Antonioni: "Blow-Up" and the criticism of the time

Blow Up. What a beautiful photography when there was no Photoshop and photo editing to disguise reality! The sequences of enlargements (blow-ups, in fact) that lead the protagonist to trace the secret of a casual but suspicious shot are truly memorable. To then discover that reality escapes its mechanical reproduction, well before Photoshop and memes. In his evanescent absence, Hemmings is perfect. An ectoplasm traveling in a Rolls-Royce in Fellini's London. Touch à l'Antonioni in the prop scene.

Alberto Moravia interviews Antonioni

Albert Moravia: Dear Antonioni, you shot in England, with an English story, English actors, English settings. After the red desert, a rather romantic and psychologizing film in which, albeit in your own way, you told the typically Italian story of a marriage crisis, this clear, clear, precise, well articulated, well told, elegant and whimsical film made me think to a return to the inspiration that made you shoot one of your best films years ago, I mean The vanquished and especially the English episode of that film, in which you recounted a real event: the crime of a boy who kills a poor woman matured out of vanity and mythomania. Also in blow-up, as in that episode, there is a crime. On the other hand so in Blow-Up as in the episode of The vanquished there is the same way of narrating: distant, absolutely objective, in a certain way a little on this side of your expressive possibilities, so as to allow complete domination of the material. Also in Blow-Up as in the episode of The vanquished the protagonist was a man. By the way, did you know that male characters do you better than female ones?

Michelangelo Antonioni: It's the first time I've heard that. They usually say the opposite.

Moravia: Of course, you have been able to create memorable female characters. But while it would seem that these characters somehow escape you, that is, they are mysterious not only to the viewer but also to yourself, the male characters seem more dominated and therefore more characterized and delimited. In short, they are more “characters” than female characters. But let's go, let's go back to Blow Up. So you recognize a relationship between the English episode of The vanquished e blow-up?

Antonioni: I would say no. It may well be that you as a critic and viewer are right; but I do not see this relationship. I've never thought about it. Blow-Up is very different from the episode of The losers. The meaning is also different.

Moravia: I didn't expect a different answer. An artist is never fully aware of the near and distant origins of his art. But let's go back to Blow Up. If you allow me, I will tell the story.

Antonioni: For me the story is important, of course; but what matters most are the images.

Moravia: So the story is as follows: Thomas is a fashionable young photographer, indeed the most fashionable photographer of current London, the Swinging London, the unleashed, vibrant, active London of these years. Thomas is one of those photographers who are not satisfied with shooting extraordinary things, i.e. worthy of interest for some particular reason, but spy on the most common reality a bit like a voyeur spying on a room through a keyhole, with the same pathological curiosity, the same hope of catching someone or something in a moment of complete intimacy. In life, Thomas is a typical representative of the English youth of these years: active and distracted, frenetic and indifferent, revolted and passive, enemy of feelings and basically sentimental, resolute in rejecting any ideological commitment and at the same time the unaware bearer of a precise ideology, that precisely the rejection of ideologies. Sexually, Thomas could be described as a promiscuous Puritan; that is, someone who refuses sex not by repressing it but by abusing it, without however giving us importance. One of those days while looking for unpublished photographs for one of his albums, Thomas happens to be in a park, sees a couple, follows them, takes them several times. It is a young woman and an elderly man; the woman drags the reluctant man towards a corner of the park, evidently to withdraw with him. Then the woman sees Thomas, runs after him, violently demands that he give her the roll of paper. Thomas refuses, goes home, the girl joins him, asks him again for the roll, Thomas ends up making love with the girl and then gives her the roll, but not the one of the photographs taken in the park, any other . As soon as he is alone, Thomas develops the photographs, he is immediately struck by the strange way in which the girl drags the man and then looks in front of her. Thomas develops other photographs, enlarges some details and then, among the foliage, above a fence, a hand armed with a revolver appears. The killer can also be seen in another photograph. Finally, in a third appears the head of the elderly man, lying dead on the ground at the foot of a tree. So it wasn't a matter of a love encounter but of a criminal ambush, so the woman had dragged her partner into the park to have her accomplice kill him. Thomas is shocked by this discovery; he gets into the car, runs to the park and in fact, under the bush, finds the dead man who, without seeing it or knowing it, he had photographed. Thomas runs home again, new surprise: in his absence someone has entered, has thrown everything in the air, has taken away all the photographs of the crime. Thomas then goes in search of the woman; but she too has vanished; he thinks he sees her on the street, he chases her but then loses her. Thomas goes to a friends' house, finds his partner Ron there, tries to make him understand what happened, he fails: Ron is drugged, dazed, irresponsible. Thomas falls asleep on a bed, wakes up at dawn, goes out, takes the car and goes back to the park. But this time the dead man has also disappeared, like the photographs, like the girl. At that moment a group of masked students with their faces painted white burst into the park. There is a tennis court, the students pretend to play a game with no balls and no rackets, just with gestures. Thomas attends this ghostly match and in the end it is understood that he gives up on investigating the crime. Which is as if it never happened in that there is no place for it either in Thomas's life or in Thomas's society.

Gadda's example

This is the story of the film; I wanted to tell it to underline an important aspect. And that is: it is a story, as they say, yellow; but yellow up to a point. You have included everything that usually characterizes such stories: the crime, the mystery about the author of the crime, the search for the criminal, even the beginnings of conflict between the criminal and the inquisitor, anything but the discovery of the culprit and his final punishment. Now all of this could very well be the stuff of, say, a Hitchcock film. But suddenly, your film takes a completely different direction, that is the direction of a crime that goes unpunished, whose culprit is not found, whose mystery is not clarified. Thomas finds nothing; we will never know why the woman had her partner killed or who was her accomplice or who she was herself. We'll never know, but while in a Hitchcock film this ignorance would leave us deeply dissatisfied, in your film it not only doesn't bother us but we like it and it seems coherent and natural to us. Why this? Evidently because the real subject of the film is not the crime, as in thriller films, but something else. Now the same is happening in literature. Crime novels and stories that explain crime have crime as their subject: but crime novels and crime stories that do not explain crime have something else as their subject. In these last narratives, the writer's refusal to explain the crime is equivalent to censorship which, according to psychoanalysis, ensures that the apparent subject of dreams is not the real subject; in other words, the refusal to explain the crime immediately makes the whole story symbolic. In the literature there are at least two well-known examples of this refusal and of this transformation of the story into a symbol. The Mystery of Maria Roget by Edgar Allan Poe, and the Mess by Carlo Emilio Gadda. Both of these writers, after presenting the crime to us, refuse to give us the key. As a rebound we immediately feel that this refusal shifts our attention from the crime to something else, of which the crime is the symbol. What? In Poe's case, the real meaning of the story seems to me to be the very lucid demonstration and illustration of a method of cognitive research; in the case of Gadda, the recovery of the, so to speak, material reality in which the crime is immersed through a stylistic and linguistic operation of extraordinary complexity and adherence. Now even in your film there is a refusal of the naturalistic story, the reference to a second-order meaning. But which? What did you actually mean?

Antonioni: To tell the truth, I couldn't even specify it. While preparing the film, some nights I woke up and thought about it and each time I found a different meaning.

Moravia: Maybe. But the fact is that in the end you made the film. It was you who decided that the protagonist shouldn't find the culprit, he shouldn't see the girl again, he shouldn't resort to the police and in the end he should give up on understanding what had happened to him. You and no one else. So it seems right to ask you why you decided this way and not another; why you made this choice.

Antonioni: I can only say that for me the crime had the function of something strong, very strong, which nevertheless escapes me. And what's more, it really escapes someone, like my photographer, who has even turned attention to reality into a profession.

Moravia: It's kind of the theme of my latest novel which is called precisely Attention. Also in my novel the protagonist is an attention professional, that is a journalist; and even he misses things that nevertheless happen under his nose.

Antonioni: Yes, it's true. The theme of your book resembles that of my film, at least in terms of attention to reality. It was a theme that was in the air, I mean in the air around me.

Moravia: Yes, but in my novel the character was directly implicated in the crime; in yours it is not, he is only the witness. Perhaps it follows from this that your character is lighter, more innocent, more distracted. However, in this idea of ​​the photographer who is caught off guard by reality, there is an implicit criticism of a specific human or social condition. As if you wanted to say: this is how blind, alienated man is. Or: this is how blind and alienated the society this man is a part of is.

Antonioni: Why don't you, for a moment, try to see this blindness and this alienation as virtues, qualities?

Moravia: They could be I'm not saying no; but in the film they are not so.

Antonioni: However I did not want to describe them as something negative.

For something to come

Moravia: This is also true. Let's squeeze then: you told the story of a crime that however remains without explanation and without punishment. At the same time you gave us a description of today's London, the London of the beat revolution. The crime doesn't have much to do with England in 1966; but the fact that the crime remains without explanation and without punishment, yes. In other words, the connection between the crime and Swinging London lies in the way the protagonist behaves. Who, while not at all devoid of moral sensitivity, does not want to understand or deepen or explain or ideologize reality and put the accent above all on the fact of being active, inventive, creative, always unpredictable and always available. Simplifying a lot, we could say that you wanted to show us how in an exceptional circumstance disengagement is born, takes shape, takes on the consistency of an attitude, develops, becomes a true and proper mode of conduct. All this against the backdrop of a new and youthful society undergoing radical change and revolution.

Antonioni: It is a revolution that is taking place at different levels, in different social strata. That of the photographers is the most conspicuous and exemplary case; that's why I chose a photographer as the protagonist. But everyone in England more or less seems to be drawn in the direction of this revolution.

Moravia: What do you think would be the purpose of this revolution? All revolutions have a so-called libertarian start. But what do we want to get rid of in the beat revolution?

Antonioni: Of morals. Maybe of the religious spirit. But you mustn't get me wrong. In my opinion they want to get rid of all the old stuff and make themselves available for something new that they still don't quite know what it will be. They don't want to be caught unprepared. My photographer, for example, refuses to commit himself, yet he is not amoral, an insensitive and I look at him with sympathy; he refuses to commit himself because he wants to keep himself available for something to come, which isn't there yet.

Moravia: It is very true that you look at him with sympathy. I will say more, the character is likeable to viewers because he is likeable first of all to you. And trying to define this sympathy, I would like to say that it is a very curious sympathy: mixed, one might say, with admiring envy or, if you prefer, envious admiration. It feels like you want to be your character, be in the circumstances he's in, act like him. You would like to have his age, his physical appearance, his freedom, his availability. In other words, while creating a typical disengagement character, you also created what was once called a hero. That is, an ideal type, a model.

Antonioni: Yes; but without making him a hero. That is, without anything heroic.

Moravia: He's a hero because you like him, not because he's heroic. On the other hand he is a character, so to speak, autobiographical for another reason: because he is a photographer. That is: one feels that through this man's profession, so close and similar to yours, through the representation of the technical processes of this profession, you wanted to express a critical and doubtful reflection on your own profession, on your own ability to grasp aspects of reality. In short, it would be a film that would occupy in your work the place it does in the work of Federico Fellini Half past eight. Here is a film within a film, i.e. the subject of the film is the difficulty of making a film. In your film there is a photographer seen by a photographer and the subject of the film is the difficulty of seeing. We have come out of the nineteenth century

Antonioni: Jokingly, paraphrasing Hamlet's monologue, one could say for my character: "to see or not to see, that is the question".

Moravia: So you wanted to objectify, in the story of the film, a critical reflection that concerns your own profession, your own means of expression. And in fact everything in the film that has a direct relationship with the profession of the photographer is always first-rate, seen and expressed with dramatic tension, with absolute clarity. I am alluding above all to two sequences, the first in which you describe Thomas in the park filming the mysterious couple; the second in which you show us Thomas at work, in his house, while he develops the photographs, and then scrutinizes them and discovers the crime. And now tell me something else: at a certain point you introduced a sequence, let's say erotic: two girls break into Thomas's house, ask him to photograph them; Thomas ends up undressing them and making love with both of them, on the floor, in the mess of the studio upset by the run-up and the fight. This sequence, according to the conventions of current Italian morality, is very daring. However, the critic must recognize that the scene is completely chaste both because it is shot with great detachment, grace and elegance, and because the two actresses who interpret it are also chaste, both in their nudity and in their attitudes. However, I would like to know why you have introduced this sequence which will no doubt cause you trouble.

Antonioni: I wanted to illustrate a so-called casual eroticism, that is festive, cheerful, carefree, light, extravagant. Sexuality usually has a dark, obsessive face. Here instead I wanted to show it as something of little importance, of little emphasis, which can also be overlooked, if you know what I mean.

Moravia: You explain very well. Again the disengagement. Not only from ideologies and feelings but also from sex. In short, from everything.

Antonioni: It is the way of seeing things that belongs to this century. It took us a long time to get out of the XNUMXth century: about sixty years. But we finally got out.

Moravia: Now tell me one thing: Carlo Ponti told me he is proud to have been the producer of this film because according to him Blow-Up it is one of the very few films shot in complete freedom, without the hesitations and counter-reformist pressures that are typical of today's Italy. Is this true in your opinion? I mean: is it true that the fact that you shot the film outside Italy had so much importance?

Antonioni: In a certain way, yes.

Moravia: And why?

Antonioni: I don't know. The kind of life you live in London is more exciting, at least for me, than the one you live in Italy.

Moravia: In Italy life was exciting, as you say, after the war.

Antonioni: Yes, because there was chaos.

Moravia: In Italy now there is no chaos at all, on the contrary.

Antonioni: There is no chaos in England either. But there is one thing that doesn't exist in Italy.

Moravia: And which?

Antonioni: Mental freedom.

Da L'Espresso, January 22, 1967

Gian Luigi Rondi

A work of thought. A work of poetry. But also, in an elevated and most noble sense, entertainment and then, first and foremost, cinema, new, very pure cinema. Even a difficult film, in any case. To tell you about it, I have to do what one should never do with a work of art, that is, divide it into sections: the story, the meanings and the style with which both have been expressed in images.

At the center of the film is a young photographer by profession. Not an Italian "paparazzo" and not even a photographer of the type that Fellini put as the protagonist of the Sweet life, but a typical exponent of the new English youth, totally disengaged, in search (by instinct, not by intellectual calculation) of a happiness considered as the main purpose of life, a happiness to be achieved by all possible means, some very easy (sex, drugs), others more difficult such as work, for example, and a job sought not only as a means of livelihood, but also (and above all) as a tool to satisfy one's anxieties.

In any case, whether it is easy happiness or difficult happiness, what matters for this young man (and for all young people like him) is that they are concrete happiness, and concrete almost to the point of materialism. Reality is what you see and touch and it is this that satisfies them; and which satisfies all the more that young man, used to stopping it, even fixing it with a camera (his camera) and thus always able to verify it, to demonstrate it to others and to himself; believing it, therefore, with relaxed and almost dreamy immediacy.

This young man, one day, wandering around the streets and gardens as he always does in search of images to snatch from everyday life (and with which, among other things, he intends to make an art book, entirely of photographs), fixes on his film a very short sentimental sequence that has a London park as a backdrop: a girl and a man with graying hair walk on a lawn holding hands, then they embrace and kiss under a tree.

His presence, however, does not go unnoticed for long. The girl sees him, chases him and in an excited, almost frightened voice, demands the negatives of those photos just taken, the other refuses, even quite amused by the fright that little by little he sees drawing on the girl's face. The little incident has a sequel; in fact, while the photographer is returning home, he is joined by the girl who, evidently, has followed him and the scene repeats itself even more vehemently than before. The girl is beautiful, the photographer doesn't see why she shouldn't take advantage of the situation and so, seeing that the other is even willing to give him back the photos, she immediately plays the game. Cheating, though. In fact, when the other leaves, instead of giving her the negatives, she gives her any roll, so she runs to develop the much-contested photos: fairly normal photos, which very calmly seem to portray a normal sentimental scene.

A certain expression on the faces of the two lovers, however, and a strange look that the woman, in a photo, gives behind her back, intrigue the photographer who, to understand where the woman is looking, zooms in (blow up means “enlargement”) some details of the other photos. The discovery is unexpected; It is surprising. Among the foliage of the park someone seems to be glimpsed, a face, a hand; and maybe even a gun in that hand. Were the two therefore observed and spied on? Among the leaves was someone who wanted to kill them or kill one of them? And was the woman, who in the photos seems to be watching attentively, but with an enigmatic expression, there as a victim or as an accomplice in an ambush? In short, had the intervention of the photographer prevented a murder or even a sordid trap?

He hadn't foiled anything. In fact, the photographer, seized by a very violent suspicion, returns to the park late at night and finds the man with graying hair dead under the tree. He knows nothing about the woman, he doesn't know her name, he doesn't know her address, so, suddenly losing his calm indifference towards life (death can produce these shocks even in an unengaged man), here he is rummaging through London in search of the unknown woman. , following a false trail that leads him through those environments beat which, in part, are also his. In that colorful world full of ferments, even negative ones, he meets people who can listen to him, advise him, but it is still a world which, having ended up keeping too much to the evidence of things, in the constant search for those concrete forms of happiness which just a few hours earlier our photographer too was aspiring, he is unable to go in depth and has almost no possibility of listening, of responding, of "communicating"; especially if many of his exponents this concrete and earthly happiness, failing to find it in tangible reality, seek it in the artificial and smoky one of drugs.

The few hours, however, spent in that futile chase and in that frantic and vain search for possible help, allow someone to steal the photographs and negatives from the photographer's studio and to make the mysterious corpse disappear in the park. Without the photos, and without even the concrete proof of that corpse which, if only, would now allow him to turn to the police, the photographer suddenly loses all the ties that kept him united to those solid, earthly realities which up to by then he was leaning. Death, that dead man, had kindled a sense of anguish in his heart, but the crisis comes now, when the evident reality is easily replaceable by other realities, less justifiable, less explainable, not at all clear. It's the end? Is it the principle of a new way of adhering to a different and new evidence of things?

Bewildered, perplexed, doubtful, the photographer now comes across one of those student "carnivals" which, in England, look a bit like our "freshmen's party", with the difference that they explode all year round, without the need for ideas and occasions: apparently meaningless masquerades that allow students to give free rein to their desecrating or prankster, petulant or quarrelsome instincts. These that the photographer comes across, with painted faces, strange costumes, hallucinated make-up, are playing tennis, not seriously, but miming a match played without the ball. The photographer looks at them, studies their gestures, especially follows those hands which, holding invisible rackets, dribble a ball that doesn't exist and when the ball - non-existent and invisible - falls in front of him, he picks it up and shoots it. Well, he's in the game. Perhaps that non-evident reality, which, however, can be ideally embodied, is worth living. Just accept the rules.

Therefore, less pessimism than once upon a time. The crisis of Antonioni's latest character is healthier, in fact, than those of his previous ones. The others took note of the end of feelings and recognized that life, as it is, cannot be lived; this, caught in the heart of his solid adherence to a purely terrestrial reality (similar, in some ways, to the one in which - in different years - the male character participated, satisfied and satisfied, but opaque and closed of the Eclipse), detaches itself from this reality, but accepts another, certainly more profound; the one that, precisely in its change, in its evolution, seems to contain the possibilities of being lived. Antonioni, in short, rejecting the idea of ​​a static, fixed, immobile, always demonstrable reality, welcomes, as a positive datum, that of a dynamic reality, in perpetual movement, a reality that finds its vital energy precisely in dynamism.

Let's not be scared, Antonioni seems to say. The anguish that arose in us when some element out of the ordinary came to deny us the validity of tangible realities and absolute certainties, can give way to a virile acceptance of life if we admit the positivity of these continuous movements of reality around us , of this continuous change and evolution of things.

Antonioni, however, even if he is a thinker, is, above all, a man of cinema, and to express his new philosophical acquisitions to us, therefore, he certainly did not offer us a doctrinal essay; how neThe adventure, how ne the eclipse, but, here with even higher and more complete poetry, he instead offered us a cinematographic story all lit up by splendid visual incandescences, supported by a particularly collected and reserved psychological climate, even where it seemed he had to let the emotion explode, entrusted to a technique unusual, and indeed very new, full of fervent inventions.

First of all, he gave a modern drama modern images. Abstract painting, on the one hand, and the new English fashion on the other, allowed him to give each of his shots a very particular figurative relief. The film is in color, as already the red desert, but the dominant colors, here, above all in the photographer's studio which is one of the frames to which the action relies most, are those which dominate Carnaby Street today, which the abstract artists and the op and pop painters offer us: the greens, the purple, yellows, blues, composed according to lines, signs, contrasts with a rigorously pictorial effect; in deliberate contradiction with the realistic colors of the parks and gardens and with those of the very colorful London of Chelsea, with its houses lacquered in white or painted in red and blue.

At the center of these images (sometimes composed with meticulous precision, rich, other times, with precious, singular, baroque elements suggested by the draperies, panels, feathers, technical equipment that are all the rage in the photographer's studio) the drama of the protagonist unfolds : studied from the inside, always expressed with severe measure, cadenced by a psychological study which, with a procedure that I would like to define as Chekhovian, if the term, even in the cinema, were not abused by now, is supported only by indirect indications, often even implicit , in a dramatic climate that finds its emotional strength above all in the succession and variation of moods. It is, of course, in the narrative rhythm that Antonioni has meticulously studied even with precise technical devices.

A rhythm, unlike what happened in his other films, extraordinarily fast, even precipitous, essential and terse, as if to express, especially at the beginning, the protagonist's frenetic pace of life; a rhythm which, in order to be even more direct and immediate, overlooks (with the editing) all useless explanations, totally and polemically disregards real cinematic time and proposes only the essential moments of the same scene, asyntactically cutting out passing ones, resorting, in other points, to a variation of images and visual fields which, almost totally disregarding the means normally used up to now by the cinema (for example the "tracking shots") immediately and punctually puts the spectator in front of the images and details that in that moment they serve him to understand the action, to see the reactions on the faces of the protagonists, to know the evolution through their gestures, skilfully brought, and at the right moment, to the foreground.

In contrast, however, with what happens at the moment in which the blow-up reveals, through the various photographic details, the mystery of the park: here, then, the rhythm becomes very slow, even solemn, heavy with high silences in the soundtrack; the enlarged photographs, pinned to a wall, alternate with the increasingly tense face of the protagonist with a subdued visual cadence that slows down the agitated narrative discourse conducted so far, suddenly opening up the first glimpse of mystery in the film, the secret suspicion of the poetry, A poem that is found further on, when the questions begin to weigh on the protagonist's heart, and a poem - warm in its rigor, incandescent in its austere severity - which dominates the whole film, both in the intimate and suspended pages , both in the open and turbulent ones (among the latter, it is worth mentioning the erotic orgy in which the protagonist indulges in the studio, with two beat girls, between skilful purple paper backdrops).

In short, a work of meditated vigor, suffered, macerated, but limpidly resolved with a cinematographic language which, at every moment, imposes itself with the splendor of the noblest style; a compelling, fascinating work, one of the best (I admit it very rarely) that can happen to be seen in the cinema. He will be representing English cinema at Cannes in a few days. I don't see who could compete for the Palme d'Or.

Da Il Tempo, 14 April 1967

John Grazzini

blow-up, presented tonight at the Cannes Film Festival under the English flag, and received with great applause, it is not Antonioni's best film, and God forbid you don't listen to those who consider it the most beautiful film of all time. But it interests us as a strong antipoison expressed by the very heart of the civilization of the image.

The guiding idea of ​​the film, if one can ask Antonioni for ideas, rather than sensations and atmospheres, is a few centuries old: the things we see with the eyes are really all of reality, or what affects the optic nerve (and, by proxy , the photographic lens) is it only an aspect of reality? It is clear that Antonioni does not have the presumption to answer these age-old questions.

Blow-Up he is content to tell us that today they reappear urgently because there is a whole area of ​​society that tends to identify reality with the concrete sign it has left; and he gives the example of a crime, which may even appear not to have occurred if there is no evidence left. Anyone who believes he was an involuntary witness and photographed it could be convinced that it was an optical illusion if the photographic evidence were then taken away and the corpus delicti disappeared. He, then, would be the symbol of contemporary man who, faced with the difficulty of knowing the true filigree within the visible, welcomes the game of life as a fiction and annuls in the automatism of gestures (like the photographer in the frenetic shots of his cameras ) the anguish for the unknowable problematic nature of reality.

To give evidence to a metaphor which expresses, ambiguously, the indignation and attraction that Antonioni feels towards modern civilization, Blow-Up is set among those fashionable photographers who believe they are making up for their sentimental passivity with the hysterical clicks of their lenses, and in thatHappening which is the SwingingLondon, the London of young people trying to overcome boredom with the marijuana and hallucinogens, unleashed in dances and rituals pops and ops, empty souls and interchangeable sexes. Thomas, the protagonist, is precisely one of them: a successful photographer, specialized in news snaps and portraits of cover girls, always hungry for money, although he can already afford the Rolls Royce, and as agitated at work, as brusque with his models, as devoid of authentic spiritual energy.

It happens to him, following a couple in a park, to photograph an embrace. The woman notices it, and later she runs after him in her study begging him to give her her roll: she offers herself, just to get it back. Thomas pretends to accept; he hands her a small roll similar to the one indicted, and would set about, without enthusiasm, to enjoy the girl, if at that moment the doorbell did not ring: an airplane propeller is arriving, which Thomas bought from an antique dealer to add a touch bizarre to the decor of his studio.

Once the woman has left, she enlarges the photographs taken at the park (blow up you mean magnification), and he realizes that what his eyes hadn't seen has been recorded by the camera: on the film, as he progressively enlarges the details, in fact, a face hidden in the bushes, a weapon and a body overturned appear. Everything points to the woman luring the victim into a trap.

Thomas begins to wonder what to do when two grulline arrive who had already knocked on his door in the morning, hoping to be hired as models. In other times they would have been two examples of adolescence astray: now they represent the London youth attracted by easy successes. Jokingly, they undress each other: it is a distraction that Thomas welcomes with joy, in a racket that erases any erotic pleasure.

And after use he hunts them: the dominant thought calls him towards the park. The suspicion was well founded: a corpse is still under the tree. Stunned, Thomas would like to ask a painter friend for advice, but he is busy with intimate matters. Back home, a new surprise: all the photos have been stolen from him, except one, which however, isolated from the others, looks more like an abstract painting than constituting evidence. He then he goes down the street. He catches a glimpse of the woman of the crime, and, chasing her, sneaks into a night where a guitarist beat tramples his own instrument and distributes the scraps to the screaming audience. The woman has disappeared.

Looking for a friend, Thomas comes to a cocktail, which in other times would have been called an orgy of the vicious, and now represents the "dolce vita" of London. At dawn, she returns to the park to photograph the body, but it has disappeared. Now devoid of any proof, Thomas can doubt that he himself was the victim of a hallucination. When a group of young people arrives masquerading as clowns, who pretend, without ball and racquets, a tennis match, is in the game: the dynamism of the match mimed perhaps overcomes any doubt of the soul or thought.

Strictly speaking, the film does not say that the final scene is the realization of the need for fiction, with its relative self-pity: blow-up, more than any other Antonioni film, it does not contain a thesis. There are those who interpret Thomas as a virtuous example of perennial readiness for action, and there are those who consider him, for this reason, an emblem of solitude to which the pallor of feelings can lead. One fact is certain: that Thomas, showing total distrust in the civil order in which he lives, does not immediately turn to the police, nor does he have more reasons for inner peace at the end of the film than he had at the beginning: if anything, he comes out desolate, male version of many unfortunate heroines of Antonioni. It is along this path that perhaps Antonioni's ancient melancholy can be grasped, who has by now overcome even anguish, touching the supreme solitude. But when will we learn to stop looking for the moral of the story in Antonioni?

Let's stick to the movie. A judgment, albeit hasty, should begin with the observation that Antonioni, in order to represent today's London, set out his Thomas on an itinerary very similar to that which Fellini made the protagonist of the sweet life to discover the Rome of yesterday; nor with much newer fruits than certain sociological documentaries. And this is not the only echo of Fellini that displeases in Blow-Up: is it is unlikely that gods can still appear in a film clowns without at least thinking about Half past eight. The kinship, of course, stops there, but it is not without meaning that Antonioni lacks originality in the narrative structure when accompanied by that rather conventional representation of the night and cocktail.

Typical of Antonioni is instead the effort to place the bulk of the bet on the central character. And to say that Thomas is only sometimes in focus. Described with effective colors as long as he is in motion, all neurotic shots (in a beautiful initial scene he comes out exhausted by a series of convulsive photographic shots: his surrogate for embrace), until he commands his models and goes wild in the joke, Thomas then he blurs when he begins to puzzle over the photos of the crime, and spends hours contemplating them, comparing them, pinning them on the wall. We don't quite know what goes through his mind, what order his sensations are. It is the objectification of a torpor which, if interrupted in the first part by the hasty parenthesis of love games, is reflected in the film in the long run, guided by a slow rhythm which weakens the thriller.Passed from intellectual cinema to thriller, Antonioni seems to have brought with him the habit of taking a long time, of inexpressive silences, the rejection of that taste for the ellipsis which instead expresses the best of modern cinema.

But within a slightly old-fashioned and opaque frame, Blow-Up it has groups of successful sequences: at the beginning, they are all those of the ritual to which the photographic models are subjected; visits to the antique shop; the listless relationship with the woman who came to pick up the roll; the liturgy of the darkroom; the playful scuffle with the girls (a date in the history of cinema: an unshaven female nude, who knows if there was a need) and the enigmatic finale, which the audience will rack their brains over: all scenes that confirm certain of Antonioni's talents, but also, inserted into the fabric of the film, his difficulty in dissolving acute intuitions in flowing, spontaneous narration. Inspired by a short story by the Argentinian Cortazar, the film already has some embarrassments already in the screenplay, by Antonioni and Tonino Guerra; several times one gets the feeling that certain characters were invented to put blood into an anemic matter rather than out of true narrative necessity.

Considering the lively scenography of the studio, the beautiful colors of Di Palma, the elegant toilettes of the models, the eyeballs of the interpreter (newcomer) David Hemmings, real photographic lenses extended on the world, and the participation, however not decisive, of Vanessa Redgrave, by Sarah Miles and the model Veruschka, the film as a whole gives the impression of languor. Like a flower that hasn't had the strength to open, and yet retains a hint of perfume.

Da Corriere della Sera, 9 May 1967

Haggai Savioli

Antonioni's film, figuratively very suggestive, does not represent a new arrival in the author's thematic and stylistic research, but rather a summary and precise development of it. Excellent interpreters, among which David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave and Sarah Miles stand out.

Overflowing public and warm, but not enthusiastic success. for Blow-up by Michelangelo Antonioni, presented today at the Cannes Film Festival, and still up for grabs, more than anyone else, for the grand prize of the review. Much has been said, from the United States and England, about our director's recent work, that perhaps it is worth starting at the end.

Blow-Up, therefore, does not represent - in our opinion - a swimming port of the author's thematic and stylistic research. but a fine-tuning by him, figuratively suggestive, masterful in many ways, and yet affected, on the whole, by no small amount of pedantry. The basic concept is known: reality is unknowable, even at its elementary existential levels (birth, copulation, death); the maximum approximation to it coincides with the maximum ineffability of matter. So the detail of a photograph. magnified (e Blow-Upmeans precisely «enlargement», in the technical and metaphorical sense), it will clearly resemble an abstract painting, the meanings of which can only be deduced later, and with the benefit of an inventory, and perhaps erroneously.

Thomas and a young London photographer: he is not a character, he is a function: if he repeatedly shoots the scene of the encounter between two lovers, in the silent green park, it is to add a relaxing element to his cruel investigation of the most degraded aspects of the city : bums, evicted. beggars at the public dormitory: which, for their part, make a good contrast to the sophisticated images of the models, to which Thomas also devotes his professional attention. In almost the same way, the protagonist buys a huge, useless propeller, which will serve to break the overly linear rhythm of his studio furniture.

But the woman, surprised by her goal in company, asks Thomas for the return of the negatives, and even offers to get them back: he deceives her, she gives him a false name and address, and disappears. The developed photographs will also vanish from the studio after Thomas, scrupulously dissecting them, will have identified a gun brandished by a man and, perhaps, a corpse abandoned on the grass. Later, back on site, Thomas will see (or think he sees?) the lifeless body of the victim. He will try to interest others in the case (not the police, at least for the moment, because there is a "hit" to do), but no one will listen to him. Upon further reconnaissance, the body will be absent. Nothing happened, or it's as if nothing happened.

For those who have not understood well, here is the codicil of the fable: a group of boys, dressed like clowns (and a little Fellini-like, if you like) watch the tennis match that two of them are playing, without rackets or ball. After watching them with smiling distrust, Thomas also enters the game, and he even seems to hear the ball bouncing across the field.

That all of this (besides being, obviously, an argument not of faith, but of debate) has already been widely affirmed, and not only by Antonioni, would however count not too much, if not in the sense of setting the limits of Blow-Up in the career of one of the most admired and most discussed artists of contemporary cinema.

It seems to us, however - and at least at a first "reading" of the film, necessarily hurried - that the coherence, directness of the director, his famous stubbornness, are leading him to the risk of didactic, almost popularizing attitudes: to assume motives of the world he observed (beaten London, for example) as pure and simple traits to be placed in a pre-arranged graph: and the same problems and recurring grievances in his work (such as that of sex) as supporting structures of an already exhaustive discourse Done.

Thus, the erotic scenes, although wonderfully shot and precious in themselves (but the truly splendid sequence is that of the stalking in the park) seem almost mechanical artifices, introduced to attenuate. and then to increase, a tension of a different nature; moral and intellectual.

The immediate qualities of Blow-Up are evident, and are not discussed: from the care taken in color photography (by Carlo Di Palma) to the conduct of the actors' acting: the effective David Hemmings. Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles (both good), the others. But from a master, such as Antonioni is rightly considered, is it excessive to expect anything more than a stupendous mastery of his primary means of expression?

Da Unity, 9 May 1967

Mario Soldati

I've seen it twice already Blow-Up, and I believe that it is not only a masterpiece, but, at least for now, Antonioni's masterpiece: a film that no one, honestly, can proclaim inferior to any other Antonioni film, while each of Antonioni's other films can be, according to taste of those who judge, proclaimed inferior to Blow-Up. However, before this film, Antonioni was in constant progress, and Blow-Up it didn't surprise me: I will say that I expected it and publicly, on several occasions, I even advocated it.

Blow-Up it is the very personal work of a unique and profoundly individualistic director like Antonioni. Spoken in English and shot entirely in London, with English actors and collaborators, it is not an Italian film: it is an English film, and which, in Cannes, officially represents Great Britain.

Well. In our opinion, this too is a point in favor of Antonioni, who was never, not even at the beginning of his production, a provincial artist, nor even, if God wills, a national one, but detaching himself from our then triumphant ways in neorealism Italian or Romanesco, he immediately demonstrated the height, the highly lyrical and abstractive tendency of his inspiration, and, in short, his very modern and international nature.

If there is one reason (perhaps the only one) for which I think it is preferable to be a film director and not a writer, it is precisely this: that one speaks to the whole world: with almost no need to be translated: with the same ease of communication with all peoples, or nearly so, of the musician and the painter. How many times have I thought that Gozzano does not have the fame he deserves just because he is a poet, and, worse still, an Italian poet: while if he had been a musician no one would have judged him inferior to Puccini, to whom he resembles so much, and while in this way, as a poet, everyone judges him inferior to one who is inferior to him, to D'Annunzio, who acquired fame in the world much more with his life than with his works.

So is it worthwhile to use a mechanically international medium like cinema and, in making cinema, persist in the provincialism of one's own nation? No, it's not worth it. Antonioni understood this right from the start. And, for the avoidance of doubt, I warn you that I am not speaking of contents, but of forms: or, if you like, of art. Antonioni was also international with Il deserto rosso, and also with The Scream: even when he toured his villages, and even when, so to speak, he spoke "in dialect". Let alone now, that from Ferrara he passed to cockney.

One sunny morning, in good weather, on the Genoa-Serravalle road, which still, pitying a very distant though recent past, many call "the autotruck", I was surprised by a marvelous, fascinating, and indecipherable sight. Coming out of the darkness of a curved tunnel, I suddenly saw, a hundred yards ahead, glaring in the sun a lorry all loaded and swollen, all bristling and curly, all overflowing with a tangle of gold, silver, mirror steel, very minute moving quivering prisms of light.

Only at the last moment, passing by and past him, did I understand what it was: it was a truck loaded with scraps of sheet metal, more precisely heaps or "nests" of enormous foil strips.

Another climb, another tunnel, another curve: and another truck like the first one. And a third, and a fourth. How many will I have counted before arriving at the Giovi? The show was, every time, intoxicating. That curly, shiny, wobbly material lived, continually changed with the continuous slow curve of the road under the sun. I never got tired of seeing tinfoil trucks. And before the last, or rather the first of them, since I was walking up the caravan, filed past me, I had thought of Michelangelo Antonioni.

It certainly can not surprise, this thought. Nor was I, then, surprised. Especially since the association had presented itself to me in the simplest and, I would say, the crudest form. Well, I said to myself very trivially, here's a nice idea for Michelangelo: how he would like these tinfoil trucks in the sun! You have to remind me to tell him. Either to him or to Tonino Guerra, his screenwriter. Who knows, maybe in the next film they won't find a way to use this idea... I remember interrupting the course of my thought: why, I said to myself, baptized as an "idea" what, normally, I would have always considered only as an "object"? Could it be an idea, a tinfoil truck?

Not for a writer. But for a painter, and for that painter-of-a-painting-in-motion who is the film director, what richer mystery, what deeper source of inspiration? The flames of a fireplace, the waves of a storm breaking on the cliff: one can watch them indefinitely, without ever getting tired. Well, the tinfoil truck offers the same enchantment as the flames and the waves, and something more: there is industry, there is the work of man, there is the current historical moment, the car, the road, the journey, the going of creatures under the going of the sun, both apparent and at the same time real, deceptive and at the same time indubitable.

The encounter with the tinfoil trucks happened two or three years ago: I remember I hadn't seen yet Il deserto rosso, i.e. the first color film by Antonioni: and I remember telling myself that, in any case, that prismatic and luminous effect was more easily achievable in black and white.

On the occasion of the Cannes Film Festival I reviewed Blow-Up For the third time. I have already said that I consider this film, to this day, as Antonioni's masterpiece. I will add that, at the third screening, the film seemed, miraculously, even faster than at the first.

As for the tinfoil trucks, I had always forgotten to tell him about them, both to Antonioni and to Guerra. In fact, I had completely forgotten about the trucks themselves. I remembered it now, on the first and last episode of Blow-Up, with that truck packed and overflowing with hipsters whitewashed, which makes evolutions in the streets or avenues of a park, in London. And I understand that tinfoil trucks are more than just an object, a subject, or even an idea for Antonioni: tinfoil trucks are, by themselves, a picture of the art of Antonioni: this enchantment, this magic that grabs you in its luminous spiral and that satisfies you, even before you worry about it, before you wonder about its meaning.

Indeed, there is no doubt that Blow-Up is a big step forward, for Antonioni, because it represents a decided overcoming of the phenomenological experience, a condemnation, even if unconscious and even if involuntary, of aestheticism. Everything the critics have said and will continue to say about this film absolutely does not correspond to its simplest meaning, which is that of a definitive and irreversible sentimental and human education: at the beginning, the young photographer Thomas considers life as a purely visual phenomenon and to be interpreted from the outside, as a disengaged, amusing, madcap spectacle: at the beginning of the film, therefore, the young photographer Thomas is also a hipster, beat, like the others in the van, and like those we'll later meet in the ballroom where the electric guitar is smashed, or in the apartment where marijuana is smoked.

But here, abandoning himself to the very mechanism of his profession as a photographer, Thomas discovers not so much A crime as THE crime: he becomes, for the first time, aware of reality: which, beyond the joke and beyond all the sparks, is kneaded with atrocities and wickedness, and not without purpose, perhaps, not without hope of a slow improvement, of a slow and almost imperceptible expansion, if, in spite of everything, we take some pleasure in living, and if we pass moments of happiness in contemplation of beauty.

In other words, the chastity of Blow-Up it is just the opposite of what is believed and said. And it doesn't matter if, among those who say it and believe it, there is also Antonioni, and there is also Guerra. How often do the most fortunately gifted authors not know what they are doing. The phenomenon beat, this says Blow-Up, is a recessive phenomenon, an old thing disguised as a novelty, a last repull of aestheticism. And the philosophical school of phenomenology, which from the outset recognized itself in Antonioni's works, has been here, since Blow-Upfinally unmasked. «Blowing up», that is «magnifying» the phenomenological reality, Thomas and Antonioni discover what is «behind» that facade so beautiful and so insipid. They discover that, in life, there is "much more".

In the beginning, photographing reality, Thomas says, with an idyllic and pleased smile: "There is nothing else, believe me, friends, there is nothing but beauty, there is nothing but the surface". In the end, pretending to play with the fake tennis players, Thomas's smile is different: he is bitter, virile, tragic and optimistic all at the same time. As if he were saying to the hipsters: «Yes, yes, poor fools… go ahead and believe that there is nothing but appearance! There is much more, friends. Much more. And the crime really existed precisely because the evidence disappeared, precisely because there was someone who worked to make it disappear».

Contact with the tragic reality of life. Rejection of aestheticism. Could this be the gist, or at least the danger, of phenomenology, aestheticism?

The secret of Blotv-up it is a return to tradition: we discover all the dryness, all the old stuff of the beats: we feel the vitality of positions that many believed to be obsolete.

But how beautiful were the tinfoil trucks!

21 May 1967

Da Cinema, Sellerio Publisher, Palermo, 2006

Philip Sacchi

Blow-Up it means to explode, possibly also to inflate because by inflating a body it enlarges, in photographic jargon it is used for "enlargement". Immediately after the resumption of the enlargement, the technical manipulation is professionally more important, because it allows one to enter the very fabric of the image, to isolate its details, after which only the photographer can decide the cut, the rhythm. This is how Thomas, very close-fitting, very calibrated (David Hemmings), a very successful young London photographer, specialized in fashion shoots, while enlarging certain scrolls taken in an East-End park, dimly glimpses something impressive. Far out on the lawn, a man and a woman were engaged in a strange conversation. Well, from a nearby bush appeared the shape that might have been an inanimate body lying on the ground, and next to the body a pistol.

If Antonioni places this non-mystery at the center of his story, it will not be to follow it in its developments and up to the police solution. True, it leads us first to suspicion (when the girl from the park immediately rushes to Thomas's house to buy the negative) and then, when unknown people rob his studio by removing the negative and enlargements, to the certainty of the crime. And, in fact, we will see Thomas rush to the spot and find the lying corpse under the bush, in the evening shadows. But we will never know who killed or who was killed. Because, of course, Thomas doesn't warn the police.

He doesn't warn because he wants to photograph the corpse first. That crime still ignored in a public park in the city can be a formidable one scoop, a great professional coup, and therefore he goes to ask for the solidarity of his agent and publisher. But at his house there is, that evening, an unfortunate party, with a hallucinogen den, and the publisher is already stupid. Thomas also believes in the invitation of intoxication, when he comes out of his slumber it is dawn. He runs to the park, goes to the bush. The corpse is no longer there. But what matters to Antonioni is not the body, nor the crime. It is the breaking push that that phantom adventure has on Thomas's nerves and character, taken as a paradigm of a particular experience and way of life.

It is the world of the very young generations who attempt the fascinating experience of starting from scratch, of burning within themselves the patterns, prejudices and taboos of previous generations, in the confused certainty that, once the debris has been cleared, a more courageous human habit will emerge, freer and more serious. It doesn't matter if they wear strange clothes and behave like primitives to break down taboos: "scandal must happen". And it doesn't matter if, in the most lively and intelligent, that denial often manifests itself in a recourse to the irrational and the sub-human: let us not forget that this civilization of the atom and the imponderable is all turned towards the depths and abysses.

Thomas is a typical product of this subversive anarchy. He is a great fashion photographer. He is a genius of gestural imagination. Now posed in acrobatic and boneless arabesques, now in the rigidity of idols, strange and wonderful models, anticipating in their stylistic asexuality the femininity of the future, stare through his infallible lens into a world of fabulous mannequins.

And yet Thomas is already undermined, he is undermined by the emptiness, by the restlessness, by the dissatisfaction that an officially so prosperous civilization, arrived, rorid like the faces of the elders who govern it, gives to his generation, because the young feel it, even if they don't explain the absurd looming: opulence and hunger, peace in words and war in deeds, Sunday Christianity and daily ferocity.

Well, that strange adventure, that mystery that grazed him, that he held in his hand for an instant, and that immediately vanished like a breath, unleashes the crisis. The corpse is no longer there. Yet she had seen him. But was it really there? The Thomas who leaves the deserted park with lost steps in the clear early morning light is a lost, disheartened, destroyed Thomas. It is at this point that Antonioni with a stroke of sardonic, stupendous lyricism has inserted the scene of the fake tennis match, that ghostly match in which, suddenly silenced, the night owls jeep they assist with movements like automatons, who have also become ghosts.

And when the lens begins to move away, discovering Thomas down there in the middle of the lawn, ever smaller, ever more defeated, ever more alone, and suddenly in the terrible emptiness and silence of dawn comes the first soft thud of the non-existent ball, it's like if all the empty unreality of the visible opened up before us.

I don't know if I did get that figured out for me Blow-Up it is the masterpiece of new cinema and new visual techniques. If then one can find here and there some leftovers of manner (the orchestra beats), some superfluous joint of expertise (Thomas who surprises his woman with his friend), and usually a few meters of walk too many, it doesn't really matter.

15 October 1967

Godfrey Fofi

Antonioni also intends to take us to the center of a typical European situation, indeed advanced and renewed, in the colorful London of the "youth revolution" of costume. He too sets out to show us how we live. He leaves provincial and incurable Italy, he would say later Il Deserto rosso; and whose “industrial” pretensions, whose speeches were perhaps too disproportionate to the Ravenna shown, pushed too far for the sake of demonstrating a thesis. London can better support his reflections, now on a broader level we would say, with his demonstrations of how it is possible to live without meaning, without pursuing the search for it. But the important thing is in the way he sees it and narrates it.

De Il deserto rosso we had salvaged the very beginnings of a discourse, among so many slags, on today's or future man, in today's or future industrial society: the attempt to analyze a subtle and very profound metamorphosis. Badly said, clumsy approximate, it was still an attempt worthy of respect; it demonstrated the presence of a director, restless and attentive even at times witty or naive, but in any case advanced dilated, susceptible to serious developments. Compared to it Antonioni does not seem, with Blow-Up, have gone much further. This film is, at least ostensibly, one of rest and relaxation, at times even a game, admirably staged, full of suspense, beautiful images.

The first part is undoubtedly the best, supported as it is by a great invention (of Cortazar) applied with intelligence, and with extreme sensitivity. For the first time, perhaps, Antonioni is somehow outside the film, he does not present "his" reality of himself in it, but a photographer (and it could be a director who could be Antonioni) who observes reality, and a " his” reality of him. This game of objectives is narrated in a new way. The scene in the park (the fateful idyll behind which the impressed film will reveal the murder, no longer virgin) could be, at best, a piece of Chronicle of a love as to subject. But the return to the origin - which can also be found in the use of the "yellow" convention - is only apparent: Antonioni bends over to reality, trying to objectify it, and nonetheless reaching his typical conclusions: the only reality that resists, that exists, is that of the artist, or of the recording machine (and it was not he who directed in the theatre I have a camera of Isherwood, years ago?), the two in subtle disidentification, in a process more often parallel than joint.

Cinema within cinema, the tool and the artist who uses it as the only valid approaches to understanding reality, tremendously objective or extremely subjective, in short, never the apparent, the immediate everyday. It is understandable how the film, from this point of view, offers insights worthy of further study in relation to the entire work of the director.

But his photographer (who makes one think, in the "damned" and lethal use of the camera, much more of that of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom than of Muriel's frantic researcher of insignificant details of hidden mutations, which also derives from the first ) is also the bearer of something else, of an approximate, generic, rather bogus discourse in its mediated culture, which relates a whole part of the film to the nonsense that circulated abundantly in The desert, to references from other films, to certain heavy and mediocre dialogues.

Where Antonioni leaves intuition (or biography) it would seem that he has only vague and second-hand or third-hand ideas to support him, worn out, only rarely reinvigorated by directorial invention by the significance of narrative instinct. It is the most harmful part of Antonioni, precisely the one that should and would like to be more adult, which explodes in this film as never before.

The impoverishment operated by Antonioni and Guerra on the beautiful story by Cortazar from which the film is taken, the exemplification and reduction to which it was subjected, is already perplexing. In fact, in it the photographer who photographed a pleasant lady on the quais of the Seine making subtle advances to a teenager, discovered by "enlarging" in this even tender, slightly and pleasantly morbid "market", a filthier "market": in the next car, a face, a greedy gaze of a man who is the one for whom the lady bargains… An idea too “fine” to support a film, or too little “evident”? Antonioni has chosen assassination, a dead man is something more direct, he undoubtedly has a weight, he says all too clearly what he is. Another easy solution also seems to me to transfer the story to London, although I see nothing unseemly in it (as for the dead man, on the other hand).

After the splendid beginning, voyeuristic and inhuman masked coitus, after all the scenes in the park, after the beautiful presentation of the character of Vanessa Redgrave, after the admirable orgetta from the images of a delicate and obsessive mannerism in the frankness and freshness of the scene, the necessity to "explain" invests Antonioni. "Il faut etre profond", and he offers us an insistent attempt, vulgarized, even painful, but above all banal, due to cultural shortcomings, self-confidence and ideas of hire, the search for success.

The result is all the more irritating the more interest, esteem and affection one has for Antonioni, the more one expected from this film. Instead, as it is, it is understood that he collects in America, more than Cleopatra (and it is not the case to say: Antonioni, it suits you!, since the director publicly boasted about it). An action of "vulgarization" is not in itself condemnable, if ideas elsewhere banal are expressed with originality and conviction, relived in depth.

Ultimately what is surprising is that Antonioni, in order to "explain", found nothing better than to resort to a symbolism (refuge of the incompetent, as is known) worthy of the worst Fellini. And we really can't forgive him for this precisely because it is a convenient, silly solution, to which he has so far decisively and rigorously refused.

The civilization of consumption, the domination of the object as such, its effective and fetishistic uselessness? and here is an immense prop that the protagonist buys without knowing what to do with it. Reality and imagination, and where does one end and the other begin? and Sarah Miles who exclaims in front of the swarming and incomprehensible enlargement of the dead man: it looks like an abstract painting. The end of feelings? Voyeurism, sex as a deadly innuendo and self-sufficiency of the hero. The tragedy that lurks beneath this world? A corpse, a dead man, that no one believes is disappearing, that no one takes care of, that is quite evident, that the spectator (unless he is later than Sadoul) has no doubts. the youth, their directionless revolt? The horrible episode of the electric guitar. Meaningless life, reality in the way one is forced to live, far from true reality, and where does this one begin and that one end? The stupid and easy didacticism, excessively, extraordinarily, incredibly easy of the final scene.

Da Red shadows, n. 2, 1967

Tullio Kezich

Someone says that Blow Up, produced by Ponti with American capital, offers us a less authentic Antonioni, linked to the quirks of great photographic journalism. In reality the director, who started from a story by the Argentine Julio Cortàzar, this time managed to insert his themes in an unusual dimension that bypasses any residual provincialism.

Blow Up is for modern-day London what Dolce vita it was for Rome in the early sixties: and just as many wrote then that Fellini's vision did not correspond to a verifiable reality, so today there are those who say that Antonioni's city has little in common with the Swinging Town.

It may even be, in terms of strict verisimilitude; especially since the second part of the film, in describing the character's wanderings through different parts of the city, is less happy than the first. Antonioni found on the Thames an unprecedented scenography within which to illustrate his recurring themes: alienation (think of Hemmings who photographs Verushka miming a non-existent act of love), the infinite penetrability of the image (there is always an enlargement , a theoretically possible blow up, which discovers things where the eyes cannot see), the solitude of the individual (the photographer besieged by the silent violence of the reality that surrounds him).

But in the films there are no twilight notes or suicidal thoughts, the protagonist's lens opens onto the infinite variety of phenomena with an expectation that not even the most hateful experiences can destroy.

Blow Up, in this sense, is a declaration of availability, perhaps the birth certificate of a new Antonioni. In trying to make an objective film, the director has confessed more deeply than elsewhere: it is impossible not to recognize him in this photographer whom we meet disguised as a worker at the exit of a factory (a tribute to the neorealist experience) and we follow from a meeting other in his curiosities about women, objects and above all images.

Herman Comutius

Blow-Up it is not a simple film, which can be easily schematized: here its theme, there its realization, divided in the direction of the actors, use of color, editing, sound or other. Its meanings are subtle and multiple, and should be analyzed, it seems to us, not sectorally, but globally, since never has a film been more fused and brought back to unity like this one (and it is already a precise judgment of merit): we will therefore consider the film in its aspect of "what it says" and "how it says it" according to a wholly personal succession of what seem to us to be its basic motifs, which follow one another and repeat themselves as in a musical composition.

Why is this story set in London in the first place? Not so much to free oneself from provincialism ("intellectual horizons broaden, one learns to look at the world with different eyes" - said Antonioni) but because London has become in recent years the center of "modernity", or of a certain type of modernity, perhaps more flashy than real, but undoubtedly significant. London, in its showy split between old and new, between severe tradition and provocative originality, has taken on a guiding role: the restlessness of its youth, the daring of its theatre, the unscrupulousness of its cinema, the novelties of its fashion, the revolution of its customs profoundly affect the taste of our time.

The new London, that of concrete and glass, opens the film. But immediately, against this background, there is the jeep full of masked and shouting boys: it is the restless generation that with its deliberately disordered and provocative behavior opposes the codified order. Apart from the sense of this presence (which then seals the film's ending) the carnival is both realistic and symbolic, since if it immediately suggests this type of new existence, it is also one of those goliardic manifestations, with the begging for roads in favor of school initiatives, as is practiced in England.

The dualism between the world of conservation and that of rebellion is continuous. The London of the poorhouse, from which Thomas emerges in the early morning light, is the brown and sooty old suburb; that of Chelsea and the neighborhood where Thomas works is very colorful: red and blue houses, white fixtures on black walls, ostentatiously, demonstratively colorful. The antiques shop, in classic early twentieth-century brickwork, and surrounded on all sides by the very modern buildings of the East End. Thus, next to the royal guard in fur hat and red jacket who strolls strutting up and down the sidewalk, here is the pair of “Edwardian” longhairs; after the old man who puts the waste paper on the stick, the young people of the protest demonstration.

However, the emphasis falls on the "new". The profession of Thomas, the protagonist, is typical: fashion photographer as well as trendy photographer. Advertising, cosmopolitanism, the image as the number one vehicle, "mass media", magazines, billboards, shows, technology, models, "hostesses", long-haired people, abstract art, "pop" and "op", the "beat" music, the unusual, exciting experiences, perhaps with the help of hallucinogens: a whole mythology that has a powerful effect on the souls of today's young people, often influencing their existence, making them become, in England of Mary Quant and the Beatles, dominated by fashions.

Thomas is an intelligent boy and a serious professional: he seems to be one of those who determine fashions, not suffer them. Antonioni chose his type well: David Hemmings, with his dull face, his sudden fury, but above all with his shadows and his perplexities, is a perfect incarnation of the character. Who has a fabulous studio and exercises an undoubtedly interesting profession, but it certainly cannot be said that he lives a full life of him. He is always in a state of excitement that alternates with short breaks of exhaustion; at night he doesn't sleep for the "services", during the day he doesn't eat, driven by a thousand occasions and a thousand commitments. Drink, yes. When he works he takes off his shoes and is constantly in need of music, music as stunning, music as company. Even when he travels by car, a Rolls-Royce, a symbol of success, equipped with a radio telephone that allows him to always keep in communication with his office: since Thomas is also a businessman and has a flair. Precisely this allows him to keep himself at the top, at the top of the ladder.

But his job doesn't satisfy him that much. The models he photographs are not real women, they are automatons, female abstractions. None of the characters in the film is fully realized in the existence of him. Thomas is always on the move, always looking for something that escapes him, dissatisfied with himself, even though he is constantly "playing". He is fed up with London, he himself says, and his physical tiredness is occasionally ignited by completely illusory shots, such as the one in the music room, where Thomas starts a fight to get hold of a guitar neck - a fetish of the our age - which he immediately throws with absolute disinterest on the sidewalk.

Thomas is therefore disappointed and uncertain, both professionally and privately. Aggravated by contacts with others: his woman betrays him, his friend doesn't listen to him when he needs to, stunned by hallucinogens (and he himself lets himself be attracted by the soft refuge of the party where one abandons oneself to artificial paradises). Yet he realizes that something else would be needed. But what is needed, and how to get there? A scandal, a breakup, that's what it would take, like the girl at the antiques dealer who wants to leave everything, go to Nepal (or Morocco…), like Jane, who is on the verge of disaster. "A disaster is what it takes to see things clearly," says Thomas to the woman.

Here: seeing clearly in things. Discovering their true meaning, listening to the inner meaning of the music, not following its rhythm externally (as Jane does instead). The "mystery" in which Thomas is involved, and which he would like to solve with the tools of his profession, is an event that could act as a catalyst in this other "mystery", the real one, which is the search for truth . In themselves, the hand holding the gun, the shadow that reveals itself as a corpse, the corpse itself and the disappearing photographs are unspecified facts, and the solution of the mystery is unnecessary.

The sense of the story lies elsewhere, since the mystery is quite different, like the sense of The adventure went far beyond the girl's unsolved disappearance: "The story as a plot - writes Umberto Eco referring precisely to The adventure — does not exist precisely because in the director there is the calculated will to communicate a sense of indeterminacy, a frustration of the spectator's romantic instincts, so that he effectively introduces himself to the center of the fiction (which is already filtered life) to orient himself through a series of intellectual and moral judgments.

In short, Hitchcock, brought up by someone, has nothing to do with it. It is at this point that the protagonist's profession takes on a precise importance, well beyond the external data (it is Antonioni himself who warns: «I have the impression that the essential thing is to give the film almost an allegorical tone») . Thomas, therefore, as well as photographer-technician and photographer-businessman, is a photographer-artist, a creator, an intellectual. His is the research of the intellectuals of our time for whom the living conditions of the contemporary world have sharpened the art-life opposition to the death. It was also the drama of Sandro, the architect of The adventure, and of Giovanni Pontano, the writer of The night. Thomas would like not to create discontinuity between art and life, but in reality there is an abyss between these two dimensions, since in neither of them he finds what would give meaning to both, genuineness, authenticity. The truth, in a word.

Thomas makes an effort to capture reality (the photos taken in the hospice: a door with the glass chipped, a mattress turned upside down, a naked old man putting away his miserable belongings; those in the album: an elderly woman, a funeral, a demonstration of workers, poor children, a "tramp"), but immediately these efforts are directed towards the business, the situation to be exploited in the most banal professional sense. In short, he exploits this reality. But here is the break caused by the occasional discovery of the crime, to which Thomas clings desperately, in the long afternoon in the studio, when he interrogates the "signs" of life and believes he discovers an unsuspected reality, denied in his eyes. Here Antonioni reaches one of the highest moments of his cinema: from the comparison of the images, that is of the "signs", from the intense use of the tools, from the desperate meditation something is born that seems a triumphant result, but which immediately vanishes into thin air, and everything returns to the primitive uncertainty. The fact is that the truth is elusive: not even the body, first photographed and then seen by Thomas, is true.

In the finale, the concept is reversed: the truth is even in fiction, as long as it is accepted as truth. We are referring to the tennis match without the ball, which is a page of exquisite architecture and which, in our opinion, represents the whole film well, where the concepts are certainly no more important than the aesthetic contemplation. The camera, for example, which follows the ideal ball out of the field on a tracking shot, slowing down and stopping on the grass — to frame the grass, the empty lawn — as if it had really followed the run of a ball, and which then it follows its trajectory when the "ball" is relaunched, as well as sealing the concept of the relativity of reality it creates moments of true poetic suggestion, made up of an impalpable sense of mystery, of participation in something fantastic, magical.

Sensible experience, therefore, deceives us, there is no doubt, and Antonioni does not limit himself to illustrating the deceptions of sight and of its "sublimation" which is the glassy eye of the highly perfected Rolley, but also those of hearing and its "mechanical devices": the amplifier in the music room that throws a tantrum, against which the guitarist rages to "punish" him, and conversely the noise of the ball that is not there, audible not only to the "players" but also to Thomas and the spectator.

What is the truth? Here is the real "mystery", the real mystery. Being able to give order and meaning to the chaos of life is, for the painter Bill, "like finding the key in a mystery book", only here, in this finite existence, someone has thrown away the key. Art as a "modification" of reality. Antonioni, like the Bergman of About all those ladies need  Persona, in the midst of his discourse he stops to question himself, to confess, to talk about himself and his way - of the possible ways - of continuing his contact with things and of expressing this contact.

It's not just a question of "photography" (although the good Di Palma second Antonioni with extraordinary sensitivity): the director builds discourses completed with the "global" observation of things, and of gestures, facts, behaviors, as in the sequence of the blow up, sustained by a profound silence, or like that of the park visited for the first time, with the marginal presence of the tennis court, the pigeons chasing, the observation of the two lovers, the clearing that remains empty, the rustling fronds in silence.

Da Cineforum, 71, January 1968, pp. 31–35

Georges sadoul

A fashionable photographer (David Hemmings), in London in '67, discovers, enlarging a photo, that the love scene in a park he shot and of which the protagonist (Vanessa Redgrave) tried in vain to get the negative , is actually a murder scene. But the traces of this have disappeared, and no one is interested in it.

What is the relationship between reality and abstraction, how the imaginary and the lived are connected in a society by now indifferent to the tragedies of others, such as the "youth revolution" of costume - particularly evident in the "post-Victorian London" where Antonioni wanted to shoot his film — does not know in which direction to move: the themes in this film by Antonioni ("which has few biographical elements. I believe in this story, but on the outside", he said) are, at least apparently, clearer and more immediate than in his past work, and this is probably the reason for the great public success of this work, also and above all in America.

The extreme photographic skill and some splendid sequences (the photos in the park, the painter's house, the first meeting, at the beginning of the film, with a band of young people with masked faces, the small "orgy" with the two teenagers in the photographic studio , between colors of a delicate mannerism, etc.) do not prevent the film from falling unpredictably.

Da Movie dictionary, Florence, Sansoni, 1968

Lino Miccichè

Blow Up: i.e. literally "enlargement". Not just because Thomas, the film's main character, is a photographer; but also, and indeed above all, because the true protagonist of Antonioni's tenth feature film is not one of the usual symbolic characters whose contrast with reality signifies the processes of estrangement which it forces individuals to, but reality itself in its polyvalent indifference: where objects men things made slip without a trace, silent and interchangeable, with a reality so devoid of depth and impact that their existence is just as weightless as their non-existence. In this phenomenology of the absurd, where the discourse therefore moves from the effect (alienation) to the cause (alienating reality), Thomas has the function of a catalyst agent who objectively records (photographs) portions of reality and analyzes them (the magnifies). As is known, and it will be worth remembering, it is precisely from a photograph and an enlargement that the plot of the film begins.

One of the first observations that can be made on the thematic and narrative level of Blow-Up it is that the events involve the characters only externally: they do not change them, nor do they seem able to change them. Unlike all the protagonists of the tetralogy (or rather the protagonists; and this passage of sex is already significant; after Giuliana of Il deserto rosso, the woman-salvation disappears, as if to signify that there is no longer any possible salvation), Thomas lets reality slip over him, he experiences it with a completely detached participation, he doesn't suffer from it in any way.

His approach to things, his "curiosity" to know them, do not motivate a position, a character, a problem. Not a movement, a gesture, a statement, a contradiction offer footholds for deducing a psychological picture, or even just an antinomic existential project: Thomas's life is a scaffolding of objects (beautiful objects), of colors (beautiful colours), of human appearances (beautiful appearances) that touch it and with which it merges or from which it detaches itself with the same indifference. If the presence of a woman, Patricia, the painter friend's companion, may appear to be a vague glimmer of human openness, he doesn't even seem to notice it: the only "love" he knows is playful joy, without a "before" and without an "after", of a threesome with two girls who leave as they came, from the unknown to the unknown.

Play and indifference are the two variants of an ambiguous reality. And this is the second observation that can be made about the film: the ambiguity, ie the indefinability, of things is the main theme of this symphony of indifference. Thus beyond the "fact/not fact" from which the film takes its cue - the unprovable, inexplicable crime, perhaps never occurred, in front of which, in any case, the trees in the park continue to rustle - objects and people tend to escape every identification: spots of colour, soft shadows, meaningless signs, a message without a code of a reality that speaks an incomprehensible language.

Stylistically this translates into Blow-Up in a series of changes that innovate the characteristic style of Antonioni up to The desert red. For convenience, we will limit ourselves to mentioning only two: color and rhythm. In Il deserto rosso color had eminently psychological functions, of subjective definition. It was no coincidence that it had been called the "color of feelings" and the definition was well suited to the use that Antonioni had made of it: just think of the violet flowers, first out of focus in the foreground and then in a very sharp, almost metallic long shot, which opened and they closed the visit of Corrado and Giuliana to the house of Mario, the neurotic worker. In Blow-Up color has, so to speak, ideological functions, of objective definition. It could be called the color of the unknowable as it tends to connote the double order of interchangeability and atomisation of reality: just think of the intense green of the park which turns deep blue in the night.

But, as has been said, also the rhythmic qualities - a fundamental component of Antonion's "prose cinema" - highlight in Blow-Up a different orchestration. The introspective slowness of The night or The desert red, the expressive overload of each shot, the analytical intensity of the "field" are here replaced by a broken period, made up of abrupt jolts, rapid shifts, dazzling glimpses, sudden illuminations: as if to avoid any excessive focusing, any concentration of interest, every illusion that reality can have other truth than its own naked, immediate evidence.

In apparent contrast to this principle there is a single object on which the protagonist's (and director's) attention dwells: the park with its multiple and substituteable images. But the profound truth that it seems to offer ultimately reveals itself as absolutely unknowable, precarious, provisional: here too, in short, the only firm and lasting truth is identified with appearance. After that, all that remains is to accept to live the illusion as true: the game of tennis mimicked, without the ball, to which Thomas lends himself, while the sound of a real tennis ball suddenly comes from the soundtrack.

Blow-Up marks the turning point in Antonion's theme, from the motif of the tormenting maladaptation to reality, to that of the inert adaptation to reality, that is, to integration: in a world of objects and reified human beings which by now, beyond Claudia's torment (The adventure), the anguish of Lidia (The night), Victoria's questions (The Eclipse), Giuliana's neurosis (Il deserto rosso), he calmed down in the uncomposed composure of an irreversible sleep of reason. This film, thought up and shot in 1966, and with which Antonioni won the 1967 Cannes Grand Prix, confirms more than any other what we initially said about the ability of Antonioni's discourse to remain steadfast around a single trellis (basically that , already mentioned, of the "feeling of reality"), however gradually opening up to subsequent developments that underline its risky, but constantly renewed modernity.

Few films, and not only in Italian cinema, reflect how Blow-Up - albeit through a whole series of mediations and allegorical reductions - the unease that in those two or three central seasons of the last decade already foresaw the explosion of 1968, after which Antonioni will give his poetics a further turning point with Zabriskie Point. A work like Blow-Up it is at the same time definitive testimony of the "international" dimension (and yet not at all "cosmopolitan") of Antonioni's discourse, that is of his placing - together with the more imaginative Rossellini and the better Visconti - in a perspective that is not limited (albeit brilliantly, as in the case of Fellini) from a cultural and humoral hinterland so specifically (in some cases so provincially) Italian which has often characterized, in the history of Italian film, even the most notable personalities of our cinema.

In certain respects there is no doubt that this characteristic legitimizes, not entirely unjustifiably, the sensation that among the great authors of our cinema Michelangelo Antonioni is the one capable of greater detachment and less immediate concrete "commitment" with respect to the general tradition of ideological-political militancy of Roman filmmakers. However, it is equally undoubted that in Italian cinema, not infrequently, the showy militancy serves as a noisy cover for clamorous industrial subjections: to an expressive surrender badly disguised by flashy ideological rigor, to an unlimited trust (actually very mysteriously founded) in the possibility that some progressive "ideological contents" can be conveyed, without price and without losses, by regressive formal models. All the cinema of Antonioni, e Blow-Up perhaps in a particular way, it bears witness to the rejection of this convenient alibi and the positive choice of the first political commitment that must be asked of a filmmaker: that of being "politically" responsible for one's means of expression.

Da Italian cinema of the 60s, Venice, Marsilio, 1975, pp. 239–242

Stefano Lo Verme

In London, a fashion photographer believes he has seen (and photographed) a murder. He tries to get to the solution of the mystery, but he can't. Reality has many faces, even evidence, even an image impressed on a plate can be denied. The film starts as a "mystery" but soon turns out to be a fascinating meditation on the gap (if there is one) between reality and fantasy. Unlike other Antonioni films, Blow-Up it is perhaps more timely work than valid. It happened at a time when the public was interested in existential themes, hermeticisms of language, works without a plot. Carlo di Palma's prodigious photography captures the most evocative glimpses of the Beatles' London and Carnaby Street and (quickly) resumes Redgrave's nudity.

Thomas, a brilliant young London photographer, while walking by chance in a public park takes pictures of a mysterious girl who is in the company of a man; however, when she realizes it, she follows him home and does everything to steal the roll of film from him. Intrigued, Thomas develops the negatives, and by enlarging the images he realizes that he has evidence of a murder in his hands.

Made in 1966 and filmed in London, Blow-Up it was the first film in English directed by the director Michelangelo Antonioni, who also co-authored the screenplay together with Tonino Guerra; produced by Carlo Ponti, the film surprisingly met with resounding international success and won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and an Oscar nomination for best director. Inspired by the short story The devil's slime by Julio Cortazar Blow-Up is built around the eventful daily events of the protagonist, a renowned fashion photographer played by David Hemmings, and continues the discourse on art and cinema already started by the Italian filmmaker in his previous titles.

As frequently happens in Antonioni's works, the story does not follow a precise narrative structure but is entirely based on the ambiguity of the images. In the first part, the film illustrates the Swinging London of the 60s, with its frenetic rhythms, its frivolous character and its eccentricities; then, at a certain point, the plot suddenly deviates towards the thriller, with the episode in the park which will be the engine of the protagonist's obsessive investigation in search of an elusive and ineffable truth. And in fact, the film wants to be a reflection on the deceptive nature of reality, an enigmatic and incomprehensible reality filtered through the lens of the camera; to this theme is added that of the illusoriness of the gaze, in an atypical detective story in which what is seen does not always correspond to what is, and in which there seems to be no longer any certainty (did the crime happen or not?). Not surprisingly, in the end, the viewer's doubts are destined to remain unresolved.

Revised today, Blow-Up it certainly continues to be an hermetic and fascinating film, although there are some narrative imbalances and some sequences may appear to be ends in themselves. At the time, it caused a scandal for the display of female nudes and for a certain slightly specious transgressiveness (as in the ménage-à-trois scene); however, the silent tennis match played by the mimes in the finale should be remembered. It was one of English actress Vanessa Redgrave's first film roles. The title, Blow-Up, refers to the operation of enlarging the photographs.

From MYmovies

Hugh Casiraghi

Twenty-four hours in the life of a London photographer. From a dawn under the sign of Reality (the nocturnal asylum from which the protagonist disguised as a homeless man comes out among those he has secretly filmed) to the following dawn of Virtual Reality (the mimed tennis match without the ball and without tennis rackets a hippie group, in which the same photographer who has lost reality along the way attends and participates). In between lies the story of human figures and objects, placed as spots of color in an abstract painting. There swinging London from 1966, an oasis of rampant youth and cover-worthy beauties, as a perfectly integrated fashion photographer captures it with his lens. Sex at your fingertips, rock music and soft drugs: all doors are open and a widespread sense of freedom hovers over the splendid neighbourhood. But “he too is free?"asks the writer friend, who prepares an art book with him, pointing to the photographer a distressing close-up taken in the dormitory.

In fact, this freedom produces satiety and, with it, a creeping malaise from a declining society without stable values, a not even hidden desire to escape to other shores. And after all, at the beginning and at the end, that caravan of beat disguised as a clown frames and implies the contestation of an establishment that does not appear, but is there. A small preview of what will happen in XNUMX.

Blow-Up (in photographic language "enlargement") is Michelangelo Antonioni's cine-eye. The human eye of the young protagonist omnipresent from the first to the last shot, and the mechanical eye of the Rolleyflex that never leaves him. Don't forget the title I am a camera of a comedy that the director had directed in the theater in 1957. Until when do the two eyes coincide? and when do they diverge? Such are the problems that the film poses.

The protagonist (David Hemmings, then almost unknown) puts on the double skin of the professional master of the trade and the amateur in search of something new. At work with the aseptic models, in the aseptic and immense studio equipped with sophisticated technology, he has carnally its matter (sitting with Verushka corresponds to a sexual act). The amateurish aspect, on the other hand, is the indolent but attentive wandering, being on the alert to "steal" reality, the identification of the environment and of the people in an elegant series of plans, glimpses, details.

The young man moves to the open Rolls-Royce, equipped with a radio-telephone (today's mobile phone). When he gets off, his slow stride in impeccable white jeans prolongs the soothing coloristic effect of the atelier. But the "yellow" is lurking starting from the walk in the park, whose idyllic green will change into the blue of mystery as evening falls.

What are the strange couple (a girl in a miniskirt and a grizzled old man) doing standing among the trees? Does it buckle or push back? And why will she be so anxious and ready to do anything to get the scene roll back? The photographer's prominent eyeballs and the cannon of his telephoto lens have sucked in a fragment of life like suckers that hides more than one enigma. The development, and above all the analytic enlargement and decomposition, reveal a different reality from appearances. It is here that the two eyes divide, the mechanical one having registered what the human one has not perceived. Beyond the visible reality there is another hidden one. SF, but which one? First, the thief of images believes he has averted a crime with his casual intervention. Then he discovers that the crime has taken place and, returning to the scene, sees the body next to a bush. Finally the roll and the corpse have disappeared and the fronds up there rustle almost mockingly.

Therefore, not only is reality in itself ambiguous, but its image, instead of helping to decipher it, makes it even more elusive. Photography and journalism, cinema and television restore the surface of things, not their essence. It is a recurring theme in Antonioni's art.

As in fashion and costume the mass development that then took place is heralded, so Blow-Up predicts the progressive derailment of vital reality into virtual reality. Today, almost thirty years later, fashion is said to have "nothing under the dress" (which was a subject by Antonioni himself, unfortunately created by others). Today that tennis match is no longer a metaphor, nor a frenzy of the imagination, much less, as it was then, a game between cheerful and pathetic. It has become the obsessive nightmare that has invaded every field, from advertising to politics.

Blow-Up above all, it is a beautiful film to watch, exquisitely maneuvered on a subtle balance of colors and on the visual strength of images chosen with an enchanting rigor. After the slow rhythms of the 'tetralogy of feelings' (The Adventure, The Night, The Eclipse, The Red Desert) it is also a film that flows with a pressing montage. It was not for nothing that it brought the director his first complete success with the public, especially in the United States, opening up the possibility for him to shoot there Zabriskie Point. Seeing him then, one had the sensation of stepping out of a provincial cloak which, thanks also to his political regime, had spread over Italy, and of breathing in a new, continental air.

Il gut feeling. between Antonioni and the English world is indubitable: on the other hand, we had already had an inkling of it fourteen years earlier, in that magnificent episode of the triptych The vanquished made on the outskirts of London. In the spring of 1967 Blow-Up won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, applauded by the same audience that had booed the masterpiece in the spring of 1960 The adventure.

However, the beauty of the film is not that of the airplane propeller which dominates, beautiful but useless, in the photographer's studio. At the center there is a problem that worries. The civilization of the image destroys feelings, even the little that survived in the Italian desert. The women who best represent it have the consistency of mannequins, the two nymphets aspiring models enter the orgy as in a game.

Even Vanessa Redgrave, in her tormented character, poses jerkily, like an automaton. And even the object loses its meaning as soon as it is removed from her place of worship. The guitar piece thrown to the fan in the basement of the concert it's a reason to hunt inside, but just outside nobody wants it. The protagonist himself suffers a professional setback that does not disturb him beyond a certain limit: he too resigns himself to the game by sending the non-existent ball back to the hippie girl. But watch out for the finale. In three fade-out shots, Antonioni cancels his character, as he had done with the vanishing woman in it The adventure. A "third eye", that of the author, takes over from the other two to tell us, before the word "End", that the increasingly arduous cultural and artistic battle for the identification of the world in which we continue to live cannot stop.

Michelangelo Antonioni talks about the film

My problem for Blow-Up was to recreate reality in an abstract form. I wanted to question "the real present": this is an essential point of the film's visual aspect considering that one of the main themes of the film is: to see or not to see the right value of things.

Blow-Up it is a play without an epilogue, comparable to those stories from the XNUMXs where Scott Fitzgerald expressed his loathing of life. I hoped, during the making, that no one could say, seeing the finished film: Blow-Up it is typically Anglo-Saxon work. But, at the same time, I wanted no one to define it as an Italian film. Originally the story of Blow-Up it should have been set in Italy, but I realized almost immediately that it would have been impossible to locate the story in any Italian city. A character like Thomas doesn't really exist in our country. On the contrary, the environment in which the great photographers work is typical of the London of the time in which the narration takes place. Thomas also finds himself at the center of a series of events that it is easier to relate to life in London than in Rome or Milan. He opted for the new mentality that was created with the revolution of life, customs and morals in Great Britain, especially among young artists, publicists, stylists or musicians who are part of the Pop movement. Thomas leads an existence regulated as a ceremonial and it is no coincidence that he claims to know no other law than anarchy.

Before the shooting of the film, I had stayed in London for a few weeks during the filming of Modesty Blaise directed by Joseph Losey and starring Monica Vitti. I realized at that time that London would be the ideal setting for a story like the one I had in mind. However, I had never had the idea of ​​making a film about London.

The story itself could have been set and developed, no doubt, in New York or Paris. I knew, however, that I wanted a gray sky for my script rather than a pastel blue horizon. I was looking for realistic colors and had already given up on the idea of ​​the film for certain effects obtained for The red desert. At the time I had worked hard to obtain flattened perspectives with the telephoto lens, to compress characters and things and place them in contradiction with each other. On the contrary, in Blow-Up I lengthened the perspectives, I tried to put air, spaces, between people and things. The only time I used the telephoto lens in the film was when circumstances forced me: for example in the sequence in the center of the crowd, at the bottling.

The great difficulty I ran into was making the violence a reality. Embellished and sweetened colors are often the ones that look the harshest and most aggressive. In Blow-Up eroticism takes center stage, but often the emphasis is on a cold, calculated sensuality. The traits of exhibitionism and voyeurism are particularly underlined: the young woman in the park undresses and offers her body to the photographer in exchange for the negatives she so much wants to recover.

Thomas witnesses an embrace between Patrizia and her husband and the presence of this spectator seems to double the young woman's excitement.

The rough aspect of the film would have made working in Italy almost impossible for me. Censorship would never have tolerated some images. Although, no doubt, it has become more tolerant in many places around the world, mine remains the country where the Holy See is located. As I have written on other occasions about my films, my cinematographic stories are documents built not on one suite of coherent ideas, but on flashes, ideas, which are born every moment. I therefore refuse to talk about the intentions I put into the film to which I dedicate all my time from time to time. It is impossible for me to analyze one of my works before the work is completed. I am a film maker, a man who has certain ideas and who hopes to express himself with sincerity and clarity. I always tell a story. As for whether it's a story without any relation to the world we live in, I'm always incapable of deciding before I've told it.

When I started thinking about this film, I often stayed up at night, thinking and taking notes. Soon, this story, its thousand possibilities, fascinated me and I tried to understand where its thousand implications could lead me. But when I got to a certain stage, I said to myself: let's start by making the film, that is, let's try more or less to tell its plot and then… I still find myself in this stage today, while the making of Blow-Up it is in an advanced stage. To be frank, I'm still not entirely sure what I'm doing because I'm still in the "secret" of the film.

I think I work in a way that is both reflective and intuitive. For example, a few minutes ago, I isolated myself to reflect on the following scene and tried to put myself in the place of the main character when he discovers the body. I stopped in the shadows of the English lawn, I paused in the park, in the mysterious clarity of London's illuminated signs. I approached this imaginary corpse and totally identified with the photographer. I felt very strongly his excitement, his emotion, the feelings that triggered a thousand sensations in my "hero" for the discovery of the body and his subsequent way of animating, thinking, reacting. All this lasted only a few minutes, one or two. Then the rest of the crew joined me and my inspiration, my feelings vanished.

Da Cinema New no. 277, June 1982, p. 7–8

Emiliano Morreale on 'Blow-Up' restored

Antonioni also goes abroad, to shoot a story loosely inspired by a story by Julio Cortázar for Carlo Ponti. The story is well known: a fashion photographer, also tempted by social realism reportage, one day in a park realizes that he has photographed a murder by chance. An idea that, in the following decade, would inspire many directors, especially in a New Hollywood between postmodernism and conspiracy theories, up to De Palma's Blow out. Agostinis had already dedicated

a couple of years ago a fascinating and well-informed book, Swinging City (Feltrinelli), brought to the world that revolved around the director from Ferrara during his trip to London. And there is something to make your head spin. It is a season that was born from the ashes of the Tory governments, buried by the Profumo scandal, but Labor is already disappointing many with their economic policies and support for the war in Vietnam. But the battle against theatrical censorship began, and in 64 Radio Caroline began broadcasting the new music off the coast of the island, on an old Danish ferry. Carnaby Street has already become a tourist trap, but the creativity has moved to Chelsea. Innovative television broadcasts, vintage shops (with names like Granny Takes a Trip), venues with or without music, for VIPs or non-VIPs, photographers' studios, magazine editorial offices and parties. Art schools churn out new talents and new sensibilities: “Everything was colour. We were bringing color to this foggy nation,” Clare Peploe recalls in the documentary.

Antonioni arrives in London in April 66, and takes his time to explore the city, very different from the London where he had set an episode of The Vanquished in 52. While the director beats the first takes, the Beatles are recording Eleanor Rigby, the first single of what will be the album Revolver. England wins the soccer world championship. Truffaut has just finished shooting in the English studios Fahrenheit 451; Roman Polanski is at work, Kubrick is in the midst of filming 2001. In a few months Antonioni manages to meet the best of a metropolis in effervescence, and to involve prominent names in the project. He sniffs the air, immediately finds the right contacts. He meets everyone. He hires the playwright of the day, Edward Bond, to write the English dialogue, and the set and costume designer of Not everyone has it. He submits a questionnaire to fashion photographers to understand their habits, shoots the scenes of the photo sessions in the studio of one of them, John Cowan (among the models is Jane Birkin), but also uses the "committed" reports of the great Don McCullin . The music is by jazzman Herbie Hancock; for the concert scene in a club the Who are contacted first, and then the Yardbirds will be chosen, in formation with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. And we could continue. Today, the "philosophical" side of the film, with the reflections on the disappearance of reality, the point of view, the mimes playing tennis with invisible balls, may appear dated. Even if it undoubtedly intercepted a widespread mood, a distrust of reality that was all the more felt in a director who, after all, came from neorealism. And undoubtedly, the most fascinating element is precisely that of the intertwining with the heart of a city and of an era: as if Blow Up was above all a surreal documentary that captures not reality but the dream of an era.

Repubblica.it, 15 May 2017

Jill Kennington photographed by John Cowan

Philippe Garner on Blow-Up enlargements

The ambiguous and sometimes deceptive nature of the photographic image is analyzed by Michelangelo Antonioni in Blow-Up as an effective visual metaphor for the immeasurable ambiguities of life itself.

At the heart of the film is the gripping scene in which Thomas, the protagonist, zooms in on the photos he has taken in the park, convinced that there is a mystery to be solved. Yet, in enlarging them, those increasingly grainy images instead of revealing the truth become even more illegible and the magnified details appear indecipherable, enigmatic.

In his film Antonioni recalls, through the twenty-four hours that unfold before our eyes, the existential doubts of the photographer himself. THE Blow-Up that frustrate rather than solve his investigations effectively visually reflect his own ambivalence. These contradictory artifacts implicitly raise metaphysical questions that Antonioni, as usual, is careful not to resolve.

Antonioni had asked Arthur Evans, his still photographer, to make some test images of a person hidden in the leaves and Evans asked his daughter to pose in the bushes and then shoot her on 6×6 film.

This request was at least unusual for a photographer whose career had always been characterized by high technical quality, and these first attempts proved too sharp and defined to satisfy the director's needs and intentions.

Thus Antonioni recruited the photographer Don McCullin, who was making a name for himself thanks to the crude reportages made above all for The Sunday Times Magazine. Most likely the two met through the journalist Francis Wyndham, who was helping Antonioni as a consultant to outline the environment and lifestyle of the new generation of ambitious photographers who worked in London. Obviously Wyndham and McCullin knew each other from their mutual association with the Sunday Times.

It was McCullin, Thomas's alter ego, who took the photos in which the film's protagonist filmed a secret meeting between two lovers in Maryon Park, in Woolwich, southeastern London.

They were shot on 35mm on Kodak Tri-X, a versatile film with a grain that would become even more evident in the enlarging process, perfect for achieving that image disintegration that Antonioni had in mind. The images and related enlargements were all horizontal and were printed in a 60×50 cm format.

To facilitate the enlargement process, transitional negatives were made from these early prints, and the film shows Thomas doing this process in the darkroom. The final prints assume a fundamental but silent role within Antonioni's calm-toned drama.

When filming wrapped, however, they went missing for almost thirty years, until a crumpled yellow Kodak bag turned up at an auction in London in 1996 containing 21 of these original prints. Pencil annotations on the envelope read “HANGING ENLARGES + PHOTO PORTFOLIO” (front) and “RESTAURANT + SEQ BLOW-UP — KEEP UNLOCKED” (back).

Fortunately this last instruction had been respected, who knows if by chance or on purpose.

In hindsight, today we clearly understand the importance of these enlargements, which not only represent scenic devices functional to a particular film project, but are images that play a fundamental role in the history of our analysis and understanding of the photographic medium.

Antonioni, who can rightly be considered the author, even if their creation was entrusted to McCullin, already wondered about the nature of photography, questioned its probative value, undermining its generally recognized claim to innate truthfulness, authoritative science.

The director was in good company. In that same period, the artists Richard Hamilton, Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol also deconstructed and reworked pre-existing images, albeit in a climate of substantial respect for the concept of photographic truth.

This line of research anticipated the wider use and investigation that would emerge in the following decade with the works of a generation of young artists - including Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman - who leapfrogged the narrow confines of the photographic discipline to venture into contemporary art.

Antonioni's intuition hit the mark when for Blow-Up the director outlined the figure of the artist as a counterpart to his photographer. The character was inspired by the British artist

Ian Stephenson, whose Pointillist paintings were a revealing parallel to Thomas' mysterious enlargements: both mediums raised questions of visual perception, in which physiology raised philosophical questions.

From: I am the photographer. Blow-Up and photography, Contrasto, Rome, 2018, pp. 53–58

Walter Moser on photography by John Cowan and Don McCullin

In stark contrast to Thomas' detailed portrait, Antonioni's description of fashion photography appears somewhat superficial. To be a film centered around a fashionphotographer which contains many accurate depictions of the photographic gesture itself, oddly enough Blow-Up he shows us a few fashion photographs (The images that can be seen in the film were taken from the exhibition “The Interpretation of Impact through Energy”).

We only see a few on the walls in the scenes shot inside Cowan's studio — all taken by the author in the early XNUMXs and made available to Antonioni.

This explains why Cowan is the only photographer mentioned in the opening credits: even though his photos appear in numerous scenes in the film, the director never directs the camera at them, nor does he isolate them within the frame; their purpose is only to characterize the figure of the fashion photographer in a more authentic way, not to explore the genre in which he works — at least not in depth. Despite this, however, the photos of Cowan used in the film were chosen with extreme care.

Antonioni tries to connect them to the photographic services shown during the film and although the photos in question are all taken outdoors, for Blow-Up those that interact with the type of work and photography shown in the film itself are chosen.

The scene with Veruschka, for example, where Thomas unhooks the camera from the tripod to be able to circle the model and shoot more instinctively and less thoughtfully, reproduces all the hallmarks of a typical Cowan photo shoot.

His two images showing Jill Kennington dressed as a paratrooper and a diver are among the best seen fashion photos within the film and have the same characteristics — instantaneity, dynamism, spontaneity — evoked by Thomas's session. Hardly a coincidence, it's much more likely that Antonioni was explicitly copying Cowan's body language to outline her character. Thomas' photographic gesture and Cowan's images, therefore, match perfectly.

But if Cowan's photos are totally consistent with blow-up, the same cannot be said of Don McCullin's social reporting that Antonioni also uses. As already mentioned, Antonioni chooses a fashion photographer attracted by social reportage as the protagonist. The director describes this interest at the very beginning of the film, where we see Thomas coming out of a homeless shelter.

As it turns out later, while meeting with Ron, his publisher, Thomas spent the night there to photograph the plight of the poor. The protagonist meets Ron to show him a dummy of the book he would like to publish, and the publisher leafs through it carefully.

The photos shown are all by Don McCullin, taken in the early XNUMXs. McCullin had been contacted before filming by an agent of Antonioni, who had asked him if he was willing to participate in the making of the film.

When he accepted, Antonioni commissioned him - for 500 pounds - the images that would later become the enlargements, the blow upof the title. The shots were taken in Maryon Park, London, where the sequence of Thomas secretly filming a pair of lovers was filmed.

Antonioni and McCullin also talked about a report by the latter and selected 24 photos for the film. The photos in question are mostly portraits taken in the poor neighborhoods of London, especially in the East End, in those years an area known for its poverty, slums, unrest in factories and racial tensions.

McCullin chooses the subjects and characterizes them starting from their profession — butchers, policemen, musicians… — thus managing to present a cross-section of less affluent London. These images, unlike Cowan's, almost completely occupy the frame, while the two men observe and comment on them.

For Antonioni, McCullin's shots were an opportunity to reflect on the political and social upheavals of the time in Great Britain and allow us to measure how much society was changing in the XNUMXs and XNUMXs. In an exemplary sequence, Antonioni films Thomas while, in his car, he comes across one of the many protest marches for nuclear disarmament and peace, common in those years.

But beyond the political references, McCullin's photos allow us to identify the protagonist as a photographer is fashionable, is of social documentation: a dual orientation certainly not atypical at the time, as demonstrated by the photos of David Bailey and Terence Donovan in which the stylistic boundaries between the two genres are actually permeable; just think of the decision to photograph the models with a 35mm in a city setting, borrowed from social reportage. Nor was it unusual to see fashion shoots and social reporting on the pages of the same magazine, such as Man about Town.

The use of McCullin's photos in Blow-Up it is interesting to the extent that it contrasts with the original semantics of the images: McCullin was one of the few photographers who concentrated exclusively on photojournalism and had never ventured into the world of fashion photography.

His images have often been considered voyeuristic in the context of film, an interpretation that derives directly from the way Antonioni presents them, such as furtive shots of Thomas in the dormitory.

Not only does Thomas photograph the couple in the park without asking for any permission, but right at the beginning of the film Antonioni shows him leaving the shelter where he spent the night to shoot secretly.

The spectator is thus led to think that even the photographs taken in the dormitory - and also taken by McCullin - were taken stealthily, without the subjects' permission, such as those, later enlarged, of the couple in the park.

But however plausible that deduction may seem, it does not accord with the facts: the subjects of the photos look into the camera and are therefore aware that they are being photographed and since none of them protest, hide or withdraw, it seems unlikely that McCullin will is imposed on his subjects as Thomas does.

His approach confirms this assumption and indeed, McCullin has declared how much he loves approaching people to photograph them but only after asking their permission. In other words, her images are always the fruit of a dialogue between the photographer and the subject, not of a one-sided, voyeuristic gaze — as the film suggests.

Obviously the director does not appropriate McCullin's images to shed light on his intentions, but to give shape to his own vision and the photos are intended to make us understand that Thomas is increasingly tired of the superficial world that revolves around fashion photography . As he tells his editor: “I wish I had a lot of money.

Then I'd be free”, and in response Ron points to one of the portraits — which Antonioni describes in the screenplay as “a photograph of an old man in a desolate place — dirty, stupid, a human wreck — and cynically asks him 'Free as he ?”.

McCullin's photos, therefore, serve to represent the difference in class and the consequent imbalance of power between photographer and subject.

The images that play a central role in Blow-Up are the enlargements to which the film owes its title. The story of their origin is well known: the protagonist secretly photographs a pair of lovers in a park. The fact that the woman, Jane, played by Vanessa Redgrave, seems extremely eager to recover the negatives ignites the photographer's curiosity.

So, after developing the film and making small format prints (about 17×25 cm), he decides to enlarge some of them. At first he notices a man lurking in the bushes with a revolver and then what appears to be a corpse.

The photo negatives were made on set by McCullin, to whom Antonioni assigned this specific task. Using the same camera used by the protagonist of the film, a Nikon F, McCullin had to stand in the same places in the park and use the same angles as Thomas. McCullin remembers it as a surreal and unsettling situation: he was told to follow Antonioni's instructions, but no one ever explained to him the content implications of those images, and therefore he knew nothing of the man hidden in the bushes at the time of shooting that specific one. photo.

That the camera was able to see something else than the photographer, not only in the film, but also in reality is a pleasantly ironic detail. McCullin delivered the negatives to the production company, which then took care of enlarging them for Antonioni.

The enlargements are the only photos of the film whose production process we follow from start to finish, and it is certainly for this reason that Antonioni did everything possible to ensure that the photographic gesture and its visual result corresponded as closely as possible. To keep the production process as authentic as possible, McCullin also advised actor David Hemmings throughout the park shoot. It was he who showed him how to hold the camera and the body language that came with it.

From: I am the photographer. Blow-Up and photography, Contrasto, Rome, 2018, pp. 154–163