BLOW-UP

Jeff and Keith grapple with the technology of sound: Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966)

Blow-Up ’s macho photographer (played by David Hemmings), with his phallic camera and toys-for-boys technology, believes he can still penetrate the superficiality of the photographic surface and reveal the answer to that great mystery that lies at the core of all histories: what actually happened. Yet despite his conviction that ‘something fantastic happened’, his quest for the holy grail of positivism merely disintegrates before his eyes....

Instead of finding a physical body and a rational answer to his mundane questions, the photographer—named Thomas, like his doubting biblical counterpart—experiences a spiritual resurrection through the miraculous power of the poetic imagination and the intuitive, creative play of his freed spirit.

 —Bill Hare, "Blow-Up: Between Form and Formlessness," MAP Magazine, No. 8 (Winter 2006), https://mapmagazine.co.uk/blow-up-between-form-and-for.

By the time I got to Jim's place, I was convinced again that what had happened, or what I felt had happened, needed to be shared. For reasons tied to my manic free-association, I'd rented two videos to bring with me. 

• Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, for its own questing plot and the incidental "live" performance by the Yardbirds therein.
• an anthology of mid-60s TV clips featuring two songs by Bo Diddley, with his female bassist The Duchess and three curvy backup singers. More on them later.

Considering my state, and its imposition on their evening, they seemed receptive as I uncoiled the events of my day, from the photo of Keith and April to the Yellow Daffodils and the syllabic HAR + PER alchemy in the Black Lounge. (Yes, despite the implied admonition in the title of "You Never Can Tell," I was spilling the beans all over their living room.)

There was a gasp from Laurie (whether rehearsed or not, I never knew) when I produced the photo of April/Monica. I explained that I'd brought Blow-Up because of the notion of magnification of photos: in the film the literal magnification, and in my case the magnification of the effects of certain "dead ringer" resemblances. Of course, I'd also brought it for the Yardbirds clip, one of the few publicly available at that time, so they could see Keith in action and further assess our particular resemblance. The scene is only peripheral to the overall plot, which is described with admirable concision by Roger Ebert in his 1998 online review:

Thomas wanders into a park and sees, at a distance, a man and a woman. Are they struggling? Playing? Flirting? He snaps a lot of photos. The woman (Vanessa Redgrave) runs after him. She desperately wants the film back. He refuses her. She tracks him to his studio, takes off her shirt, wants to seduce him and steal the film. He sends her away with the wrong roll. Then he blows up his photos, and in the film's brilliantly edited centerpiece, he discovers that he may have photographed a murder.

At the very end of the Yardbirds clip, after being chased by Mods desperate for the remnant of Jeff Beck's guitar he's snatched, Thomas ends up outside the club on the street, and he diffidently discards the guitar relic, which is then picked up and discarded as junk by a bystander—highlighting the protean nature of meaning in a culture robotically in thrall to materialism. As Ebert relates, the mystery has, for the moment at least, released the photographer from this stupor:

Whether there was a murder isn't the point. The film is about a character mired in ennui and distaste, who is roused by his photographs into something approaching passion. As Thomas moves between his darkroom and the blowups, we recognize the bliss of an artist lost in what behaviorists call the Process; he is not thinking now about money, ambition or his own nasty personality defects, but is lost in his craft. His mind, hands and imagination work in rhythmic sync. He is happy.

 

Thomas (David Hemmings) grapples with the technology of vision.

But the reprieve is only temporary, and by the end of the film the body and the photographs have disappeared. Even the photographer himself, ever more distracted and ambivalent, seems in danger of disappearing. 

As I explained the film's conclusion to my hosts, I wondered aloud if something similar would happen to my "mystery" once my intensity abated.  

Then I showed the Bo Diddley clip, wherein, during the eponymous song, the backup singers mimed an African fertility dance, thrusting their pelvises forward with their hand gestures. 

Sometimes you don't really need a caption...

I linked this with the manic froth I'd been accumulating, tying in the triangular nature of the musical influences with the historical triangular slave trade—in fact, a blizzard of connections and influences, real and imagined, all, somehow, related to Africa, Eden, fertility etc. "From out of Africa, there is always something new," I quoted from Pliny the Elder. What issued forth was probably not much more coherent than than the notes I'd been taking, pictured below.

In retrospect, it seems obvious I should have stuck to the personal material and left the manic froth out of it. But that's not how mania works, is it? 

Everyone—Jim, Laurie, and Jim's girlfriend Sue—sighed in relief when they realized I was done and we could return to the film they'd rented, an indie comedy with a memorable title: Nice Girls Don't Explode.

After the film, as I prepared to leave, Sue said something to the effect that, as crazy as it all sounded, maybe I was onto something. Maybe something was really "going on" with me. After all, she continued, the female protagonist in the movie, the "nice girl," was named, of all things, April Flowers. And the name of the film itself? How about Nice Girls Don't BLOW UP?

Freshly amused and encouraged, I took my leave and headed home to bed, and the closest thing I'd had to a good night's sleep in a while.

Next Stop: GENESIS: MARCH 11, 1988