Michelangelo Antonioni
Blow Up

Dialogue overheard on a bus this morning, between Professor Velluto (V) and Mr. Grigio (G).

V: ...last night I watched 'Blow Up' by Antonioni again, one of our best filmmakers, the poet of incommunicability, the chronicler of the individual's inability to decrypt reality, to deconstruct and reconstruct reality, giving it a complete meaning, the impossibility of weaving an authentic dialogue with others, with the otherness.

G: ah, yes... I also saw part of the film on Classic TV, but I got bored almost immediately, I found it heavy, you can't exhaust the viewer with meaningless images and narrations, in cinema we look for something else, a little bit of entertainment, a story to tell. It's not like after ten hours of work I can deal with theories of incommunicability, I only have a junior high school education and don't reach the abstractions of such intellectuals of the kaiser. I changed the channel and watched Biscardi's trial.

V: ...but come on, kaiser or kaiser, you should have more respect for an author that the world envies us, one of the last great Italian intellectuals. Don't you understand that in Antonioni what matters is the form of narration, the play of colors and music... that the plot is so slender it gets lost in the suggestions of the vision. Look, 'Blow Up' constituted the model for Kubrick's 2001, for de Palma, for all of Dario Argento's cinema and Deep Red that you also like, it's not just intellectualism... it's explaining how man is an incomplete creature, at the mercy of his own perceptions, his own subjectivity, almost like an atom in the Universe...

G: yes yes, a fart in space... Listen, Professor Velluto, I'm tired of the presumption of you self-styled critics; let's be honest, many talk about this Antonioni but no one ever paid attention to him at the cinema; in the 60s here in the city there was only western and peplum, artisanal films that earned a lot of money and promoted the whole film industry, sustaining the intellectuals, their vices and their flops. Look, professor, that I'm not so naive, the only good one at that time was Gian Maria Volontè... who moved from Sergio Leone to Rosi and Petri making didactic cinema but with a message... what message does this Antonioni have who only tells me "there are no messages"?!?!? What do I care about the photographer in 'Blow Up' who doesn't understand what he saw in a photograph...

V:... Anyway, stay with your opinions. If you'd watched the film with patience, you'd understand how David Hemmings, the protagonist, believes he has photographed a murder, but doesn't discover the culprit precisely because reality is unknowable, and a thousand visual, auditory, chemical, sensual stimuli distract us every day from our purposes, from our goals... it almost seems to tell us that man is alone in the world, that there's not even a god, and that every search for meaning is destined to get lost in the plurality of significations. And beyond this, if you'd had a bit of patience, the film provides a splendid depiction of swinging London in the mid-60s, predicting the psychedelic age, the freedom of the youth, there's even the Yardbirds with Jimmy Page imitating the Who and smashing guitars at a concert...

G: you know professor, that I don't give a fig about those sixties?!? At the time I had to earn my daily bread, support a widowed mother and three siblings getting up at five in the morning, in Italy at that time there was scarcely anything to eat, let alone psychedelia and various nonsense. If anything, a glass of wine and that was it... at most I'd hit the dance floor with Giuliano and the Notturni, Dino, the Kings of "Caffè Amaro", we didn't even know who the Beatles were, and they sang in English, we didn't understand a thing!

V: Stop right there... you didn't understand anything, I understood a lot back then, and then going back to Antonioni...

G:listen, Prof. Velluto... but if Antonioni had nothing to communicate, what was he communicating for?

I'll stop the transcription of the dialogue here. From what I gathered, while Prof. Velluto is for a 5/5 with honors, Mr. Grigio is for a flat 0/5. For once, caught between these two views of reality, indeed incommunicable, I suspend judgment.