Since the birth of film, European filmmakers have not been satisfied that it only exists as a tool for mass entertainment like American film, but longed to make it a new artistic medium, a tool for conveying artists' feelings, experiences and even ideas. As a result, not only did the French slogan and practice of "art cinema" appear in the first 10 years of cinema, but in the 1920s, there were even more radical ones, starting with French Impressionist cinema. The modernist film movement. But this movement led to the end of modernist cinema by taking the film out of the audience. After that, it was not until the rise of French New Wave films that the art of film was integrated with contemporary social thoughts, and the latter entered the cinema. In the 1960s, in the wave of the film innovation movement that gradually spread all over the world, represented by the creations of a group of modern European film masters, modernist films re-emerged, forming an indelible page in the development of world films. This "Zoom" by the famous Italian director Antonioni is one of the representative works.
The film tells a story that seems to have a bit of a "detective film" color. Young photographer Thomas took a candid photo of a pair of lovers in a park in London and was discovered by the client. The woman in the photo followed, desperately trying to get the photo and the negative back. This aroused suspicions in Thomas. He kept zooming in on the photos until he finally believed he saw a dead body and a man with a gun. Convinced that he had found evidence of a murder, he tried to uncover the murder based on those photos, but in the end found nothing and left himself in a daze.
It should be said that "Zoom" has marked a certain important turning point in his creative path compared to "Adventures", "Night", "Eclipse" and "Red Desert" that made the modernist film master famous. He began to leave Italy for the first time, set the film in England, and used English dialogue; the storytelling of his films began to strengthen somewhat, and he also began to use a lighter and more tense rhythm . However, just as he walked out of Italy in order to find a more general human existence, in this "Zoom", as always, his sense of the mystery of contemporary life runs through him, and his feelings about the incommunicability between people An exploration of the state, and a portrait of the indescribable anxiety of human beings in modern industrial society. And, his themes have become more philosophical.
So, in the film, Thomas's "encounter" and the seemingly confusing "murder" story is just a medium for Antonioni. At the heart of the film is Antonioni's exploration of the relationship between reality and the "image" of it and the hallucinations people create.
Thomas in the film initially, like most people in contemporary society, firmly believed that the technological invention of human beings-photography would enable him to obtain and conquer reality, and to indulge in this world of "images" created by modern technology. Not only did he take pictures of beautiful female models (which allowed him to "conquer" "sex"—the two girls who came to his house and volunteered to be his models seemed to convince him of this), but also constantly Use his camera to record reality. However. When he tries to prove a murder based on the "reality" he filmed, he finally gets lost. He found that the "corpse" he photographed or even saw with his own eyes did not "exist" in "reality". This leads him, or Antonioni, to finally discover the reality and its replicas, and the hallucinations that people have about the latter (which often comes from people's belief that reality can be faithfully reproduced by some technical means firm belief) is elusive. This made Thomas question his own beliefs about whether these "images" could be used to properly represent reality.
It is not difficult to see that what Antonioni expresses here is actually a proposition in quite old Western philosophy, that is, agnosticism about reality. But the difference is that he puts this proposition in the context of modern industrial technology society, and connects it with the technological medium that contemporary human beings increasingly rely on - photography, and the resulting "image", so as to make It is richer in the bewildering charm of contemporary philosophy. What is equally fascinating is that, as an exploration of this metaphysical problem, Antonioni did not use language to let the characters in the film have endless discussions on this, but successfully used the power of film art language, The expression of its theme is achieved with a large number of symbols and metaphors of visual images. There are roughly three types of images related to this in the film: one is the things captured by Thomas's lens, that is, those photos; the other is an "imaginary" image, such as those paintings of Bill and college students in the film. It is a pantomime of playing tennis; the third is what the characters in the film see directly with their eyes. In these "images", the performance of college students plays a structural role. At the beginning of the film, they are pretending to beg people for money on a noisy street. For Thomas at the time, it was nothing more than a funny scene. He quickly got into "roles" and pulled out the money to give them. And at the end of the film, the students act out an imaginary tennis match. For an experience Thomas had just had, this scene had some profound revelation and became an important symbol of the change in Thomas' thinking. To the college students, the imaginary tennis was certainly "real," just as some of the images in the photographs that served as evidence were probably just a fantasy to Thomas. So Thomas finally came to a realization. He no longer tried to distinguish the boundary between reality and fantasy, but joined the game at the call of the students - he followed the students' gestures, imagining the tennis being played out of bounds, running over to put the imaginary The "ball" was picked up and thrown back to the students. But just as the film attempts to show the ambiguity of the line between imagination and reality, for the film's director Antonioni, this symbolic scene does not imply some kind of definite conclusion. We can see that Thomas didn't put his camera down when he picked up the imaginary ball. In this regard, we may say that for him at this time, the boundary between reality and its replicas, as well as people's fantasies, is rather non-existent. In this regard, the film makes an excellent visual interpretation at the end: Antonioni here first puts those The large photo is compared to a painting by Thomas' friend Bill. Those emulsion grains on the enlarged photo look comparable to the stains of the canvas. This blurs the line between "objective" photography and "subjective" painting. And in the final frame of the film, Antonioni goes a step further by making Thomas himself appear as blurred as the grains of those photographs, thus establishing an interesting analogy between the real and the artificial reproduction. .
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