"Obviously rather than Kubrick's doomsday, nor Bergman's focus on salvation, Antonioni's modern Western world is filled with weary and poignant losers, threatened by nameless violence and death. Between the naked and listless flirtation and the omnipresent, inescapable loneliness, there is a sense of a life of helplessness in the heart of a traffic jam."
The standard-bearer of neo-modernist films, the wandering Bohemian poet, the rational critic of Western civilization... Antonioni's world is undoubtedly a closed present time and space isolated from yesterday and lost of tomorrow, a world that has lost the possibility of salvation. Cities and people have always been recurring motifs in Antonioni's video works. Modern cities are reinforced concrete monsters. People are like passers-by and wanderers. In his words - "a bloody desert covered with human bones. Modern cities are monuments of human civilization, but this monument may Live longer than humans."
Although the cityscape in "Zoom" is a London street, this empty and icy neighborhood can also be a corner of any nameless metropolis, full of nameless violence, wanton aggression, and apocalyptic crowds. A person who lives in a small, boring, confined space, longs to abandon it all, go to a distant place or completely change his life, but has never been able to change the status quo (even lost the sincere desire to change the status quo). In the video presentation, the story is also transformed into a "situation" rather than a design of dramatic conflict, showing an extremely accidental and seemingly fatal life (the so-called "plotless film"). No matter how hard you struggle, you can't escape the shackles of destiny itself. "Everything I encounter is my life." The ending that awaits modern people is always failure, death and the complete surrender of the soul. In the rich and rich society of modern civilization In material life, the heart is empty like a desert, and the whole film does not construct any solution, nor does it have an ending in the classic sense.
Regarding the unidentifiable reality of the real, this "agnosticism" is the motif that "Zoom" will explore - "It is not that the real does not exist, but that it is far beyond the limited cognitive ability of human beings." In the traditional sense As a master with a high degree of image author attitude, Antonioni takes visual presentation as the first criterion, upholds a highly media reflexive attitude, and uses the image itself to explore a kind of subjective deception about visual images. How subjective expectations are obscured and confuse the truth and objectivity of human observation. "The achievement of a true artist lies not in the fresh ideas and philosophies he can contribute, but in the way in which he can use the medium and in which way his subject can be conveyed in a new and unique medium." Antonio At the beginning of the film, Ni showed a deceptive visual appearance: the subtitles are based on the green lawn where the "murder" took place (a seemingly peaceful and leisure place that contains hidden violence), but the subtitles are hollowed out. The squiggly characters, in the hollowed-out gap is a dancing person. This undoubtedly means a hint and a choice. In the later development of the film, there is also a trend of organic images, and the viewer must constantly overthrow the cognition of the intuitive appearance as the plot develops. Photographer Thomas’ home and the outside world also take on a black-and-white/color opposition, and color is given a fraudulent disguise: the calm green lawn hides the naked violence, while under the photographer’s enlarged black-and-white photos, A brutal and bloody murder is revealed.
"Modernist art is first and foremost about the medium itself, a self-referential art. It is about the language of film, but also anti-language; it is narrative and anti-narrative." It is art under the action of the peeping mechanism, and for Thomas, the protagonist of "Zoom", the possession of the appearance is the only connection with reality (after encountering the cold reception of the old antique shop, he used the act of photographing his storefront, which is also meaningless. A kind of possessive revenge), peeping and aggression do not constitute a threat in his eyes (for example, in the face of a woman who is accidentally photographed, he uses his identity as a photographer to firmly believe that his candid photography is correct), on the contrary, he is peeping and possessing. Appearance as his means of infringing others and exercising power. But what his peeping wants to show is not the "recovery of the material world", but a way of covering and shattering reality. When the appearance he obtained violates the reality beyond the meaning of appearance, the reality that is far from beautiful will break through the door. , destroying the inner affirmation of the self. The corpse found by chance in the photo caused Thomas's huge inner squeeze, and he was "reversed from the voyeur to the peeped, from the aggressor to the violated object". Unable to control the unknown situation, and thus fall into a huge unknown panic. Thomas assigns the fantasy designation of "murder" to this panic, establishing his "known" in the enlarged combination of photos, but the absolute certainty of subjective expectations brought by the means of images is a nihilistic grasp. Fantasy - Thomas could never point to the truth. This is undoubtedly a frustrated experience in the individual's life, a process of being forced to surrender by a huge panic of the unknown.
The court pantomime at the end of the credits is where Antonioni takes "agnosticism" to the extreme. Thomas's pursuit of the truth was fruitless, and he voluntarily gave up his judgment about the truth in the great confusion and distress. A young man wearing a mask and carnival starts a non-existent tennis match, and Thomas also participates in this "show" interactively, completely identifying fiction as real. In the end, Thomas disappeared in the gradually zoomed-out big overhead shot, and the solid ending subtitle appeared. Since then, there is no need for the viewer to distinguish between appearance and reality - the truth is always beyond people's cognition, no matter how hard you struggle, it is just Fictional experiential fantasy, unknowable and unseemly.
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