Point Blank

John Boorman's Point Blank (1967) has long been recognised as one of the seminal films of the 1960s, with its revisionary mix of genres, including neo-noir, New Wave and spaghetti western, its lasting influence can be traced through the decades in films like Reservoir Dogs (1992), Heat (1995) and Memento (2000). Eric G. Wilson's compelling study of the film examines its significance for New Hollywood cinema. He argues that Boorman revises traditional Hollywood crime films by probing a second connotation of 'point blank'. On the one hand, the film is a neo-noir that aptly depicts close range violence, but it also points towards blankness, a nothingness that is the consequence of corporate America unchecked, where humans are reduced to commodities and stripped of agency and playfulness. Wilson goes on to reimagine the film's experimental style as a representation of and possible remedy for trauma. Examining Boorman's formal innovations, including his favouring of gesture over language and blurring of boundaries between dream and reality, Wilson also positions the film, as a grimly comical exploration of toxic masculinity and gender fluidity. Wilson's close reading of Point Blank reveals it to be a film that innovatively inflects its own generation and speaks powerfully to our own, arguing that it is this amplitude, which encompasses the many major films it has influenced, that qualifies the film as a classic.