Vol. 37 No. 2 1970 - page 279

PARTISAN REVIEW
279
immediate past) of the new American film to its European counter–
part. I'm aware that in saying this my thought may seem to be running
along well-worn and mostly abandoned routes - what have terms like
superior and inferior to do with action, gesture, testimony; how do you
judge what isn't meant to be judged but taken as life?
We can judge whether it is possible to create such things. To try
to appropriate the truths of the world through an exclusive elan about
what is palpably happening in society, to try to make "where it's at"
the basis of your vision, is to trust that the world will yield up its
pleasures and secrets in the face of sincerity, or what I would like to
call
mere
sincerity. The tradition of art has never relied on that, which
is why the search for forms has always had to go on. Within that
tradition still, filmmakers like Antonioni, Fellini, Godard, Truffaut,
Bergman, Resnais, Bresson work at the renewed obligation to take
account of the present, to be accurate with the insistent materials of the
here and now. They may even want strenuously to change things, but
they do not work by ceding their vision to the public atmosphere and
they do not offer us portraits of how it is.
That they are widely thought to tI?' to do this is the basis for
complaints against their ostensible failures, the extreme outcry in Amer–
ican film circles against
Blow-Up,
even among many of Antonioni's erst–
while supporters, being a particularly instructive case in point. In
Blow–
Up
Antonioni was not attempting a portrait of London, swinging or
otherwise, so that the accusation "that's not what it's like" was especially
obtuse.
If
anything, Antonioni's stranger's eye on London provided
him
with the perspective of
strategic na"ivete,
the freedom from any com–
placent conviction of knowledge, the antisophistication (and Antonioni,
like any artist, is in need of unsophistication on the level of the human
and social; you create in order to find out, not to exemplify what you
think you know) that he needed to be able to set about his real business.
This was precisely to deal with the relationship between what we
think the world is like - ideas derived mainly from what others have
thought it is like and, today, from
publicized
ideas about it - and what
the imagination together with all perceptive powers are compelled to
decide.
Blow-Up
is "about" things society, as society, cannot know in
regard to itself: the fact of life caught between knowledge and radical
doubt, passion and enervation, reality and illusion. Its subject isn't
London or sexual behavior or
ennui
among the chic, but the way the
imagination attends to such things: all of Antonioni's films are artifacts
of, and new forms of perception about, our present dilemmas and con–
tradictions, not representations of them.
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