The Film Features of antonioni's Magnification

Antonioni is very skilled in the expression of modern life elements, concise and carefree camera language and enlarged narrative full of suspense.

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Director: antonioni

Starring: David Hemings and vanessa redgrave.

Introduction:

The main plot of this film based on a short story is like a simple detective story. Photographer Thomas is a cynical young man. One day, he secretly took a series of photos of couples who looked very loving in a park. This woman named Jane almost went crazy when she found out, and even went all out to get the negatives of these photos as if they would reveal something. Thomas suspects that the photo has been enlarged. In the smallest detail, he believes that he has found a murder case, and Jane is the key figure in this mysterious murder case. The rest of the film is all kinds of actions taken by Thomas to prove his ideas. But his investigation and evidence collection is futile, and all the evidence can't prove anything clearly, as if it were just an illusion and provocation.

The film seems to be discussing a series of philosophical and psychological issues, the essence of subjective reality and objective reality, and the relationship between social reality and developing technical level. In the 1960s when modern industry was doubted, these topics were the most important social and philosophical topics. The decadent life of young people in modern city (London) provides a good realistic foundation and ideal background for his story.

One of the main passages in the film is that Jane first entered Thomas' studio, when she tried to seduce the photographer in order to get those negatives. This passage shows the director's consistent style. The plot of the play develops slowly and leisurely, and the minimalist dialogue and long silence create a suffocating atmosphere. The bright and contrasting colors in the photography studio seem to be magically softened and well controlled, thus giving the scene a realistic tone that is almost black and white. Only a few directors, like antonioni, can reveal the potential meaning and most hidden meaning through composition and visual structure. As he has shown in Adventure, Night, Eclipse and Red Desert before, magnification has successfully shaped the characters of the two protagonists with a small amount of dialogue, and hinted at the sexual conflict between them.

In this film, the external world plays an important role, which is the driving force for the change, introspection and introspection of the characters' inner world. Just as the photo that caused the incident in the film is such a material factor, at the end of the film, a group of hippies are playing a nonexistent tennis ball on the tennis court, but there is a crash in the voiceover. Thomas's action of "picking up" and "throwing back" tennis represents that photographers who have been looking at the world with "material eyes" finally agree with "spiritual eyes". Emphasizing the material environment of the characters' lives has always been the characteristic of antonioni's works, and well-designed lens composition and color application have a very accurate role in revealing the theme of the film. Every shot in the film is a well-constructed sentence with infinite meaning.

The central theme of Magnification is the problem between creative spontaneity and artistic truth, and the role of artists in the society with great development of science and technology. This kind of thinking about the times and society obviously does not belong to antonioni's consistent theme of revealing the personal spiritual world of modern society, but the film still embodies many characteristics of his works in style and becomes another masterpiece of his.

Comments:

Magnification is actually a work that antonioni is facing a turning point in his creation. Compared with the previous Eclipse and Adventure, the director has greatly weakened his consistent exploration of the alienation theme that people can't communicate with each other, and portrayed the lonely state that is not in the middle class. In the use of images and lenses, he has also lost his usual empty lens and long lens, replaced by Ann's concern for the whole human society and culture in the 1960 s, and his vision is light. However, this film has become Ann's only commercially successful work. If we put aside the factors of English dialogue, it is not difficult to find a true portrayal of the whole era in the film.

Realism and absurdity

Like any modern Ann film, it is a confusing experience to see it enlarged. In the first 27 minutes of the film, there was never a clear narrative main line, and trivial details on the street and in the studio replaced the plot development. Then the sudden park incident, as the beginning of a plot similar to a detective film, pushed Thomas to find the truth. Antonioni spent 15 minutes describing the details of Thomas's enlarged photo. Finally, this plot that seems to be the main line of the film disappeared with the body. Starting with chaos and ending with another chaos, antonioni easily subverts the traditional film plot structure with broken stories and accumulated details. At the same time, antonioni added absurd elements rarely seen in the past to his films. The propeller that Thomas bought in the antique shop, the rock music performance in the deep corner and the silent tennis match at the end of the film make the film transcend the appearance of life and reconstruct the reality in an abstract form. This kind of virtual reality is different from Ferini's psychological script, but more like the essence of the absurd drama, which captures and presents the absurdity hidden in reality in the form of absurdity.

About the theme

As far as the theme of the film is concerned, it is not so much a philosophical proposition of realistic agnosticism as another pessimistic inquiry into modern civilization after An Ji's trilogy and The Red Desert. The film is set in London in the 1960s. In order to get first-hand information, Thomas did not hesitate to dive into the slums. In his own studio, he seems to be an arrogant conductor, entangled by many beautiful women, but unable to get away. Antonioni patiently recorded Thomas' words and deeds and quietly revealed a typical emptiness. As a photographer, Thomas tried to conquer everything with modern technology, claiming that what he was pursuing was real, and he did achieve some success, including sex and career. However, in the process of enlarging the image again and again, Thomas gradually lost himself in the illusory world he created. When he realized that he couldn't change the world, the final result was that he picked up the unwarranted tennis ball and accepted the change of the world. In addition, with the vagrant students, crazy and fierce rock music, models who became famous at any cost and drug-addicted publishers always appearing in the film, antonioni extracted many aspects of the 1960s and criticized all kinds of superficial fanaticism, the decline of faith and people's sense of powerlessness in it.

natural environment

Antonioni's films often play a leading role in the objective material environment. Hippie students wandering under high-rise buildings at first are typical images of modern cities under a lens. In the closed studio, Thomas is the god who dominates everything, and there is only command but no communication with the model. The glass facade model that was divided into pieces has become a modern device in Thomas' eyes. The relaxed jazz music released by the phonograph is a void behind fashion. Thomas created an imaginary world in a dark room. The empty park always gives people a cold feeling, where behind my surface is an unknown transaction or a more terrible murder. Rock music performance, as a feature of the times, became a deadpan audience and guitarist in antonioni's eyes. The broken guitars ransacked at the performance site suddenly became the garbage ignored on the street corner, and antonioni looked on coldly as fashion games were blinded by fanaticism.

Magnification and The Corner of zabriskie are the results of antonioni's constant pursuit of artistic style in Britain and the United States after he left Italy. In Eclipse, he has pushed the works of the same theme to the extreme and can't surpass himself. After Red Desert, he tried to create another way to deconstruct modern life. Although his films have always maintained despair of material civilization in the western world, the greater significance of the two films lies in their contribution to modernist films.