Michelangelo Antonioni 1912—2007

It would be more appropriate to have an image of Mr. Antonioni adorn this brief remembrance rather than the shot of Vanessa Redgrave above. But the director kept a low profile despite the enormous critical and financial success of Blowup in 1966. And Vanessa shown here, naked above the waist, those long arms protecting her from our gaze, was an inescapable presence, a pop icon of the period. There was a running joke in our house, as we’d get the newspaper to find out what was showing at one of our local theaters: “Probably Blowup!” my mother would say, because the film had played there for months. That’s a considerable feat for what was generally referred to as an “art movie” in the midst of our bucolic suburban idyll, where John Wayne and Cat Ballou ruled the roost.

    With its fleeting nudity and subversive narrative, Blowup was hot stuff, “adults only” material condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency, an organization my mother adhered to diligently. What can I tell you? The woman had problems.

    Blowup is Antonioni’s masterpiece. There isn’t a bum frame in the entire film. Of his other work, there are highs and lows…but the appeal is in the eye of the beholder. I have great affection for Red Desert (1964) and Il Grido (1957), but need to revisit La Notte (1961), which has nearly faded from memory. The one element stressed in these and other films is space, a surrounding expanse that can swallow us whole. Isolation, contamination and corruption as an aura rather than tangible negatives…did Antonioni believe the environment was consuming him?