Film Bookends Part III: "Blow-Up" (1966) and "Deep Red / Profondo Rosso" (1975)

David Hemmings in Dario Argento's 1975 Profondo Rosso (Deep Red)

My latest entry on the theme of Film Bookends allows me to discuss two of my favorite films, both by Italian directors: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, from 1966, and Dario Argento’s Deep Red / Profondo Rosso, from 1975. Blow-Up, like so many of Antonioni’s film, is a powerfully intellectual film that operates on many different levels; one critic calls it “a deeply philosophical film.” Deep Red is, more or less, a slasher flick; Argento is known for his bloody horror films in which blood and gore are exaggerated, aestheticized, and relished. Antonioni is an auteur, but Argento has his own claims to auteur-ship, his films having something of a cult status. Argento delights in imagining ever more gruesome manners of death, and in capturing them in exquisite detail on film.

Blow-Up was Antonioni’s first English-language film, and it was set in London. It was scandalous at the time for its representation of the Swinging London scene of the 1960s, depicting pot-smoking and promiscuous sex. (The Yardbirds perform in a guest appearance.) But these aspects are secondary to its incisive character study, its formal design, and its meta-discourses on art, filmmaking, and vision.

I read Deep Red as an homage to Blow-Up, a tribute from a younger Italian director to a great Italian master. The first clue of their relationship is that both films cast the British actor David Hemmings as their star; the second clue is that they share a plot device, which is that they both involve mysteries that the Hemmings character attempts to unravel, based on visual evidence that is only available to him. Whereas Blow-Up frustrates the expectations of the “whodunit” genre by having all evidence disappear before the protagonist can expose the crime, Argento fulfills expectations by allowing the protagonist to catch and punish the murderer. Perhaps Argento wanted to compensate for Blow-Up’s lack of closure.

The films’ similarities go deeper than that: both thematize questions about the status and reliability of visual evidence, perception, and recollection. In Blow-Up, Hemmings plays a photographer who “witnesses” a crime, though in fact he does not know he has witnessed it until he finds traces of it in the film he shot that morning. However, he does meet a mysterious woman in the park (Vanessa Redgrave), whose desperation to retrieve the film from him suggests that something’s up. The Hemmings character pieces together and deduces the crime based on the sequence of shots he surreptitiously took of her and her companion; and though he passes an erotically charged afternoon with her in his flat, he never learns anything about who she is, her motives, who the murdered man might be, or who her accomplice is. The title refers to the repeated enlargements (ever larger and larger) that he prints from his negatives, which reveal (very indistinctly) the gun barrel peaking through the bushes, and the corpse.

In Deep Red, Argento contrives a pretty good mystery as well, which leaves the audience guessing up until the very end. The film begins with a psychic, a German woman named Helga, whose powers of telepathy are being demonstrated before an audience in Rome by two Italian psychologists. The murderer is in the audience, and Helga discovers the murderer’s violent thoughts. We see Helga perform the following monologue:

"There is something – someone – no – I don’t know – forgive me, I’m sorry. It was – I can’t explain it – something strange – and sharp – like the prick of a sword. It upset me, but it’s alright now. I can feel death in this room. I feel – a presence – a twisted mind – sending me thoughts – perverted, murderous thoughts. Go away! You – have killed – and you will kill again. There’s a child – singing – And that house! – death – blood – hard blood – aah! I’m scared! We must hide everything – everything in the house – back the way it was. Noone must know – noone – noone! – forget it – forget it – forget it – forever – forever – forever."

In the last two sentences the psychic is no longer stating her impressions, but serving as a medium for the thoughts and words of the murderer. In this opening scene, the director immediately makes his case for the centrality of “the house” as locus of family, of trauma, and of repression; these words will provide the clues that later will lead the Hemmings character to discover the killer’s identity.

In his interest in Freudian psychology, Argento obviously owes a huge debt to Hitchcock; but his debt to Antonioni is more pronounced. Antonioni used the photograph to represent the subjectivity of vision and perception. Argento gives his hero a few visual clues as well: the fleeting glimpse of a picture as he enters the dead woman’s flat in his attempt to rescue her (a picture which disappears almost immediately); a photograph of a haunted house, which he finds in a book that one of the paranormal psychiatrists recalls; and a child’s drawing of a murder, an image which he discovers in three separate places (and which he fails to apprehend correctly, or even to see completely). Another character discovers a clue in a word written on a steamy mirror, a word that becomes invisible as soon as the steam goes away. In all of these clues, knowledge is elusive; by not being shared, knowledge lacks its socially-agreed-upon status, just like the clues in Blow-Up.

Readers of this blog may recall that I am considering Deep Red for my course this fall on “The House in the Horror Film.” The importance of the haunted house as a plot device, and the explanation of the house’s sinister aspect being caused by traumatic events that took place there in the past, make it perfectly suited for this course. But the film has a couple drawbacks that could make it a problem for students: (A) the extreme goriness of the film; and (more significantly) (B) the dialogue’s constant switching between English and Italian, with no English subtitles available for the Italian dialogue. Most of the communication that is important to the plot takes place in English (except for an early conversation between the Hemmings character and his friend Carlo), but there is enough Italian conversation that English-speaking students could be put off by it. There is no apparent rhyme or reason for when English occurs or when Italian occurs; both languages have the appearance of being dubbed, and conversations between the same characters take place in both languages. It’s almost as if a restoration was created from two partial prints of the film, one dubbed in English and one dubbed in Italian. It’s distracting if nothing else.

But even if you speak no Italian, I urge you to see Deep Red. I also urge you to see Blow-Up, and then to watch the excellent commentary track available on the DVD.

My thanks to my friend and colleague Valerie Kaussen, who initially turned me on to Dario Argento’s work.

The House and the Horror Film (Fall 2009 Course Offering)

Last month I read the novel The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, first published around 1958 or ’59, I believe. It was a fantastic 20th-century example of the Gothic novel, though surprisingly it is the only “ghost story” that Jackson wrote. She is probably best known for her short story “The Lottery” (first published in The New Yorker magazine). The Haunting of Hill House appealed to me because of the author’s use of architecture – a creepy old Victorian mansion – as the locus for both the apparent haunting and for the troubled psychic life of the main character. It turns out there is a film version of the novel, a 1960 movie called simply The Haunting (which is decidedly a B movie). Reading Jackson’s novel, then watching the film, convinced me that this fall, when I teach my “Architecture in Film” course, I will organize it around the theme of “The House and the Horror Film.”

This will be my third time teaching the course (which has finally been given a permanent course number), and each time I teach it, it’s slightly different. I taught it for the first time in 2006, and I covered an eclectic assortment of themes, including heterotopia, dystopia, modern and avant-garde architecture, films about architects, the postwar European city, and methods of creating horror or suspense through architecture (including the Gothic novel conventions and the uncanny, among others).

I taught the course again in 2007, and this time organized it around the theme of domestic architecture, examining various categories of domestic architecture: the hotel as temporary home (in Grand Hotel and The Shining), the aristocratic mansion (La Règle du Jeu and Gosford Park), the urban apartment (Rosemary’s Baby, Rear Window, and A Raisin in the Sun), the rural dwelling (The Birds), the suburbs. We discussed gender (for example, The Stepford Wives of 1975 as feminist critique of the suburbs), race (both in A Raisin in the Sun and Far from Heaven), and some more specifically architectural topics (e.g., the critique of New Urbanism in The Truman Show).

The 2007 course on domestic architecture in film was premised on my argument that, in film, the house is always a symbol of the family; and that films featuring domestic architecture can be read as family dramas, regardless of the genre (horror, drama, comedy). I told my class this on the first day of the semester:

“The basic argument of this course is that domestic architecture in film is always used to represent the family: how the family works, or doesn’t work, is mirrored by the kind of home it occupies. For example, in The Shining, the Torrance family is highly dysfunctional, and the hotel they occupy – their temporary home – becomes more unsettling as the family unravels. Ruptures between husbands and wives (as in Rosemary’s Baby), or between parents and children (as in A Raisin in the Sun), are played out in films in which the plot centers on creating or changing homes (as in both of these examples), which often involves the addition of new children to the mix (which is a central plot device in both of these films).”

In the 2006 and 2007 classes, although very different, there was a surprising emphasis on horror films – surprising because it was unintentional on my part. I always used to say that I don’t like horror films, but given the evidence I’m forced to admit that I actually do like them (some of them, anyway, but not slasher films). There are distinct disadvantages to my choosing this theme for the course – I won’t be able to teach some of my absolute favorite films, because they’re not horror films (both Grand Hotel and La Règle du Jeu come to mind, and I also like teaching L.A. Confidential and The Ice Storm); but I do like to vary the course a bit, and this slightly different focus (still a variation on the domestic architecture theme) will open up some other possibilities. So far, I’m planning on the following films and readings:

Films:

Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 1920, dir. Robert Weine (German Expressionism used to create horror)

Rebecca, 1940, dir. Alfred Hitchcock (based on another 20th-century Gothic novel, by Daphne du Maurier)

*The Haunting, 1963, dir. Robert Wise (note: there is also a 1999 remake that I haven't seen yet; then there's the 1958 House on Haunted Hill, with Vincent Price, unrelated but equally B-movie-ish)

The Shining, 1980, dir. Stanley Kubrick (Stephen King’s novel, in my view, owes quite a lot to Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House)

Psycho, 1960, dir. Alfred Hitchcock

Rosemary’s Baby, 1968, dir. Roman Polanski

The Birds, 1963, dir. Alfred Hitchcock

*The Amityville Horror, 1979, dir. Stuart Rosenberg

*Poltergeist, 1982, dir. Tobe Hooper

*Profondo Rosso/Deep Red, 1975, dir. Dario Argento (Italian)

The Stepford Wives, 1975, dir. Bryan Forbes

*Panic Room, 2002, dir. David Fincher

(Films marked by an asterisk are those I have not taught previously.)


Readings from:

Bob Fear, “Evil Residence: The House and the Horror Film,” in Architecture and Film II, edited by Bob Fear

Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”

Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

Camille Paglia, The Birds (BFI Film Classics)

David Punter, The Gothic

Katherine Shonfield, Walls Have Feelings: Architecture, Film and the City

Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny

So far I’ve only identified 12 films I plan to show, so there’s still room on the syllabus for two or three more. Please email me or leave a comment on this blog if you have any suggestions, either for films or for readings.

The Passenger (film review)

The Passenger, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and starring Jack Nicholson, is a captivating portrait of a reporter who impulsively trades places with a dead man. What kind of person would do such a thing, and why? And will he get away with it?

I don’t want to spoil the film for you, but I will quote the Netflix plot synopsis: “Disenchanted with his life, Locke [a reporter covering an insurrection in North Africa]…assumes the dead man’s identity, not knowing that he was a gunrunner for the insurgents. By the time Locke realizes that he’s put himself in grave danger, it may be too late.”

The Passenger expresses so well many of the themes that are important to Antonioni, and they recur in his films over and over. I will explore some of these themes here, but first some background. Antonioni directed 37 films, of which I have now seen 8; my favorite ones are noted with an asterisk:

Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair), 1950 (his 12th film, but the first full-length one)
*L’Avventura (The Adventure), 1960 (first in the so-called Trilogy) (Criterion Collection; commentary by film critic Gene Youngblood)
La Notte (The Night), 1961 (second in the Trilogy)
*L’Eclisse (Eclipse), 1962 (third in the Trilogy) (also in the Criterion Collection)
*Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert), 1964 (some sources say this belongs in the “Trilogy” instead of La Notte, which I can see; and some say those four films make up a Tetrology)
*Blow-Up, 1966 (Antonioni’s first English-language film)
Zabriskie Point, 1970 (Antonioni’s first U.S. film)
*The Passenger, 1975

1. The first common theme is pursuit. In L’Avventura, a young woman disappears from an uninhabited island while there on holiday with friends. Her best friend (played by Monica Vitti) and her fiancé (Gabriele Ferzetti) search for her, and for the rest of the film are seen travelling around Italy chasing after clues and falling in love. In Blow-Up (Antonioni’s first English-language film), a photographer (David Hemmings) tries to solve a murder that he thinks he has captured evidence of in his photographs. In The Passenger, David Locke (Nicholson) is being pursued by many different people and organizations, but is far from figuring out who/what they all are. (As a reporter he’s praised for being very observant, but it turns out he’s actually not very smart.)

2. The second theme that Antonioni explores in The Passenger is trust and its corollary, betrayal. These themes, as expressed through romantic relationships, are essential to nearly every Antonioni film I have seen, though in none so prominently as in The Passenger. (Like I said, Locke is very observant but not actually very smart…)

3. The third prominent theme in The Passenger is identity. David Locke assumes the identity of the dead man, David Robertson. He takes up with a young woman whose name is never given; she is listed in the film credits simply as “Girl.” (She is played by Maria Schneider, who had starred in Last Tango in Paris just 3 years earlier.) The fact that we never know her name underlines the fact that we have no idea who she is; we know nothing about her, and neither does Locke. She says she is an architecture student. Locke trusts her implicitly, but it’s not clear why; because of his trust for her, it’s easy for the viewer to be lulled into trusting her too.

4. Fourth: observation, the camera, the window, the gaze. This complex of issues permeates all of Antonioni’s films, and it’s part of what makes them so amazing. They become visual puzzles. In The Passenger Locke’s character is said to be observant, but as viewers WE need to pay close attention too. Antonioni demands a lot from the viewer, which is part of what makes his films so compelling. He thus thematizes the role of film director (the one controlling the gaze of the camera) IN the film’s structure and its narrative. David Locke in The Passenger is a television correspondent, and as such, he’s behind the camera, interviewing subjects, all the time. In one scene, the subject (an African “medicine man”) takes hold of the camera and turns it on Locke; the loss of control clearly discomfits Locke. But Locke is not the first Antonioni protagonist who works with a camera: Thomas (the Hemmings character) in Blow-Up is a photographer, and photography is central to the plot of that film.

In The Passenger, Antonioni at times frustrates our desire to observe and, hence, our desire to know. People and situations are often filmed through a window, and during the climactic final sequence, the camera focuses on what's happening outside the Hotel de la Gloria (through Locke's window) rather than the drama that is -- silently -- occurring within. An earlier crucial scene is filmed through water (a public fountain) so that we can’t be sure exactly what has happened; one man is seized in a restaurant by a group of four men, but what happened to his companion? Why wasn’t he seized? Was he complicit in the capture?

Unlike a lot of directors, Antonioni does not call attention to every detail; it’s easy to miss some of his clues. And a lot of questions go unanswered, and mysteries are never solved. In L’Avventura the girl who goes missing (Anna) is never found, and no explanation is ever given for her disappearance. In The Passenger, we can never fit all the puzzle pieces together.

Much of the dialogue is about seeing; Locke repeatedly asks the girl, as she looks out the window, "what can you see? what can you see now?" And he tells her this story:

“I knew a man who was blind. When he was nearly 40 years old he had an operation and regained his sight….At first he was elated, really high—faces, colors, landscapes. But then everything began to change. The world was much poorer than he had imagined. Noone had ever told him how much dirt there was, how much ugliness. He noticed ugliness everywhere. When he was blind, he used to cross the street alone with a stick. After he regained his sight, he became afraid, he began to live in darkness, he never left his room. After three years he killed himself.”

5. The fifth theme that intrigues me in Antonioni’s work is architecture. He juxtaposes historically “important” buildings with the ugly modern architectural landscape of Europe (Italy in L’Avventura, Spain in The Passenger). The main male character in L'Avventura is an architect; the girl in The Passenger says she's an architecture student. (Not to mention that she meets Locke in a building designed by Antoni Gaudi.) I think it has a lot to do with being Italian, surrounded by "great" architecture from the past and seeing the rapid transformation of the country in the post-war period. This really merits its own separate blog entry.

(Note: I taught L'Avventura in my "Architecture in Film" course two years ago, and was disappointed that students didn't like it very much, for a number of reasons. One, they generally don't like any foreign-language films; two, Antonioni demands so much from the viewer in terms of interpretation -- for people who think being asked to read subtitles is a burden, this is evidently beyond the pale! Three, his pacing is much more slow and deliberate than the kinds of American, Hollywood films they're used to watching.)

The Passenger is a must-see film (as are L’Avventura and Blow-Up). (Red Desert is great, but not yet released on DVD so harder to get a hold of). I’ve never described myself as a Jack Nicholson fan, but I never cease to be amazed by his talent as an actor (despite some films I’ve hated, including As Good As It Gets and The Witches of Eastwick). As my husband put it recently, “there’s really noone else like him.”

I have to say, too, that there's noone else like Antonioni. I just love his subtlety and his sense of understatement. In The Passenger, there's virtually no dialogue in the first 20 minutes, and after that it builds only gradually for another 20 minutes. His films are so utterly visual, yet the characters are incredibly nuanced psychologically.

SPOILER ALERT…Continue reading at your own risk

If you haven’t seen The Passenger, I strongly suggest you watch it BEFORE you read what follows, as I would hate to ruin what is surely one of the great pleasures of the film, i.e., figuring it out for yourself. (If you have Netflix you can watch it instantly online.)

I keep referring to Locke as very observant but not very smart, because he trusts the Maria Schneider character and never for a minute suspects her motives. This despite the fact that he saw her in London, before running into her in Barcelona. When he tells her that he believes in coincidences, it’s actually like Antonioni waving a big red flag that says “Don’t believe in coincidences! There’s no such thing!” Of course, the fact that this gorgeous woman 15 years his junior is attaching herself to him is one explanation for his failure to question her, but another factor is his own short-sightedness. On first viewing, one might not suspect her of being a spy, or of being an accomplice in his murder; but after the film’s conclusion it’s hard not to think that she was either working for the African government that was looking for Robertson, for a European government, or for the insurgents. But she seems to have gone even farther than that, persuading Locke to stick with the plan he unwittingly got himself into. But even that’s not entirely clear. Doesn’t she believe that he’s not actually Robertson? Why doesn’t that matter to her?

And on the subject of identity: Locke's wife, Rachel, finally catches up with him at the ironically named Hotel de la Gloria, just moments after he's been killed. When asked if she recognizes him, she says, "I never knew him." Surely she recognizes that this man who went by the name Robertson WAS her husband; her statement connotes a much more fundamental lack of knowledge, rather than a lack of recognition.

Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) annual meeting, Philadelphia, March 6-9

I just returned from the annual meeting of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in Philadelphia. This was my first Film Studies meeting, and I was attracted by this year’s conference theme, “Architectures of the Moving Image.” There weren’t a whole lot of architectural historians in attendance, as far as I could tell, but one of the two plenary speakers was Tony Vidler, one of the most prominent architectural historians in the country. His talk on Eisenstein and Le Corbusier pointed out a significant connection between Le Corbusier’s idea of the “promenade architecturale,” in which space is structured around framed views, and Eisenstein’s theory of montage – the piecing together of framed views.

On Saturday morning I delivered a paper entitled “The Heterotopia as Analytical Tool for Studying Architecture in Film: A Pedagogical Approach.” This topic comes directly from a course I teach called “Architecture on Film,” which I have offered twice at the University of Missouri. It’s been a pretty successful and popular course, and I have had a lot of fun with it. For those who have never heard the term “heterotopia,” it comes from the late French theorist Michel Foucault’s essay “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” which is a lecture he delivered in 1967. Foucault’s heterotopia is premised on an understanding of architecture as social space, that is, of space being defined socially through its use, rather than being defined physically by its form. Foucault created the term heterotopia to describe arrangements of space that “are endowed with the curious property of being in relation to all the others, but in such a way as to suspend, neutralize or invert the set of relationships designed, reflected or mirrored by themselves.”

I teach Foucault’s essay in my Architecture on Film course, comparing the films Grand Hotel (1932) and The Shining (1980). Clearly these films don’t belong to the same genre, and the hotels in these two films could not be more different. Rather, the contrast between them is highly effective for my purpose, which is to introduce architectural theory as a tool for film analysis. Both these films demonstrate the basic assumption behind the course on Architecture in Film: in the context of film, architecture does not simply serve as a backdrop or stage for the narrative to take place. Architecture conveys meaning in its own right, reinforcing emotional or psychological aspects of characters and themes, or even serving as a “character” in the narrative. The heterotopia theory explains the mechanism through which this happens.

The model of the heterotopia is in many ways better suited to the analysis of film than of architecture. In film analysis, the model of the heterotopia helps us to understand the transformation of characters, the moving forward of the narrative, and the creation of emotions (suspense etc.) as functions of space. It helps us to understand how a building can function like a character in a film, because of the effects it has upon the narrative, the characterizations, and all other aspects of the film.

Hotels are not the only kinds of spaces that function as heterotopias, either in film or in life. However, they undeniably function as “other” spaces – “other” to the spaces of our normal routine, spaces in which we form temporary, transitory social relationships and networks. Think about the professional organization at a conference hotel: we meet once a year, for a few days, and in that hotel space, the virtual community becomes a real, tangible community that exists in its physical form only away from our homes, away from the usual sites where our membership in that community has meaning (the classroom, the university office, the publications where our academic work is read, etc.).