International Psychoanalysis

One Comment on “Jacob Arlow on Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blowup””

1. Tamar Schwartz Says:
   December 4th, 2007 at 7:47 am

   Arlow and Blow-Up Redux
   Bennett Roth Ph.D.

   For some time following the release of Antonioni’s “Blow-up”(1967) I was intrigued by the film. It was one of the few new films that I went to twice to re experience the film. Finding Dr. Arlow’s analysis of the film when it first appeared, I anticipated his insights but found, from my perspective, that he seemed to miss much of the film’s meaning. After many years I wrote to him to share my disagreements but disappointingly he never responded. The recent publication of his review with J. Stone’s commentary offers me an opportunity to again explore what Stone artfully describes as a form of “repression” on the part of a reviewer , but this time of an esteemed analyst venturing into the area of applying psychoanalytic thinking to movies. I am thankful to Dr. Richards for this opportunity to discuss my lingering objections and to point out what I believe to be Arlow’s misperceptions.
   Immediately following the release of the film I published a small movie review in a journal called ” Voices” and with very strong curiosity sought out the original short story by Julio Cortozar listed in the movie credits and referred to by J. Stone PhD. It appeared to me from his initial publication that Dr. Arlow never read that short story upon which the film was based, in fact in my letter to him I advised him of this impression. In the original short story (of which I have lost track) a murder is seemingly viewed through a mountain scenic viewer and when the observer rushes to the scene of the crime he can find no evidence of it. My interest was in attempting to recognize and attend to the elements in the screenplay that were added or subtracted from the original text. While the story takes place on a mountain in South America and with a scenic viewer, it was Antonioni, I discovered, who moved the location to London, fleshed out the character of his creation, “the photographer,” in his screenplay, and relocated the ‘murder’ to a London park. In a similar manner a brilliantly realized capturing of a Mishima short story was moved to Scotland from Japan “The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea (1976), and seemingly Arlow’s analysis of the effects of the primal scene perhaps better fit this later film, directed by John Carlino, than “Blow-up.”
   The theme of observing a murder is one that major film makers are attracted to; among them the classic “Rear Window” (Hitchcock, 1946) also from a short story, seemingly partially shot on the street on which my office was formally located (East10 Street. and University Place opposite the Albert Hotel which appears in the movie)) in which a bored photojournalist (Jimmy Stewart) observes a murder. I would be surprised if Antonioni never saw this classic film. ‘Witness” (1985, P Weir) is yet another of the long list of films which hold at the center of the narrative the witnessing of a murder as is “ Blue Velvet”( D. Lynch,1986) in which a voyeur is found and punished. While in “ The Conversation “ ( F. Coppola 1974) the stimulation is auditory as in the this past year’s Oscar winner “The Lives of Others”(2006, V. Donnersmark).It is possible, that as I pointed out in an analysis of a mountain top scene in “Lord of the Flies” (P.Brook,1963) that the audience is placed in the position of watching the person who has watched the murder, or by extension listening and watching the person who is listening to the love making. Movie goers are then voyeurs by proxy, a position that Hitchcock was a master at creating. Hitchcock’s technique was showing the audience the crime (murder) and then constructing the plot to be about the subsequent detecting of the crime and catching the murderer. In that manner he makes the audience the viewer of the crime (primal scene) and tension is created in the uncovering the facts on the screen with people who supposedly don’t know that information; facts that the audience already has been shown. Further the criminal can be viewed as the facts close in on him offering an opportunity to vicariously experience guilt.. What Arlow relies on and offers is the Person-Krag’s outdated analysis of the primal scene elements of the written detective story while ignoring that movies follow a different plot line. In old fashioned detective books, often the final pages of the narrative the truth is revealed through putting together the faint clues; Sherlock Holmes being the prime example. I believe the tension particular to movies since Hitchcock is obviously overlooked.
   In the following I will take issue with many elements of Arlow’s analysis and attempt to winnow an analytic perspective. Some of these points I made in my original paper, others were made in my letter to him and some are the result of my continuing inquiry in psychoanalysis and film. In his analysis Arlow likened the narrative trajectory of a film to the flow of material in an analytic session following Beres and, from my perspective, respecting his insights into the creative analytic process, the purpose of a film and the purpose the analytic contract of a session are two very different things. While movie makers are sharing something that is both visual and spoken, they are bound by the rules of visual narrative while the flow of associations in a session are bound by both the dynamics of language and the shifting underlying transferences of the moment: in sum they have very different intents. From another vantage, the analyst has a history of information about the patient making the associations; the fictive characters on the screen have no actual history. One faulty solution to this dilemma is to attribute the conflict to the director-screen writer of the film; another is to search for a single dynamic to explain a complex plot and narrative.
   For that reason I believe Arlow stood on unsafe ground when he includes the quote that “Blow Up” was an autobiographical testament to Antonioni. Antonioni was a deeply creative filmmaker and prior to my original review I saw all of his major movies. Antonioni died in July 2007 One obituary described him: “Alongside his near contemporary Federico Fellini, Antonioni signaled a break with the “neorealist” style that flourished in Italy at the end of the Second World War. In contrast to the working class parables of Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini, his films were cool and stylized, traditionally focusing on the experiences of an alienated bourgeoisie.” His American released films, produced by Carlo Ponti, have a mystical quality, and Zabriske Point, The Adventure, The Red Desert, the Eclipse, the Passenger, and The Three Faces of a Woman were the most notable. He was, with Fellini, among the first directors to create a hyper-visual reality and, for example in the park scene when he found the grass color pale to his tastes in London, he had all the grass painted green to heighten its impact. Additionally, he placed microphones in the trees to amplify the sound of the leaves blowing in the wind creating a loud ’eerie’ sound. These are among the movie plot/narrative elements he changed from the Cortozar story that are too numerous to mention but it is clear that central to the plot is doubt about what one sees and hears, and doubt about the viewing of a murder.
   Central to Arlow’s analysis of this film are the dynamics of the “repressed” primal scene to the possible murder in the park. There is no doubt that primal scene dynamics are at work in this film, and in photographing the couple in the park, however there is never actual love making in the park. There is affection and hand holding with a standing embrace between the unknown participants photographed. Perhaps Arlow was extending an analytic metaphor to the camera, its gaze and being looked through, but I do not believe that viewing the park scene is at the center of this film. I believe that there are other dynamics competing for our attention and that Arlow missed the central issues while in my letter I tried to engage him in a dialogue about my assessment.
   Antonioni wrote the script with help translating the language from Italian to English, and invented the scenes of seeming seduction and impotence of the main character that Arlow refers to as “Hemmings”. In this simple statement Arlow reveals a repression that is central to my analytic thesis; that the photographer has no name in the film and Arlow calls the character by the actors’ name. He applies an off camera reality to the character. This film is the first major film instance in which there is a protagonist without a name. The original script, (old interview with David Hemmings) I have discovered elsewhere had a name for the character but in the making of the film it was creatively omitted and never used. To be nameless is indeed a psychological deficit indicating a loss of both the subjectivity and objectivity of a self; a loss of primary identity and of having a place in the world among others. Being named is a significant part of the human experience. His namelessness subtly appears before the “killing” and led me to wonder how a person with no name can be found by the unknown, unnamed woman in the park (Vanessa Redgrave) in order to get the film back from the photographer.
   Antonioni’s creative intent, it appears to me, is to tie the scenes of seduction with a photographic camera the existence of a film that is enlarged until there are vague references to real objects such as the alleged gun and body. Specifically in regards to the image of the gun, I must report that in the initial viewing I saw as perhaps Antonioni wished me to see, a gun in the blown up image. In subsequent viewing of the film I variously did and did not see the image of a gun. This variation in perception based upon my beliefs when watching the movie led to another central point of whether there is a (cinematic) surface reality in this narrative movie that is intended to be consensual. I concluded that I believe this was Antonioni’s intent. that Antonioni was concerned here with perception of reality and seduction, pseudo-sexuality, sexuality and perversion and its concomitant psychological uncertainty and doubt.
   Often in film the final scene gives us a clue to the directors’ intent and underlying meaning. In Blow Up’s opening and final scene there are mimes passing by in a truck. Such mimes in England are associated with a secret society associated with Guy Fawkes Day (November 5) who was executed in 1605 for attempting to blow up (again that word) Parliament as part of a Catholic uprising after which 100,000.00 people were killed. In one scene there is the inclusion of nuns as extra’s that always puzzled me and the final scene the truck appears again, stops and two mimes play an imaginary tennis game without racquet or ball on the tennis court but physically moving as if they were in a game. The photographer (Hemmings) has come from a somewhat puzzling sequence in which he looks at the park scene in which he photographed the couple and the body trying to figure something out that is never verbalized. As we watch this tennis game we start to hear the impact of their shoes moving on the court. Eventually the photographer, who watches the imaginary game in the same park as the couple and the “murder”, is asked to retrieve an imaginary ball “hit off the court” in pantomime and return it to the players. After he mimes throwing the imaginary ball back we start to hear the plunk of the ball being hit by a racquet as the camera focus is on Hemmings unaffected face. In this scene I believe that the creation of an auditory hallucination to a mimed tennis game and the photographer joining the imaginary event supports the idea of a deeply disturbing psychological allusion concerning the nature of “perceived” reality. A theme so disturbing that it has been repressed by many critics. In addition, the film concludes with a long overhead shot of Hemmings on the green park lawn as the movie ends and just before the appearance of those words Hemmings disappears from view. I believe this was a signature event by Antonioni, that like the body in the photograph and Vanessa Redgrave’s nameless character in an earlier scene, people are disappearing.
   Have the events that happened in the movie as we think they have? Do we perceive auditory and visual elements of ‘cinematic’ reality clearly or have we been seduced by the “idea” of a murder in the park and seduced by Antonioni’s film? Or, in terms of the film, is this film about the psychic disintegration of the character played by David Hemmings, the character who has no name and no identity: as he says to the ‘teenie boppers’” “What’s the use of a name?“ The continued ambiguity in this movie reminds me of Kurasawa’s 1950 film ‘Rashomon (another primal scene film.) When asked what the film meant, Kurasawa explained “The film is like life ..it isn’t always clear what it means”.
   The sparseness of dialogue, the absence of both names and a clear sense of time and relationship among the characters leads to an elasticity in the narrative. This in turn causes many to create a fictive resolution and understanding, to project (empathic) meaning into Blow-Up’s plot. I believe that elasticity is central to the film and the film necessitates many viewings before reaching any conclusions to its meanings. At the same time I believe that the primal scene dynamics are played out by the film as are other dynamic as in many other films, but attributing this dynamic as an explanative hypothesis in the cinematic reality of the film or in the minds of the viewers is unlikely. It seems clear to me that the audience is put in the position of the voyeur watching the photographer grapple with his diminishing sense of reality. How did the women from the park find the photographer to get the film back? What is real and what is fantasized by the character? Was there a body in the park? Do you see a gun in the blown up picture if I say there is none? When his “wife” is shown a blown up picture of the body in the park she says ”It looks like one of your pictures,” adding more questions and doubt about reality. The creative use of sound, doubt and the elasticity of meaning of events empathically induce the audience to seek a perspective as in Rashomon.
   The finding of a basic psychoanalytic dynamic in a film should not come as a surprise, neither should it come as anything other than “normal“that great literature survives because it captures part of the human condition and in that condition we find trauma, depression, guilt and the exigencies of fate acting on character. Films made by a group of creative people portraying human stories in larger than life arenas and embedded in those presentations must be elements in which I, we. and the rest of the audience can “identify” with in multi-determined (elastic) ways. What psychoanalysis of a film can contribute is a deeper understanding of a film by adding its perspective.
   In summary I will add a few more elements to Arlow’s analysis of this film following Michels (2003) critique of psychoanalysis of film. Arlow’s review of Blow Up not only failed to offer any new perspective on some aspect of psychoanalysis, it failed to open a dialogue with film makers. An outsider might even read some of his review as arrogant, with the analyst-reviewer writing from a position of authority in the absence of direct clinical information, explaining to the auteur and the audience what the film is really about and what they are seeing. That position has largely been discredited in contemporary clinical psychoanalysis; we no longer try to pretend that we know what everything is about. A humbler posture in applied analysis is overdue—an interest in learning from filmmakers as well as in teaching them: an attempt to search for the sources of their imagery, narrative and creativity. A more open attitude about our theories might lead to some interesting explorations at the boundary of cinema and psychoanalysis.
   Finally, I now realize after struggling through this piece and seeing the movie yet again, that Arlow’s analysis of Hemmings/Antonioni and Blow-Up shows us what Arlow has detected and forces the viewer to stand outside both the film and the characters. With the primal scene as his focus, Arlow never inhabits either the film or the characters, the character’s puzzlement, confusions and quests.

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