Blow Out (De Palma, 1981): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm
This is a 35mm presentation.
Full review here:
Blow Out
is among Brian De Palma's very best films. It entertains a close relation
with a very strong (and better respected) American film of the '70s, Francis
Coppola's The Conversation (1974). Both these films are about the
art and the act of sound recording; both are about the uncovering of conspiracies.
Through The Conversation, De Palma reaches back to Michelangelo
Antonioni's famous (and somewhat overrated) Blow Up (1966), where
it was still photography that inadvertently uncovered a mystery. All three films trace
a sad arc of failure: the conspirators rise up and crush the would-be
everyday investigators, with their cameras and sound recording machines.
All are about the treachery of appearances, and the ease with which technological
evidence can be tampered with (photos can be falsified, audiotapes can
be erased), something which usually happens mysteriously, off-screen,
in the dead of night. Finally, all three films, from the '60s to the '80s
mark a certain kind of moral, or rather amoral mood. Their heroes, whether
played by David Hemmings (Blow Up), Gene Hackman (The Conversation)
or John Travolta (Blow Out), tend to have pretty soft, flabby,
moral senses to begin with – they're cool, indifferent, cruising, sometimes
repressing very effectively some past crisis or trauma. And although fate
spurs all three into some daring action, they eventually take the blows
of the world as some kind of sad, tragic or just matter-of-fact confirmation
that no ordinary person can effect or change anything in this dirty world
– so you may as well sink back into sloth, and keep drifting off to the
big sleep.
Adrian Martin
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