In 1967, the best picture at the Cannes Film Festival went to Michelangelo Antonioni's "Zoom", one of Antonioni's most commercially successful films.
The protagonist of the film is a photographer who is cynical, sensitive and cautious, yet full of confusion and conceit. While out shooting, he accidentally took a set of photos and accidentally recorded a murder. The details of the photos are constantly enlarged, arousing the photographer's desire to find the truth.
At first glance, this is a suspense movie, but it's actually Antonioni's cunning. He uses a playful story to convey his philosophical reflections on life - life is always absurd and unknowable.
The absurd arises from the confrontation between the real human desire and the irrational silence of the world.
The protagonist Thomas is a photographer with enviable social status and wealth. He can photograph those beautiful bodies in the studio, drive out to freeze the wonderful moments, and make those young girls his lover. .
This is a near-perfect life by any means, and at this point, Thomas is real. The trajectory of his life is normal and clear.
The accident happened when he went out to shoot, he met a strange couple, and took pictures of their intimacy. After being discovered by the woman, he came to ask for it, even sacrificing his own body, Thomas deceived the woman with a roll of fake photos.
Here we can assume, what kind of photos are worthy of a woman selling her body?
While developing the photos, Thomas discovers a secret. He kept zooming in on the details of the photo until he found the corpse lying in the park.
He went to the park with curiosity to check, but found that there was nothing in the park, everything was like an illusion. No corpses, no deaths, business as usual.
Thomas records a murder with a camera, but soon there is nothing left. He told his friends about it, but his friends didn't take it to heart. Thomas is desperate to know the truth, and the world is silent.
Thomas had no way of knowing what he was recording, maybe a dream, maybe a conspiracy. It doesn't matter, what matters is why you are looking for the truth, what the truth represents, and whether the truth is real or not.
Many times, when we look at life seriously, it seems that life is not serious enough, we hope to get a definite answer, and life feedback is always unknown and incomprehensible. We need the truth, but the truth seems meaningless in the face of reality.
This is a paradox, a real absurdity.
The real absurd often hides under the absurd reality.
How should we define the protagonist Thomas in the film?
We have to go back in time to the sixties first.
There were two very important philosophers in the 1960s. The first was Jean-Paul Sartre. His existentialism made many young people rethink the value and meaning of existence. Existentialism emphasizes the individual's irrational conscious activities, like Thomas's state of mind after discovering that Zhuang accident.
The second is Albert Camus, whose absurdism reveals the essence of life. The essence of the absurd is man's conflict with the world and his submission to the world, which is projected onto individual existence, which is despair and nothingness. When Thomas discovered that the film and photographs had been lost, he was plunged into a deep despair and emptiness.
Is Thomas real? He buys propellers in antique stores just because they look good there. When he chatted with the woman, he said he had a wife and children, but denied it. Seeing this, Thomas' authenticity also began to be doubted. If he was real, how could he not understand his own life.
If Thomas is real, is what he saw and heard real? Without film and photos, is what he saw and heard real? Without evidence, what could prove the truth of what Thomas understood?
This contradictory banter is actually director Antonioni's record of the philosophical trend of the 1960s. All this is not only a true portrayal of Thomas' heart, but also the social characteristics of the entire 1960s: confusion, confusion, and no support.
When we talk about the absurd, we always start from the unexpected in life. In fact, all the unexpected are within reason, and within reason itself is a kind of absurdity.
Absurd and unknowable, perhaps that's what makes life interesting.
In order to find the woman, Thomas entered an underground band's performance. In the passion and excitement, Thomas received the guitar thrown by the band's guitarist. In the looting of the crowd, Thomas clutched the guitar tightly, but immediately threw it away after leaving.
At first, we would think that Thomas was a literary youth, all because he needed to find inspiration in such an environment. When he left, we found out that it was just an accident.
At the end of the film, Thomas, after losing all clues, meets a group of hippies who disguise their real faces and play a fake tennis match on the tennis court. Thomas helped them pick up the tennis ball that had fallen off the court, when it didn't matter whether it was real or not.
Thomas began to accept this absurd world. Real existence and the reality of existence can never be unified. After thinking about this problem, Thomas began to reconcile with this absurd world and accepted the rules of this world.
In Antonioni's films, we can always find some similar themes, that is, the protagonist who endures burnout and mediocrity has no goals and spiritual pursuits other than the sensual life and the pursuit of material wealth. For life, they just endure.
Film historian David Baldwell commented on Antonioni: In Antonioni's films, vacations, parties, and artistic pursuits cannot hide the lack of purpose and emotion of the protagonist.
In "Zoom", this "absence" is everywhere. The photographer Thomas can have many lovers, but he doesn't care about thinking about it. He has enough wealth, but he bought a meaningless propeller. For family and marriage, he only stayed in his imagination, imagining that he had a wife and several children.
There is no complicated storyline, and even the dialogue is simple and boring, and most of the time "silence" becomes the best way to connect the story. It's not the first time Antonioni has used the behavior of characters to analyze philosophical ideas in a film, but in the film "Zoom," such analysis has been particularly successful.
Both Thomas and the Mysterious Woman represent a group of people who were influenced by the philosophical trends of the 1960s. Director Antonioni implanted his own philosophical views on them, allowing the characters to use behaviors and words to explain them, achieving a perfect fit between philosophical views and image expression.
At the end of the movie, Antonioni did not directly give the result of the case, but let everything return to normal, which is the genius of Antonioni.
Not all stories need a definite ending, and with such an absurd expression, the suspense and tension of the film itself are subtly dissolved. The story ends like this, and it is about to begin again. There is no excessive obsession with the truth. When we feel at a loss for this movie, Thomas gently accepts all this and draws an end to this "joke".
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