John Travolta is Jack, a sound technician who rescues a girl from a car that crushes into a river after a blow out. The man who drove the car died and he happened to be next candidate for president. This is the beginning of Jack’s involvement into the mystery behind the actual fact. When Jack records the assassination of a presidential candidate, everyone asks him to leave his conspiracy to himself. Everyone else would like to believe it was just “a freak accident” so the nation can quickly heal again. Inspired by the Italian classic ” Blow up” , Blow out is one of Palma’s best films. The skillful study in perception comes from Antoinioni’s Blow Up though unlike Antonioni, Palma doesn’t question reality itself but ,instead , its fragmented political representation.
Jack is man whose talents backfire. Once he worked for police department , but that ended after a horrible accident. He is attracted towards Sally (Nancy Allen) because she lives so easily in the corrupt world. He thinks he can use technology to solve the matter , but he uses them as a shield. Travolta and Nancy Allen both did good job in depicting their roles. The first scene of this film makes reference to Hitchcock’s Psycho. De Palma famously contradicted Godard’s theory “Photography is truth. And cinema is truth 24-frames-a-second” when he said “The camera lies all the time; lies 24-times-per-second”. In Blow Out ,he demonstrates how sound and image are assembled into an elaborately conceived deception.
De Palma challengers viewers to question their senses and consider the process of filmmaking ,how through a few simple cuts ,video and audio are shaped into narrative or propaganda. Blow Out has kept its impact as a thriller mystery with its political overtones as it mixes crime with the lives of influential people that might give viewers a point of reference between the movie and actual historical facts.
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