Blowup

Michelangelo Antonioni on the Zapruder film, rather like Borges on Whitman. ("What do you see, Walt Whitman?") The enigma of Swinging London has Preminger's Bunny Lake Is Missing as a point of departure, a gray and blue zone occasionally enlivened by the reds of double-deckers and telephone booths. Out of his derelict disguise and into the Rolls convertible, the fashion shutterbug numb with ennui, David Hemmings with his debauched-cherub mien. Glazed models at his command in the studio, antiques amid mods at the junk shop. "What are you looking for?" "Pictures." "No pictures. What kind of pictures?" "Landscapes." "Sorry. No landscapes." Images stolen on the flat green canvas of Maryon Park, just a furtive couple in the distance, the woman (Vanessa Redgrave) wants them back. A murder narrative forms in the magnified graininess of the snapshots, the somnambulistic artist is roused at last. "It sorts itself out and adds up," says his friend with reference to an abstract painting. The seeker and his lenses, Antonioni with a spring in his step in the alien pleasure city. Cinema rewards an attentive viewer, such genre staples as guns and bodies are blurry apparitions in a storyboard montage, one of the decade's greatest sequences. The need to decipher in a welter of feints and signs, momentarily interrupted by the need to roll on crumpled purple paper with lissome groupies. Film and photography and their attributes, a matter of superfices and rhythms, "against the beat." The Yardbirds find no favor with the catatonic audience until Jeff Beck smashes his guitar, the bloke who already has an airplane propeller at home braves the frenzy for another talismanic piece of wood that he immediately throws away. Peaceful images to follow violent ones, a proper way to finish a picture book, "rings true." Nights of Cabiria for the coda, merrymakers not to cheer up the protagonist but to point up his disintegrating psyche. Cinematography by Carlo Di Palma. With Sarah Miles, John Castle, Jane Birkin, Gillian Hills, Veruschka, Peter Bowles, and Harry Hutchinson.