The Configuration and Star Presence of Vanessa Redgrave in Blow-up

Much has been said about Michelangelo Antonioni’s seminal Blow-up (1966), recipient of the Palme d’Or at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival, the film has been predominantly read as an expression of the ‘existential angst’ and ‘alienation’ felt during the Swinging Sixties. Peter Brunette, however, has argued that this kind of response to Blow-up, as well as other films in Antonioni’s repertoire and generally films of this period, such as Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Mike Nichols, 1966), is more so the product of the cultural-literary paradigm that pervaded the period than the texts’ own inherent features.[1] Brunette saw this paradigm to privilege concepts and themes related to a European philosophy of existentialism; of which, Blow-up may have been influenced by, but it should not constitute as the definitive reading of the film.[2] What is important when approaching Antonioni’s work, or any work of art, is one’s own hermeneutical reading of it and an appreciation of that reading’s limitations. And so with this liberating framework to consider Blow-up, my reading will concentrate on the configuration and presence of Vanessa Redgrave (“Jane”) and her stark contrast to the other women in the film; evaluating the ways in which certain facets of the performance subscribe to the now fortified Redgrave star persona.

This reading has been facilitated by the film’s evocative image of the five fashion models standing in a diagonal line with the same frontward pose. This image seems to be a pictorial retelling of Richard Dyer’s notion that the roles and the performances of a star in her films are an unveiling of her personality;[3] as the models here, like all models, have the same identical body figure and look, they can be interpreted as being multiple incarnations of the one (ideal) person. Moreover, the black windshield darkening half the model’s body alludes to the simultaneous process of recognition and abstraction of the actor in a film;[4] wherein there’s recognition that the player here is Vanessa Redgrave, but that she’s also preoccupied with being the character Jane.

The camera first encounters Redgrave and her gentleman friend incidentally when Thomas is photographing birds in the park. An extreme long shot captures this activity, and next a zoomed-in jumpcut with the same angle and focus draws in on the action. One of the birds then takes flight, and the camera races diagonally upwards to catch it, also coincidentally capturing, from the waist up, Redgrave and her lover in an embrace. This brief moment showcases how Antonioni is toying with set principles of subject-object relations as stipulated by Classical Hollywood, though, he isn’t necessarily of that cinematic tradition; if anything, Antonioni is a renegade of the Italian Neorealists and an apprentice of the French New Wave.

Once Redgrave does come to the fore of Thomas’ attention, a series of shot-reverse-shots is used to capture her, but this is slightly problematic because what Thomas sees is predominantly through his camera’s viewfinder, and we see things from a faintly different perspective through Antonioni’s camera. This variance is reinforced when the photographs are blown-up. What we see is due to either:

(a) The camera being placed behind Thomas with the same shot angle and scale as his viewfinder perspective but with him also in the frame; simultaneously creating an objective and subjective viewpoint.

(b) The camera frame as presumably identical to Thomas’ objectifying photographic frame.

(c) The shot frame as from the subjective perspective of Thomas’ eyes as he surveys his subjects.

(d) The frame as from an arbitrary omnipresent position gazing at the park and, at random, capturing Thomas or Jane.

(e) The camera placed in front of Thomas so as to commence or conclude the shot-reverse-shot cycle.

Even with all of these multiple perspectives, which strangely fragment the spatial coherence of the park, we see no remnants of a dead body.

Even from afar, Redgrave is much more animated and lively than the hyper-sexualised but emaciated and frail Verushka, and her laughter contains more personality than all of the five android-like models together exude. In Thomas’ interaction with the models, he is the figure of not an ordinary kind of agency, but an agency rooted in supreme male phallic potency; he is the director of their bodies, poses and, most importantly, beauty. Redgrave, however, is not impressed with Thomas’ camera and this can be interpreted as she is someone who is not interested in the two-dimensional flat presentation of a person, but rather in the whole bodily exchange between peoples. Indeed, her acting histrionics, which come to reveal themselves in her confrontation with Thomas, corroborate how photographs cannot do her screen presence justice; that Redgrave, with a beauty that moves, has more to offer than just a photograph. And even when Thomas is photographing her, she is too spontaneous, action-orientated and awkward for his camera. This is the first instance of her defying his objectifying agency, of which culminates in his traumatic sense of loss when both the body and her photographs disappear.

Her acting in the park scene is highly stylised, theatrical and affected, in contrast to the aloof and naturalised calm presence of the rest of the cast. Redgrave’s histrionics is necessary to convey her character’s desperation over the photographs and to propel both Thomas’ fascination in them and the plot forward. This acting style relates back to her background in theatre, and she is reputably the most distinguished ‘thespian’ in the cast, having won the Best Actress prize at Cannes the previous year for Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (Karel Reisz, 1966). Moreover, when viewing the film retrospectively and considering the career trajectory and political allegiances of Redgrave, her line “You can’t photograph people like that… this is a public place. Everyone has the right to be left in peace.” is a very typical line for her to enact. Redgrave has long been a controversial support of left-wing politics and social causes, in fact, she even occasioned her Oscar acceptance speech to raise an attack on a “small bunch of Zionist hoodlums,” therefore it would also be apt for her to be against activities conducive to a nanny-surveillance state, i.e. spying on people in public. In addition, Sheila Whitaker, in her article ‘The Rebel Hero’, provides a taxonomy of the various rebel heroes depicted in American cinema, and the two types most pertinent to Redgrave are ‘the rebel against his own class’ and ‘the politically conscious rebel;’[5] these two prisms become a useful lens through which to scrutinise Jane’s nonconformist behaviours. Finally, Andy Medhurst and Rob Edelman have interestingly noted that Redgrave’s political views have become “somehow linked to the tenacity and conviction [that] she has displayed in her films.”[6]

There is a kind of non-sexualisation of Redgrave in the scene with her top off. Her sexuality creates a quality of vulnerability and ethereality; this in part is due to Antonioni’s camera performing an elaborate choreography to keep from revealing her breasts, which ironically foregrounds them even more as opposed to having them explicitly on show.[7] This kind of staged sexual-virginal modesty also relates to the character of Patricia (despite seeing her have sex on screen) as she aligns herself with a motherly archetype, and Redgrave with intelligence, nonconformity and an appreciation of the arts (as she suggests to Thomas to hang the propeller from the ceiling like a fan or use it to break up the straight lines). Regardless, both women seem to have a depth to them because they refuse to define themselves exclusively through their physical-sexual bodies. Consequently, highlighting how Blow-up rewires the audience’s notions of femininity, sexuality and beauty; whereby the hyper-sexualised girls are turned into androids bursting with artificiality and the ‘non-sexualised’ girls exude a sense of humanity and the everyday, which unto itself, is inherently sexually alluring.

In summary, this paper has argued a case for the elevation of Vanessa Redgrave in Blow-up. She is a fascinating figure both in terms of being a catalyst in the plotline that overturns Thomas’ dominating agency and a woman who attempts to defy being defined purely in sexual terms (especially in a film whose protagonist evaluates women in sexual terms). This argument has drawn on both Redgrave’s configuration within the film and extra-textually with concern of her career trajectory and star persona. I have attempted to pinpoint aspects of the Redgrave persona as they are evinced in the film – her ethereal beauty bordering on androgyny, her passion intensity, her political sensibility, and her nonconformist spirit; questioning whether they are the product of Redgrave’s own imagining, or Antonioni’s, or the audience’s.

Bibliography

Brunette, Peter. The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni. Cambridge. New York.
Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 1998.

Dyer, Richard. Stars [6^th Edition]. London: British Film Institute.

Ferguson, Russell. ‘Beautiful Moments’ in Kerry Brougher and Jonathan Crary’s Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art. 1996.

Andy Medhurst, updated by Rob Edelman, ‘Vanessa Redgrave’. Film Reference. http://www.filmreference.com/Actors-and-Actresses-Po-Ro/Redgrave-Vanessa.html. Accessed: 24/09/09.

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[1] Peter Brunette, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 1.

[2] Brunette, p. 1.

[3] Richard Dyer, Stars [6^th Edition], London: British Film Institute, p. 20.

[4] Russell Ferguson, ‘Beautiful Moments’ in Kerry Brougher and Jonathan Crary’s Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945, Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996, p. 157.

[5] Dyer, p. 52.

[6] Andy Medhurst, updated by Rob Edelman, ‘Vanessa Redgrave’, Film Reference, http://www.filmreference.com/Actors-and-Actresses-Po-Ro/Redgrave-Vanessa.html, last accessed: 24/09/09.

[7] Brunette, p. 114.