Nashville Noir: Up and Out
Antonioni vs. De Palma: let the smackdown commence! Tonight's awesome double feature at the Belcourt starts at 7 p.m. with Michelangelo Antonioni's enigmatic 1966 whodunit Blow-up and continues at 9:10 with Brian De Palma's 1981 conspiracy thriller Blow Out (introduced by Rage/Tennessean critic Jason Shawhan). In some ways the movies are mirror images: an artist—David Hemmings' mod photographer in the former, John Travolta's sound man in the latter—uncovers what may be a murder and uses his chosen medium to find the truth. And in both, the slipperiness of reality evades the camera, even when the footage appears to be a Zapruder-like smoking gun.
No Nashville theater or museum has ever screened artist Christian Marclay's 1998 experimental video Up and Out, which tests the dominance of image or sound by running Antonioni's visuals over the soundtrack to De Palma's movie. But anyone with a small portable DVD player and a headset could discreetly try the experiment on his own—even with the opposite mix of image and soundtrack.
If anyone gives it a go, please report back. In the meantime, here's a cool video of Marclay demonstrating his proto-mash-up methods on objects such as sectioned vinyl LPs reconnected to form new sounds.
Comments
Wow! Christian Marclay is one of my heroes... I've gotta try Up and Out immediately!
I'm gonna do my best to make the double feature tonight after a matinee of BE KIND REWIND. I've seen the Antonioni but not the DePalma... hopefully Jason Shawhan will have his own intro music (wrestler style) as he did for KISS ME DEADLY.
Posted 02/25/2008 at 04:03:20 PMYou've never seen Blow Out? Man alive, do I envy you seeing that for the first time. That's one of my favorite movies. I hope I'll get to see the intro tonight, but I've seen it several times on the big screen. (I'm still apologizing to people for the time the Frist projected a pan-and-scan DVD.) I saw it opening day 1981 with my high-school buds Wess Daniels, Greg Bailey and Mike Vermillion at the Hickory Hollow Mall cinema, then three or four times a few weeks later when it opened at the old Cinema Twin in Murfreesboro.
So how was Be Kind Rewind?
Posted 02/25/2008 at 05:37:18 PMPlease, if somebody tapes the Blow Out intro tonight, send me a copy. My kids will just not go to sleep. And since a little song they sing about their mommy contains the line, "She loves Hitchcock but she hates De Palma," they're not likely to be swayed.
Posted 02/25/2008 at 09:05:19 PMWow! Two great films, and great in such completely different ways, yet a perfect example of how one film can inspire an idea in the mind of another filmmaker and produce such interesting results. Jason's intro almost did justice to how morally brutal BLOW OUT is... Truly the stuff of Noir.
Hm... video documentation of Nashville film intros... needs to happen given this day and age.
BE KIND REWIND was all sorts of things. Gondry is one of my personal favorite artists, and his latest is an uneven but incredibly inspired movie. It might benefit from a new edit. Come for the Sweding-- practically every movie that the characters remake has been teased in the trailers-- and stay for the different movie that the trailers don't even hint at. As a celebration of community and grass roots art in the death-of-VHS era, it nearly moved me to tears.
Posted 02/25/2008 at 11:55:53 PMMorally brutal, indeed. There's a whole subgenre of horror/suspense movies about the ethical hazards and corrupting effects of moviemaking: Cannibal Holocaust, Fulci's The Cat in the Brain, Wes Craven's New Nightmare, etc. But none of those leave me as crumpled as the ending of Blow Out. The first time I saw it, I think I sat there when it was over looking like Travolta on the poster.
Did you like one better than the other? And why is Marclay your hero? The guy sounds fascinating.
Posted 02/27/2008 at 11:05:05 PM