessa notices David and chases after him, away from the clearing and down some steps.

She is furious and insists that he stop photographing them.

She says – This is a public place. Everyone has a right to be left in peace.

It’s not my fault if there’s no peace. – He replies.

She falls to the ground and bites his hand to grab the camera from him.

She says – You’ve never seen me. – And runs away.

*

Back at the antique store, David talks to the young girl who works there.

It seems maybe he’s scouting her to be a model.

She says that she’s fed up with antiques and wants to head off to Nepal or Morocco.

But their conversation is cut short when he falls irrepressibly in love with a big wooden propeller buried in the stacks that he insists he needs at that very moment.

He tries to throw it in the back of his convertible, but the girl says she’ll get it delivered to him later that day.

It turns out that he wants to buy the junk shop.

He tells his secretary that he thinks the property value will go up because he sees queers with poodles walking around.

*

David delivers his photos of the factory workers to his agent, a man in a suit eating a very fancy lunch alone in a restaurant.

The factory workers are naked in some of the photos, and changing into their work clothes in others.

To order his lunch, David touches the waiter’s arm as he walks past.

He tells his agent – I wish I had a ton of money. Then I’d be free.

Through the window, he notices a strange man looking around in his convertible.

Before his lunch even arrives, he runs from the restaurant to follow the man.

He lays on the horn constantly when driving.

But a parade of protestors carrying hand made signs against nuclear weapons walks by in silence and he waves them past, waits for them to cross.

*

When he arrives back at his studio, Vanessa shows up to get the film from him.

He puts on some Herbie Hancock music and offers her a drink as if it’s a sudden afternoon seduction.

They argue about who has the ultimate rights: the photographer, or the subject of a photo.

He tells her that she should be a model and stands her up against a purple background.

He takes his coat off and commands her to sit next to him.

His wife, presumably Sarah Miles, calls and he tries to make Vanessa talk to her.

He sets a smoldering match down on the head of a statue and pets it affectionately.

He explains to Vanessa that beautiful women are boring objects.

She says it’s the same with men.

But he cuts her off to insist that she listens to this Herbie Hancock song, and that she remain still when doing so.

He commands her to smoke slowly and against the beat.

She asks him for a glass of water and when he steps away to get it, she tries to run off with his camera, but he is waiting for her at the door.

She takes off her shirt and offers him sex in exchange for the film.

He tells her that he’s not interested.

He offers her the negatives, but secretly switches the roll of film that he hands her.

Once he hands her the film, then they kiss and head off to bed.

But someone rings the bell, and David answers the door topless.

His propeller is delivered.

They get high topless together in the afternoon and think of the propeller as a sculpture.

Saying goodbye, he asks her name.

She won’t say it, but writes down a false phone number.

At this point, there is a big piece of lint right in the lower center of the frame.

It is navy blue and curly.

*

When she leaves, he immediately develops the film to see why she was so anxious about retrieving it.

For the process of printing out big photos, he uses a magnifying glass and big metal contraptions.

Blown up, the photos are grainy, but the look of concern on Vanessa’s face is apparent.

David has to blow up a small detail over and over.

Maybe he realizes that he never saw the man again, after Vanessa chased him away.

It takes a long time and many steps of blowing the image up more and more.

A central question of the film might be why David, who obviously has a very busy schedule, would get so lost in pursuing this.

Finally, grainy and obscure, he sees it.

A man is behind the fence.

He reconsiders the whole sequence of events slowly before making out exactly what he’s looking at: a gun in the man’s hand.

He calls his agent first, certain and excited that just his mere presence with a camera that day has saved a life.

But before he can explain this to his agent, he is disturbed again by someone else at the door.

*

It is the aspiring teenage models again, Jane Birkin and her friend.

He commands them to make him a coffee, and they sneak off to try on some clothes.

When he catches them topless, he pulls Jane Birkin’s hair and starts biting her until they are all three on top of the knocked over clothes racks and tearing the clothes all apart.

Then they tear apart the big purple backdrop.

The girls are both naked in the rumble of the giant purple paper, choking him with their green stockings, giggling and screaming.

*

The girls dress him.

And waking up, shirt open and fresh from a three-way, David becomes distracted again by the blown up photos.

Shooing the girls, he finally realizes that he has witnessed a murder.

*

It is night, and he drives back to the park alone to find the corpse.

In the wet green grass, the body is a shadow under a tree; eyes wide open in the moonlight.

But David has forgotten his camera.

He is scared off by a twig snapping.

*

Returning home, David finds Sarah Miles under his friend The Abstract Expressionist, making love.

He and she make eye contact, but he walks out without saying anything.

Returning to his studio he finds that all the negatives and enlargements that show the murder have been stolen.

His dark room is destroyed.

One grainy print of the corpse was left behind, forgotten beside the sink.

When Sarah Miles comes to find him in his studio, he calmly tells her that he saw a man get murdered this morning.

Who was he?

Someone.

He shows her the print and says – That’s the body.

She says it looks like one of The Abstract Expressionist’s paintings.

*

David heads off to pick up his agent, to show him the body, and he sees Vanessa in the street.

He pulls over to chase her and ends up down dark alleys, and in a rock club where one hundred completely stoic and expressionless kids are watching The Yardbirds with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page.

Except for one biracial couple dancing, everyone is entirely catatonic.

Jeff Beck has trouble with his amp, his cable shorting when he tries to solo.

Frustrated, he bangs his guitar against his amp and destroys it and once he stomps on his guitar and throws it into the crowd, the audience gets excited and there’s a near-riot.

The band continues to play through all of this.

David catches the neck of the guitar and gets chased for it.

Dropping it on the street, a kid picks it up, interested for a second, but not knowing that it’s Jeff Beck’s, the kid drops it.

*

David shows up at a party to track down his agent.

It’s smoky and there’s lots of fringe, people in suits sitting on pillows.

Beautiful young people with money are beautiful stoned.

His agent is in a dark corner with some young girls.

David turns down a puff of a joint.

He wants the agent to go with him to take a photo of the corpse.

But the agent is too stoned to understand anything that David tells him.

*

David wakes up in the party aftermath.

It is silent, very early, bottles and garbage everywhere.

He returns to the park to photograph the corpse.

But the corpse is gone.

The grass is not even flattened.

The park is quiet enough that the wind through the trees is rustling.

Everything is green.

And also up early is the Jeep crammed full of screaming mimes, speeding through the park wildly, waving handkerchiefs and flailing.

No one else is in the park to see it except David.

The Jeep parks, and two of the mimes overtake the tennis court.

The other mimes are all thrilled to press up against the fence and watch the mimed game of tennis.

Turning their heads to follow the imaginary ball, they ignore David.

With their eyes, they all follow the volley back and forth over the net.

The players are lobbing it high and swinging big overhand.

And then the imaginary ball goes over the fence.

All the mimes look to David to return the imaginary ball.

He trots off across the field and complies, hopping a few steps to get it high over the tall fence.

His eyes follow the ball and the sound of the ball being played is heard.

*

A few years after its release, you saw this film when you were living in Manhattan.

*