Blow Up, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (1966)
‘Everything we read, feel, think, see, manifest itself in images at a given moment and from those images stories are born.’ M. Antonioni
Thomas is a fashion photographer who thinks he may have witnessed a murder. He continues to enlarge the photos he took of the incident and reveals a gunman standing in the bushes, and then a body. The tension mounts as Thomas then wrestles with a couple of young models, attends a Yardbirds concert, and finally ends up in a park where he tosses an imaginary tennis ball back to the court before disappearing in a field of green. Welcome to London in the mid sixties.
Blow Up is a film that works on two distinct levels. One is the nutty mod world that helped Michael Myers shape the mythology of Austin Powers. The other is a profound meditation on everything that’s interesting by one of the world’s greatest filmmakers at the top of his form. The deeper you look, the deeper it gets. Unlike the photograph within the moving photographs, the film does reveal its meaning.
‘The master imposes a vision that significantly alters the vision of others – especially of other artists. He shapes a language for others to use. He isolates issues, identifies subjects, and creates a realm of consciousness that others may explore and develop. He overturns expectation, and offers a new emotion. A master redefines the world for us.’ Hilton Kramer, NY Times, 1976
Gene Youngblood wrote in Expanded Cinema (1969) that all art is experimental or it isn’t art. Antonioni is attempting to get us to follow the images in Blow Up rather than the plot or character or dialogue. Everything is open to translation. Did a murder take place? Does the propeller or broken guitar or paintings have any value? Do we see only what we want to see? Has the real world finally been vanquished by the pretend one? The only time Thomas is in control of the illusions that surround him is when he is taking, developing, printing and enlarging the photos - an artist fully in command of his medium.
The obvious message is: create your world or become the victim of a non-world. In the end Thomas learns that he is in control of nothing, that reality and illusion are not his to create; that the natural world of the park and grass will still be here long after his image and presence has disappeared. The payoff for us is the reminder that we need to get beyond the limitations of the image and the word and learn to see for ourselves. That the gaze is a quest for knowledge and as Godard said: "The cinema replaces our gaze with a world in harmony with our desires." Don’t give up your feelings and ideas for the photographic and cinematic representations of those emotions. Be an artist but don’t rely on art and artifice as a substitute for human involvement. Live in your art but don’t sacrifice your life.
‘In Blow Up… I had to decide, what was the color of London – not for others, but for me. I changed the colors of the streets according to the story, not according to the real London.’
Blow Up, like all of Antonioni’s films, and all good filmmakers films, can be paused anywhere and you’ll have a perfectly framed and articulated photograph to hang on your wall. With regard to colour, the black and white world of the photographic imagination competes with reds, yellows, and purples, as the artificial world pervades and infiltrates Thomas’s consciousness. Green underlies the opening credit sequence and the final shot, as the natural world seems to prevail.
Characters, objects, buildings, art forms, actions – all have been carefully selected by Antonioni to fulfill a now familiar sixties equation of alienation, dislocation, out with the old and in with the new, appearance versus reality. Check it out. You'll either recognize and appreciate the artistry, and/or you’ll throw the tape on the ground like the shattered neck of a broken guitar.
