Sadly, some people think BLOWUP and its fans are full of it ...
I've seen this on various threads, on IMDb and elsewhere... I'd love to just chalk it up to modern audiences' "short attention spans" but there have been detractors since the movie came out in 1966 (as there always are).
I guess it's inevitable when you have a movie like BLOWUP, with its ambivalent narrative and its long silent sequences and its odd detachment, that some viewers will invoke that dreadful word "pretentious" and accuse the people who appreciate the movie of being pretentious in their appreciation of its pretentiousness.
The root of pretentious is pretend, isn't it?
And I've certainly seen movies, critically-acclaimed ones, which I indeed found horribly pretentious and found its fans to be so too, watching themselves "enjoy" the questionable artisitic merits of a movie which clearly doesn't warrant it.
And that can make your skin crawl.
So it happens... I just don't think BLOWUP is one that deserves that dismissal, but it's also precisely the kind of picture that's going to get it anyway.
And when you start using terms like "subtext" and "resonance" and "palpable angst" you really tend to lose people already skeptical of this kind of a movie. But the intimacy achieved in BLOWUP, the all-too-rare cinematic sense of being-in-the-moment (even though its lead character is a bit of a jerk, which doesn't matter at all) wouldn't come off if the story was faster, louder, more concrete, more logical, or more linear.
In fact, when you see a film like this, you're reminded of how rarely a picture ever manages to do this, or even really attempt it. And certainly its relative quiet is what makes it such an effective mid-'60s time capsule (and that may be what I love best about it, because there's nothing more mid-'60s than London).
But it's just not the kind of material or tone or approach that everybody is going to like, or even believe others genuinely like without having to lie about it.
That's frustrating, but it's just how it is.
And, to be honest, I'm not sure that such a film would work as well from an era other than the 1960s, historical crossroads that it was. I've seen similar attempts from other decades, and they usually don't have the same resonance even when they're from skilled filmmakers. (Oops. I said "resonance").
But it may be the same thing that also made the '60s such a good decade for horror: you just feel like there's a dead body laying around someplace you accidentally photographed. And a shooter. A shooter somewhere in the misty copse. One you don't consciously notice until later.
And maybe that's the vibe: voyeuristic paranoia -- are you the watcher or are you being watched?
The scenes in the park in BLOWUP always make me think of the scenes in the cemetery at the start of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. One's just slightly less paranoid than the other. But in either case you're convinced that CIA/MI6 spooks are hovering right outside the window, and you might be right.
Or something like that.
And yet they're both strangely soothing somehow... hovering, poignant without obvious reason, as if they're frozen inside a moment, frozen except for the wind, and staring into the face of eternity.
And, I ask you, what's more '60s --- or pretentious --- than that?
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The most profound of sin is tragedy unremembered.