Blow-Up & The Creation of Meaning

The primary existential quest is the search for life’s meaning. Some trust that a holy, divine being, God or otherwise, has a plan for them, and simply pray and continue on until life’s conclusion. Others find similarly ingrained practices, whether it be a profession, sport, or routine, to worship and follow, which help to qualm life’s unnerving dilemma. For the jaded rest, it’s an aimless journey, and for every moment meaning is created, the next turn could mean a pitfall into nothingness. The jaded walk a fine line between disappearance and existence.


There are some who have the profession but who also suffer from these dreaded feelings of nothingness, much like the never-named-but-known-as-Thomas protagonist of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Thomas is a fashion photographer, a well-known one, judging by the parade of doll-like 20 something female models that stalk him, whose job it is to create meaning in his photo shoots. We assume Thomas shoots for some high-end clothing companies, but it seems that his real desire is to create an art book, filled with images from homeless shelters and the pictures he takes of the couple in the park. The posed, superficial, even exploitative high fashion photos contrast greatly to the organically obtained homeless shelter images and especially to the park photos. Thomas associates different meanings to these two separate forms of photography, as noted by his lifeless attitude post-fashion photos and his comically over joyous heel kick after snapping the park pictures.

But a creation is always a creation. When Thomas develops the photos from the park and soon discovers a gunman in the bushes, he frantically and obsessively begins to blow-up the resolution of the images, distorting the quality and thus losing the truth in the distorted, grainy, now abstract images he’s left with. When he puts his P.I cap on and returns to the scene, the body looks fake and no further evidence is found. His search has led him again to nothingness.


Thomas’ experience with the park murder and his photo “evidence” exemplifies the existential elusiveness of meaning. Thomas, fed up with the vapid models and photo shoots that make up his daily existence, jumps (literally) at the chance to propel his profession to a higher overall reason for being. But it turns out his work does nothing but waste time and materials. Creations only have the meaning individuals give them, Blow-Up reminds us. The piece of the guitar from the Yardbirds concert is left as trash on the ground because it doesn’t mean anything to the passersby. The fake tennis match between the mimes only has meaning because everyone is believes in it. Thomas leaves the guitar piece on the ground. Thomas realizes he must buy into the mime tennis match for it to have meaning.

Between these experiences, Thomas learns that his creations, despite the subject matter, are inexorably linked to a sense of falsity, and that finding meaning in them is as elusive as finding life’s meaning.

Benjamin and Tajiri

Walter Benjamin, in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, states the following:

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence of the place where it happens to be. The unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence.”

This statement reminded me of the basic goals of Rea Tajiri’s documentary History and Memory. What Tajiri attempts to do is recreate what her parents’ experiences were like in a Japanese internment camp. However, all Tajiri has to work with is one sole memory, one image image, one detail her mother gave to her about the experience—the cupping of water and subsequent splashing on her face. It is up to Tajiri to flesh out the rest of the background story and create a truth with her narrative.

Though Tajiri is not “reproducing” a work of art—she is creating one—she has the same struggles that Benjamin lists here. Her work, no matter her efforts, cannot reclaim the “presence in time and space” her mother’s memory did. Nor can she herself return to that time, and have that “unique experience” her mother did. Tajiri’s work is as much about her desire to expose truth of what happened at the camps (and, thus, alert the public about the psychologically damaging effects of what took place) as it is a reflection about the painful truth of experience and the futility of fully recreating the past. Tajiri’s work reminds us why cameras exist in the first place: to try to capture those fleeting moments, to have some indication that they happened.

When Benjamin states that the “unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject”, his claims again match up with Tajiri’s work. Tajiri, in order to create a background to her parents’ pasts, researches the internment camps and provides clips of the films of the time that dealt with the issue. Tajiri shows the viewer how her parents and their existence were represented by the media of the time. Tajiri herself does this work for the viewer; she puts together all the layers that have been added to her parents’ story since then.

History and Memory features Tajiri taking a memory and creating a piece of art around it. Tajiri, in her work, then adds the history behind the art and shows how the story has evolved and changed, and, in her case, been misrepresented. Tajiri’s work also is a meditation on the act of filming and creating art and how these sort of creations affect memory and place individuals in history.

Chinatown and Demythologization

John G. Cawelti, in his essay " 'Chinatown' and Generic Transformation in Recent Films", provides an insightful analysis of how Roman Polanski takes the popular genre and American myth of the hard-boiled detective, and twists it around in his film "Chinatown". Cawelti states:

"A film like 'Chinatown' deliberately invokes the basic characteristics of a traditional genre in order to bring is audience to see that genre as the embodiment of an inadequate and destructive myth. We have seen how this process of demythologization operates in 'Chinatown' by setting the traditional model of the hard-boiled detective's quest for justice and integrity over and against Polanski's sense of a universe so steeped in ambiguity, corruption and evil that such individualistic moral enterprises are doomed by their innocent naivete to end in tragedy and self-destruction."

By this point in the essay, Cawelti has already fleshed out the hard-boiled detective structure, and how 'Chinatown' follows it closely (and even pays homage to 'The Maltese Falcon' by way of the similarities between Nicholson & Dunaway to Bogart & Astor), but then severely veers off the structure and ends in chaos and destruction. Instead of solving the crime and going back to a justice-driven, "marginal situation" and being "basically unchanged by what has happened" as the traditional structure would dictate, Detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) in 'Chinatown', cannot overcome what has occurred, and remains emotionally and psychologically scarred.

Cawelti hits on such a great truth about 'Chinatown' when he talks about how Polanski demythologizes the hard-boiled detective story with this film. Polanski shows an underbelly of a corrupt city, and does not package his narrative up by following the structure. He shows what lurks beneath the surface, and what he reveals is evil. As the character of Hollis Mulwray states before his murder in the film, what is beneath the city of Los Angeles thematically matches up with what Polanski is getting out: there is a giant, dark empty nothingness that has been caused by the movement of tectonic plates in California. Mulwray refuses to build the dam because he knows it might lead to the death of many people; instead it, along with his investigation and realization that Cross is manipulating the city's water supply, leads to his own death.

The other main point associated with this theme that Polanski gets across is the dangerous nature of the myth itself. If people believe myths, and the structure of myths, they might end up as Gittes does: confused, overwhelmed, lost. Gittes witnesses pure evil and pure chaos at the end of the film, and Polanski, by paralleling the detective myth, and then contradicting it at the film's end, attributes some of the guilt for Gittes' end to the creation of myth itself.

Rick Altman, in "A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre", talks about how as more scholars "come to now the full range of individual Hollywood genres, we are finding that genres are far from exhibiting the homogeneity" that has been attributed to genres. Essentially, Altman begins to see how it is becoming more and more difficult to pin a film down into one genre. In Polanski's opinion (I would assume), which I would agree with, it seems that the less films that support these film myths the better. As we see with Gittes in "Chinatown", believing in the rigid structure of a myth makes it all the more difficult when your narrative strays from the structure. It is much harder to accept the reality of a life of chaos if you believe so strongly in myth.

Caché and L'Absent

When reading Daniel Dayan’s “The Tudor Code of Classical Cinema” I was struck most by the terms and ideas with which he closes his essay. Dayan, chanelling many of the ideas of Jean-Pierre Oudart. states:

“When the viewer discovers the frame... the triumph of his former possession of the image fades out. The viewer discovers that the camera is hiding things, and therefore distrusts it and the frame itself.”

This immediately reminded me of the opening scene of Michael Haneke’s “Caché”. The camera shows a home, and, despite a few passer-bys on foot and in car, the image could pass for a still one. The spectator feels that triumph of entering a new film and visually taking everything in. But the feeling quickly turns ominous. Is the house going to explode? Is someone going to come screaming out of the house, with a dead baby in his hands? Because of this eerie stillness and all the attention Heneke immediately places on this house, the spectator expects the worst.

Then, when non-diegetic sound in the form of calm dialogue between two people is heard, the audience is thrown for a loop. Are they watching this first hand or is the spectator watching this through someone else? Turns out the film’s two protagonists are watching a videotape of their own home being filmed. Phew, no bombs, no bloody babies. But, however, the audience learns it has been tricked. As Dayan says: “the spectator discovers that his possession of space was only partial, illusory.” The spectator was not “where” he thought he was originally. Heneke immediately derails the viewer, and takes what Dayan says to an extreme.

Haneke continues to keep the audience uncomfortable and confused throughout the film by employing a calculated filming technique. The reasoning behind this technique matches up with the narrative of the film itself. The film’s two protagonists Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche), receive videotape after videotape of mundane shots of their home and of insights to Georges’ past. The couple goes to the police, as they feel their lives are in danger and they are being terrorized. Haneke gives the spectator clues about who is filming this family as the plot unfolds, but never reveals who the culprit actually is. Thus, for the entirety of the film, the couple (and, thus, the spectator) feels haunted by this imaginary “person” that the film is truly about. Dayan introduces and explains one of Oudart’s terms, which I believe connects to Haneke’s visual style. Dayan states:

“He [the spectator] discovers that he is only authorized to see what happens to be in the axis of the glance of another spectator, who is ghostly or absent. This ghost, who rules over the frame and robs the spectator of his pleasure, Oudart proposes to call ‘the absent one’ (l’absent).”

This idea of “the absent one” directly connects, as Dayan explains, with the shot / reverse shot technique. In film, characters are often speaking to the right or left side of the camera, thus speaking to this “absent one” who is occupying that space. The spectator learns (because of the ingrained language and vocabulary of film) that this character is speaking to another character (one who probably was in the previous, establishing shot). It is interesting to note that Heneke does not employ the shot / reverse shot often in “Caché”, which makes the spectator incredibly uncomfortable. At the dinner table discussion, for example, the camera does not shoot who is speaking at the table, but rather shoots the characters head on without much regard to whom each character speaks. Haneke does not relieve the audience with familiar shot patterns. He does not let the camera occupy the point-of-view of a specific, known character, and keeps the spectator on edge (and also keeps him paying attention). By doing this, Haneke reinforces the idea that the absent one is in control of the film. He gives power to the unknown videotape-sending silent stalker by going against the grain of the typical filmic enunciation. This makes his film all the more effective, eerie, and powerful.

Cinema Paradiso & Classic Hollywood Cinema

One of the things that struck me the most about David Bordwell’s Classic Hollywood Cinema was the definition of the “Hollywood formula” for screenplays. Bordwell writes: “the plot consists of an undisturbed stage, the disturbance, the struggle, and the elimination of the disturbance.” In this day and age of cinema, it is incredible to see how much screenplays have advanced and changed, and how films bend these once rigid rules. Screenplay writing, like every active medium, is incredibly adaptable. People get bored with the wooden, formulaic screenplays and ask for more challenging narratives. The movies today (as exemplified by Fight Club and Amelie) are clear and set examples of rule-defying narratives. However, a screenplay can be challenging and classic at the same time. Cinema Paradiso is just that. It immediately defies the traditional outline for the Hollywood screenplay (it spends essentially no time exploring the “undisturbed stage” of our protagonist and jumps immediately into the disturbance, requiring a change both in time and setting). Salvatore, our protagonist, comes home to the news that his old friend Alfredo has died. Salvatore has not been home in thirty years, but his mother, who called with the news, is sure that he will return for the funeral. In order to establish the narrative, the film must jump backwards to Salvatore’s childhood. The disturbance is clear: Salvatore’s mother calls and her news brings Salvatore back to his hometown and forces him to remember all that his childhood meant to him. But what exactly is Salvatore’s struggle? Is it a simple return home, to make things right with his mother and to honor his past with Alfredo? Is it to reconnect with his childhood love, Elena? Perhaps it is larger than that, more of an identity struggle he must endure. Is Salvatore being forced to mesh together the identity he created as a child (which, as the spectator finds outs, mainly deals with his obsession with films, especially the racier clips that are cut out), with his current, successful and professional one? It is most likely a combination of the three, with emphasis on the third definition. Cinema Paradiso plays with the effects of film on identity. It follows a film-obsessed child and how the romance of the cinema, the community togetherness of the theater, shaped and created his identity. Toto (Salvatore’s name when he was younger) lives his life as it was a film. His romance with Elena is most strongly expressed when Salvatore, as a young teenager, films her with his camera and, later on, when he dramatically embraces her in the rain. Both are cinematic moments, and the young Salvatore frames them in terms of cinema and film, rather than in more personal terms. But is the disturbance finally eliminated at the end of the film? The final sequence, the montage of the racy clips that Alfredo compiled and put together in a film reel for Salvatore, truly brings everything together. It is a compilation of what drove Toto into the film world as a child. It is brought together in a single reel, and also is evidence that Alfredo, even though he told Salvatore never to return to his hometown, knew that Salvatore would do just that. He would return home, he would honor his childhood and his infatuation with the cinema, he would wrap together his identities into one.

How does film in general affect the way you see the world?

In Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", Benjamin quotes Severin-Mars as saying: "film might represent an incomparable means of expression". Though this statement might seem incredibly bold, after watching "Amelie" and "Fight Club", the claim seems legitimate. These two films stretch the boundaries of film itself and show how much one can actually do within the medium. Benjamin talks at length about the future possibilities of film, and he would be happy to see the advances made as evidenced by these works. In "Amelie" for example, the power of the imagination is so fully and gloriously expressed throughout the film. Amelie's desk lamp comes alive, and clips of lovers across the city of Paris climaxing are shown as Amelie ponders the question on her roof. In "Fight Club", the infusion of the character of the Narrator and the influence of his alter-ego Tyler Durdan are expertly shown and thematically expressed using techniques that only film could capture. Blips of Tyler appear every so often on the screen before he actually appears in a seemingly human manifestation. In what other medium could a mental creation of an alter-ego be so powerfully expressed? When Tyler is revealed to be just that, a figment of the narrator's imagination (or, arguably, his actual self), Fincher returns to previous clips (now devoid of Brad Pitt's Tyler) and reveals to the audience how he had tricked them and how it all makes sense. Both these films expertly exploit the technological advances of the day and use them to reinforce the core narratives of their stories.