Blow Out

Last class period we watched Brian De Palmas 1981 movie, Blow Out. It was a very different kind of movie than the earlier ones we have watched this semester. I really enjoyed the movie, although it was fairly predictable. The main Character (played by John Travolta) is out collecting sounds for his movie when he witnesses a fatal car accident where a famous politician is killed. The playback revealed that it was intentional. He begins his journey to figure out what really happened, and why.

The movie pays homage to the Michelangelo Antonioni 1966 movie Blow Up where a man finds that something may have gone wrong when he blows up pictures that he took while at the park one day. Very similar idea, just with pictures rather than sound, it also plays homage to Hitchcock. Many of the filming techniques were borrowed. We as a class are encouraged to borrow techniques from movies in order to make our projects better. Borrowing ideas is very common in Hollywood, and quite frankly there isn’t much that hasn’t been done yet.

Like all of our movies so far, Blow Out is a movie about movie. He is a sandman for a tacky horror film company. In the end the main character integrated his dead girlfriends scream into the movie he was working on. His original mission was to get new more authentic sounds. Back then movie makers relied heavily on sound libraries and sounds were used over and over for different movies. The fact that her scream was used for the actual movie, and loved by the director is very dark and left a bad feeling in my gut.

The film also seemed to criticize America and corruption within the police and media. In the film the police erased the sound footage that he had recorded, and the media convinced Jack keep quiet about the girl ( not the politicians wife) that was in the car with him when he crashed. A lot of the darkest most gruesome scenes in the movie were plagued with patriotism. The serial killer would stab the liberty bell into his victims, the fireworks and jubilee masked the noise from Sally’s (Jacks girlfriend) murder. There was an American Flag in the background of the murder scene.

De Palma used a lot of techniques in his movie. He used the dutch tilt, he played around with rack focus, and he also used split screen to enhance the movie. Overall, I really enjoyed it.