Fashion, Voyerism & Deleuze: A Retro-Philosophical Comment
“The historical fact is that cinema was constituted as such by becoming narrative, by presenting a story, and by rejecting its other possible directions. The approximation which follows is that, from that point, the sequences of images and even each image, a single shot, are assimilated to propositions or rather oral utterances […].“
Giles Deleuze
“The story is important to me, of course, but more important are the images. [The photographer] wants to see something more closely. But when he enlarges the object it breaks up and disappears. So there’s a moment when one grasps reality, but the next moment it eludes us. This is roughly the meaning of Blow-Up“.
Michelangelo Antonioni
Who is the protagonist of the image world? Deleuze clarifies that the narrative in the cinema acquires a discourse that is autonomous from the utterance of the Discourse as defined by the Western canon. In this detached version of the Real from reality the protagonist is none other than the movement created by the image.
Without being trapped in an Ethical analysis of the spectacle, we remain forced to think through the commentary on Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow up, the degree of the internal conflict of the virtual protagonists.
The question of cinematic experience does not seem to depend on the freedom of the subject. In today’s terms, this film would be strongly condemned as an expression of the Male and Patriarchal gaze. Undoubtedly, such a judgment would be based on the fact that, technically speaking, Antonioni’s narrative seems at first sight to be devoted to the anxiety of how the female body will be subjected to the lens of the Dynastic Photographer.
But reading this film from the point of view of Deleuze’s analysis we reach a deeper level. Where identities, social roles and psychological relationships are dissolved in the game of appearance and disappearance.
Fashion, photography and modeling are used to call the apparent Lord into the trap of his non-existent authority.
Cinema can cancel the certainties of even its own images. The Protagonist ceases to be a given as the film progresses. The voyeur becomes an engine of desire that pushes the entire narrative into an indeterminacy.
Without making it noticeable in an intense and pompous way, the photographer is now a victim and not a perpetrator.
The scenes he watches are not only out of his control but are constantly deceiving him. He is unable to understand whether he is involved in a murder story, whether he is a witness or potentially an accomplice to a crime.
Antonioni masterfully creates an institutional Situationist guide to the seduction of virtual sovereignty from the images that make it up. A visual sabotage that precisely because it is not interested in proclaiming a meaning becomes a cinematic meaning.
Who is the protagonist? This question does not concern Antonioni and that is why he is a Deleuzean. This question concerns the Lacanian psychoanalysis of the Lord.
We would dare to say that Antonioni uses more of a clear anti-psychoanalytic approach.
Desire has no name, it is beyond classification and is not what it seems to say because it says absolutely nothing but to deceive.
After all, isn’t this what the viewer-judge hates, the ideologue viewer, the psychiatrist and patient viewer? He hates the event’s escape from its interpretive dictatorship.
This uninterrupted production of escapism is the magic of cinema. It invites you to take part in a representation whose flow seems bounded so that it can be communicatively compatible with all the social principles of individuation.
But ultimately, in the final analysis this flow is not about the viewer or his socially shaped individuality. It’s about the joy of deceiving the Sight. The image that happens is not looked at and does not look because its narrative space is not analyzed by the rules of Phenomenology.
Antonioni gives us a work that admits his complete inability to define a subject and a protagonist. Society, sexuality and relations of dominance have turned to dust. Blow up trains us in the writing of disaster as Blanchot used to say. A writing that goes out but always stays on in the Radical Fantasy.
That’s why the style, the music, the tennis, the beautiful girls, the comic-tragic photographer, the studio… all are signs of an inhuman game of the joy of the image that has performed its seduction only to happen and disappear.
Burroughs used to say the point is to destroy the studio of reality but Antonioni is the first to dissolve the boundaries of the studio with the outside reality. Who is the protagonist? What is a studio? Where is the studio? Who controls the image when the boundaries are lost and erased?
Let’s rewatch the Blow up!
