Replies to post #468623 on NorthWest Biotherapeutics Inc (NWBO)

[biosectinvestor]

Has anyone ever seen the vintage era film "Blow-up"?

This battle with shorts is intentionally a bit like the movie. I have not seen it in many, many years. Decades. But in short: A photographer does a shoot in the park and takes various photos. They are innocuous, but at some point he puts different things together, and starts blowing up the photo because he sees something behind the photos. It appears to be a crime. A murder. He goes to the park and finds a body. He tries to tell people about it, but I do not recall why, somehow things do not go as planned, and in the end, when he returns later, the body is gone. So he further blows up the photos to establish the truth, and show that there was a murder, but the more and more he blows them up, the less and less clear reality becomes, even though it's photography and in theory it has captured reality.

The shorts like to take "data" and "regulation" and text of things said by a company or a researcher and blow them up until they have little connection to reality. It's an intentional manufacturing of ambiguity, whereas in the movie, it was inadvertent. The desire was to get more reality from the photos, but the end result was less reality. It's one of those films you'd see in any film class. But it's of a certain era.

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4478-blow-up-in-the-details

We therefore perhaps need to take literally Antonioni’s remark, made to Roger Ebert in 1969, that Blow-Up was “not about a murder but about a photographer.” All his previous features had charted a transition or crisis in the central characters’ lives, and all of them, apart from I vinti and Il grido, had centered on women or on couples. Blow-Up also charts a crisis, but its central character is now a solo young man, on-screen for nearly the whole film, whose confident and bullying relation to the world begins to crumble when he realizes that his camera has recorded something disturbing of which he was unaware. The film is thus not only about a photographer but also about photography, both as a profession and as a technology. Antonioni became closely involved with the London photography scene as he researched and filmed Blow-Up. He sent a questionnaire to a number of professional photographers, to learn how they viewed their work but also to find out about their lifestyles. He shot the studio interiors in John Cowan’s actual studio, slightly modified for the film, and David Bailey’s boyish good looks and dynamic way of photographing fashion models are echoed in the character played by David Hemmings.
The film’s central idea about the camera’s ability to record something of which its human operator is unaware was already familiar from modernist writings on photography. In 1927, Siegfried Kracauer wrote, “For the first time, the inert world presents itself in its independence from human beings,” and in 1931, Walter Benjamin spoke of photography’s “optical unconscious.” But Blow-Up is strikingly original because it puts the two technologies of still photography and the cinema, and the formats of black and white and color, into dialogue with one another. As the photographer arranges the enlargements on his studio wall, the movie camera follows the movement of his eyes from one to another, “animating” the separate black-and-white images into a narrative sequence, like a film storyboard. This is followed by a series of shots of those same enlargements in which they fill the whole frame, accompanied by the sound of the wind we heard previously in the park, in effect creating out of the still images a new black-and-white film that reworks the color sequence we saw earlier and assigns a new meaning to it. In the play between the photographs and the color film that contains them, the black-and-white images carry associations of documentary, news, social realism—in short, “the real”—whereas color is associated with the bright world of fashion-magazine photography, “the unreal” of advertising, glamour, the idealized and eroticized female body, consumer culture. Yet at the same time, the film allows us to question that dualism and those relative associations: the photographer’s arrangement of the black-and-white prints is a work of interpretation, involving speculation and imagination, performed from within a colored reality.
The creation in the middle of Blow-Up of a film sequence out of still photographs echoes Chris Marker’s film La Jetée (1963), whose story is constructed out of black-and-white stills with a voice-over narration. There is also an allusion to the way the various amateur films and photographs recording John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 had been blown up, slowed down, and connected in the official investigations of the Warren Commission (1963–64). Blow-Up was responding to these contemporary explorations of the relation between photography, film, and memory and of the reliability or otherwise of photographic evidence. While it was in production, Vanessa Redgrave and her then husband, director Tony Richardson, helped finance Emile de Antonio’s film Rush to Judgment (1967), a critique of the Warren Commission’s conclusions.
Just as some of the enlarged film frames of the Kennedy assassination yielded ambiguous and indeterminate images, so does the final enlargement made by Antonioni’s photographer. It is this lone image that remains, found wedged between two cabinets, after his studio is ransacked. In the context of the other photographs in the series, it shows the enlarged head and torso of the corpse, but seen out of that context it can look, as Bill’s partner, Patricia (Sarah Miles), says, “like one of Bill’s paintings,” an abstract image composed of dots and blotches. Antonioni himself had begun painting in the early sixties a series of small semiabstract watercolors on soaked paper called Le montagne incantate (The Enchanted Mountains), and from the end of the seventies he would photograph and blow them up to larger, more indistinct images of twelve by twenty-four inches or twenty-four by sixty inches.
Interviewed about Blow-Up by Alberto Moravia in 1967, Antonioni said, “The story is important to me, of course, but more important are the images.” Elsewhere, he wrote that 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.” These remarks draw attention to an important aspect of the film, but they need not be taken as the last word. Blow-Up is indeed about photographic images and the elusiveness of the real, but it is also an exhilarating journey through the London scene of the midsixties—its youth culture, its fashions, its young professionals—and a mystery story that draws us in but offers no solution.