“it was a full hour before we learn anything of Hemmings’ suspicions about the murder”. That is what makes it interesting to me.
It’s about how sometimes the closer you look at something the less you understand about it. Like it or not, it’s pretty influential.
The film, imo, reflects how flashes of inspiration and inquisition pull us out of our humdrum or routine lives and give us a purpose, however transitory it may be, kind of like what motivates or inspires us into doing things we would otherwise not really give second thought to. I could be wrong.
I was working on a script (a really long time ago) about a guy who is looking over his old pictures in a digital camera, and he zooms in on a beautiful landscape shot and sees his fiancee kissing a politician who was murdered the night that he and his finacee met. I was reading about Blow Out (a film I loved at the time), and noticed it was a re-imagining of a film from the 60s done by some Italian director. I looked up that plot and noticed, it was extremely close to my script. Annoyed I decided to give the film a chance, and I was pretty blown away and confused. It was not the thriller I expected, in any way.
I think this film gets a lot of backlash due to it being so different than what you would have expect.
“The lack of resolution was a bit annoying and the last scene with the mime tennis match was just bizarre in a kind of meaningless way, it seemed to me.”
If you’re expecting a perfect resolution from Antonioni of course you’re going to be disappointed. In fact if you’re expecting any kind of real narrative you’re going to be disappointed.
Blow-Up hasn’t aged well, in my opinion. When you say “It captures the spirit of the 60’s” you’ve pretty much nailed it… it’s a beautiful, aesthetically detached film that speaks to a lot of preoccupations that were very important at the time (when postmodernism was gaining critical currency) that have been largely spent at this point. Self-reference, the loss of personal identity, the emptiness of glamour, the crushing weight of the mundane, and the uncertainty of experience — all themes that really deserved to be considered, especially after the glassy-eyed complacency of the 50’s.
The weird, sterile sense of boring everyday life isn’t a flaw in the movie’s message… it’s one of the essential points. It shows up in lots of Antonioni, and it’s very intentional. The scene with the mimes at the end wasn’t meaningless, either — it’s more an acknowledgment of the fact that everything is a farce or a facade, and our great existential crises are pretty much just shadow-plays we’re creating to dramatize our boring lives. However, I think as a culture, we’ve faced these facts and learned ways to deal with them, so these themes don’t seem as profound to us any more.
So your confusion is understandable… you just have to put yourself in a different pair of shoes to understand where Blow-Up is coming from. Understand that your boredom, and your dissatisfaction with the lack of resolution, are actually a big part of the film’s thematic POV.
I had a rough time with Blow-Up my first go. I’m definitely going to try it again before I set any opinions in stone. I like seeing Jane Birkin naked, I know that much.
i didn’t love it the first time i watched it, but i thought it was amazing the second time. i watched the part where the girl disappears probably 10 times and i could not for the life of me figure out how it happened. i don’t know what you expected but you certainly can’t go into it for the mystery aspects. it’s about a hip photographer who is briefly granted a reprieve from his banal existence, and the spark of passion that disappears with everything else in the movie.
you should read ebert’s great movies entry about it, and give it another shot.
I share Rumplesink’s opinion to a large extent.
I’d read that Blow Up was inspired by one of Julio Cortazar’s stories. He happens to be one of my favorite authors. This is the only reason I watched the film till the end. The mime scene was just about the only thing I actually liked and that made ‘sense’ to me.
What a shame.
@Jesse, Agree wholeheartedly with your take and I think that extends to every Antonioni movie from L’Avventura up to Zabriskie Point. His belief that modern life brings nothing more than alienation, incapacity for love and despair it is so outdated that I find it impossible to take any of his movies seriously. He has this incontrollable hate for bourgeois life or upper middle class that turns his movies into truly cinema relics.
He has this uncontrollable hate for bourgeois life or upper middle class that turns his movies into truly cinema relics.
He has ample justification for that point of view. Antonioni was born of that life and has spoken eloquently why he feels the way he does. Last I checked materialism and greed were still an affliction we’ve not cured ourselves of. Had he been alive last fall, Antonioni would have understood the near-collapse of this spectacle perfectly. He would also have choice things to say about Italy’s PM, that billionaire Buffoon Berlusconi.
@Jesse. Agree with your points. The first thing that overwhelmed me when I caught the film for the first time was its style. I felt like I was there, as in there in London during the sixties. The questions arising from the film are the icing on a great cake for me.
Rumplesink, you need to read Plato’s ‘Simile of the Cave.’ It might make a little more sense after you do.
The last five minutes of this film is modern art in its purest state.
@JESSE
One DVD commentary has some interesting things to say on it as well. Much of the film could be read as an exercise in the necessary inclusion of social and group context for individual objects to gain any significance or meaning. The one blurred shot he’s left with, worthless without its set. The guitar on the sidewalk, just junk once removed from the concert venue. The tennis match, stupid and aimless with one participant but suddenly valuable and, more to it, discernible with group participation.
Been a little while since I’ve seen it, but the ‘resolution’ seemed to wrap up in a satisfactory way to me. Similar in feel to Chinatown.
Greed and materialism are not exclusive afflictions of upper middle class and the examples you cite are despicable but pathological cases which by no means represent the majority. For Antonioni, Sandro and Claudia or Giuliana and Corrado are condemn to eternal alienation, boredom, and impossibility to love just because they belong to a fictionalized upper middle class. There is nothing they can do or will ever do that can possibly relieve them from Antonioni’s inferno. Their outrageous crime is to have money and no intellectual aspirations. As far as I am concern, I can spare his moral lessons because I find nothing useful or admirable in such a deterministic and elitist view.
Was it a murder or was it not. Awesome.
Here is something I was working on for a separate thread on Blow-up I planned to do, but if Rumplesink doesn’t mind a long post in his thread – since he posted this first – here is my take on the film [Note: Possible plot spoilers]:
I think that there are two key elements in the film to help understand what Antonioni is trying to get at. First, the mimes at the start and end of the film act as a key reference. We see them first as just a group of funny, anarchistic young theatre people, who lend an air of levity to the beginning of the film. At the end, they become the key to unravelling the theme of the movie. When Hemmings character is seen interacting with them at the end, by watching them play mime tennis, with no visible ball, then ‘retrieving’ the ball, and throwing it back, he is seen to be going along with the illusion they are creating.
The other key scene for me is the very ‘blow-up’ scene itself, where Hemmings keeps magnifying and blowing up the images of the shots in the park, to see just what has gone on, and discovers the body, and then the figure with the gun. This is a mesmerizing series of scenes, taken with almost no extraneous sound or without any dialogue. We see the finished shots as Hemmings hangs them up and studies them, seeing more and more detail.
We must also look at the context of the pictures in the park. Earlier we see Hemmings, a well-connected fashion photographer, as he leaves a doss-house. We then see several wonderful pictures he has taken in the doss house of the poor, old men who sleep there and realize that Hemmings character is also a serious photographer. He is doing a book of photographs showing the gritty, unseen side of mod London for his book, and wants to lighten the mood by taking some idyllic pictures of two apparent lovers in the park. These idyllic pictures were to finish his series, to lighten the mood. He is trying to take them from a great angle, so that the subjects are not posing, or even aware he is filming them. However, Vanessa Redgrave’s character does realize she and her lover are being filmed, and tries to catch Hemmings and grab his camera from him. We think initially this is being done because her sense of privacy has been offended, but realize, when Hemmings blows the pictures up, something much more sinister is happening.
We then have the confrontation of Hemmings by Redgrave later, when she tries to seduce him, to get the film. He gives her the wrong film, and proceeds to blow-up the original. After he has blown-up the pictures, he discovers an apparent murder. Later, he has a casual exchange with two very young fashion model wannabes that ends in a three-way sex romp. He falls asleep, wakes up to discover that his pictures have disappeared. When he goes back to the park, he indeed sees a body, but has no camera with him. It is interesting that when he does go back, the wind is rustling the trees, a similar device Antonioni has used before in moments of tension in previous films, such as L’avventura or L’eclisse.
When Hemmings tries to tell some stoned friends at a party what has happened, he is met with indifference and disbelief. When he goes back to the same spot in the park, the body has disappeared. The film ends with him joining the mime game, as if to highlight the absurdity of what has just gone on. He has seen something, not knowing exactly what, but has no proof. The reality he has filmed has disappeared and his own book ending is left hanging, as is the ending of the picture itself.
Certainly,we can see how Blow-Up ties in with Antonioni’s Italian films as an essay on alienation and how the modern culture of the 1960’s serves to fracture the relationship between people, making them more tenuous and tentative – hence alienated from one another. Life to Antonioni seems to be moving toward a purposeless void – without any external or internal meaning or reference point.
To me, the film’s ‘dated’ quality in the comments above is in the slow moving first part of the film, which can just be seen as a rather slight commentary on the mod London of the time. We see Hemmings go about London, in his flashy sports car, buying quaint objects like a propeller for his studio. He is then seen busy at work, with the film viewer as voyeur to the fashion shoot. So far, outside of some nice shots here and there – we seem to be just seeing a typically alienated hip rich person, so often the subject of Antonioni’s own Italian films. However, from the time he takes those pictures in the park that become the enigmatic heart of the film, the film truly takes off. However, Antonioni’s own style is so removed from contemporary sensibilities of fast action and quick cuts that I can see how it would be hard for contemporary (ie, younger) viewers to get into the mood of this very slowly developed piece – like the blow-up themselves.
Sorry for putting such as long post on your own thread Rumplesink, but this was the only Blow-up thread on site.
Trivia notes: Among the homeless men whose photos were taken by David Hemmings is Julio Cortazar who wrote the original short story on which “Blowup” is based.
The Yardbirds featuring Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck make a brief appearance in the film.
Yes, but the majority is crippled. Now, actually some of Antonioni’s figures do find love- well, a kind of love. He doesn’t kill them off, exactly. That happy-go-lucky crowd from L’Avventura are not suffering due to the oppressive nature of their class, that wouldn’t be terribly interesting. They suffer because they allow themselves to be defined by class and its entitlements. They are guilty of squandering their lives. What self-loathing Sandro must feel that makes him tip over the bottle of ink onto the student’s drawing. The point of rapproachment at the film’s conclusion between Sandro and Claudia is provisional at best. It is, however, something, rather than the nothingness Ana found. “Between grief and nothing I will take grief”, yes? Their outrageous crime is to allow their bad faith to ruin them. Claudia suspects that there is something more fulfilling somewhere, but by the end she is so terribly exhausted by Ana’s disappearance, Sandro’s foolishness and her own wan self, that she gives up. Tragic. Self-deception, betrayal and resentment are all that they exhibit.
@Casey- was it a murder or was it not? All I will say is that there is a reason Thomas is a photographer and not a painter. Think about it. It has to do with representation. Yes, the ending is perfection. Christopher is dead on- have a look at Plato’s Simile.
Great post, Bob. Allows me to appreciate Blowup much better.
The film is rather dated now, there’s no denying it, but it does pack a punch, I think. I remember when I first saw it in class I was severly underwhelmed also, but a good older friend was able to describe how deeply shocking the film was when it was first released, how there had just never been anything like it before.
I found the film to be rather awkward, dated, and uninvolving. I liked L’Avventura a lot, but Blowup left me cold.
I like Blow-Up a lot. For me it’s about how Hemmings begins as a rather frivolous hedonist, an artist of sorts, but not a deep or particularly serious one; and then he stumbles on this strange happening captured in one of his pictures, and it begins to get under his skin. He has to think on his feet, because people want this picture back, it’s evidence of something; he was always quick on his feet, when he wanted to get laid or get rid of someone, but now the stakes are higher.
It’s about the accident of “real art” (which is to say, a mystery deeper than the superficial) coming to disturb the life of a man who is not quite a real artist. Similar to Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, where the suave but empty Cary Grant is “filled in” by having to learn how to survive in a battle of wits against terrorists. Both films were oblique answers to questions that were on a lot of people’s minds in the late 50s/early 60s — would you crack under torture? What if you stumbled into a political conspiracy? What if you knew the bombs were coming and you had thirty minutes to live?
What’s fascinating to me about Blow Up is it ends in a somewhat unresolved way. We don’t know how much Hemmings is changed, as usual in Antonioni the social conditions and reactions that have been set in motion dwarf any one individual’s attempt to change them (or to change himself or herself). Like the idle rich in L’Avventura and La Notte, who have glimpses of what’s wrong with their stagnant, moribund lives but can’t really think of themselves in any other kind of context. The murder victim in Blow Up dies for Hemmings’ sins, but he accomplishes no spiritual awakening.
“Yes, but the majority is crippled.” Uau. That is a very elitist and sad thing to say.
I don’t think Sandro/Claudia or Giulliana/Corrado allow themselves to be defined by their class. If that was so we would see them claiming privileges or bitching about some shit they feel to be deserved. They surely have no idea of their maladies and that is what makes it so tragic. It is us, the intellectual class with time to debate this issue, that identifies their mal de vivre as the deserved consequence from the terrible ignominy that is to squander one’s life.
But the thing that really gets me is that there is never a glimpse of hope or humanity that will help them cope with life. Even if sometimes they briefly questioned themselves, they are condemn to do the same thing over and over for the rest of their lives.
Well, thanks for all the posts – certainly some food for thought. I’m not sure this one’s worth a revisit any time soon. I’d rather watch Blow Out by DePalma to be honest – I was mightily impressed with that film when I saw it some years back. I remember being absolutely floored by the scene where Travolta pieces together the stills from the newspaper with the sound recording he made and realises what’s happening. Stunning piece of cinema in my opinion.
The mimes are bookends. Their behavior is bizarre and farcical. Hemmings vanishes off the lawn in the park at the end of the film just after joining in with them. Everything Hemmings does seems without real merit and when he could behave with more than just concern upon the discovery of a possible murder, his reaction seems bizarre.
I thought that was Eric Clapton with the Yardbyrds. Am I wrong?
yeah it was jimmy page and jeff beck, no clapton
Hmm, I thought Blowup was about perception and reality. I was there in the 1960’s, and as I recall there was a lot of philosopical conversations (ok, folks were not often straight or sober) about reality. At the time I first saw it, technology like we have today was virtually (pun intended) non-existent, so the idea of changing ‘reality’ 9body present then not present) by blowing up the photo was metaphoric. As I recall, you ‘hear’ the (non-existent) tennis ball at the end; another great metaphor that folks in my circle still reference! Your reality can change by how you see it, or how bad you want it… you see what you want to see. Thanks for your insight!
I love that movie. the scene where he keeps cropping and enlarging the photos is incredible. Veruschka is …legendary in it.
(yes, i hate mimes)
Please, please read this.
I think it’s important that we let Antonioni, not some smarmy critic, describe and explain his movie.
Antonioni said: “The photographer in Blowup, who is not a philosopher, wants to see things closer up. But it so happens that, by enlarging too far, the object itself decomposes and disappears. Hence there’s a moment in which we grasp reality, but then the moment passes. This was in part of the meaning of Blowup.”
In other words, the movie is less a mediation on “reality and perception” and more about identifying Antonioni’s personal cinematic manifesto: finding an Objective Truth inside a medium of perspective and subjectivity. Antonioni always said (like the painter, not the photog, says in Blowup) that the “meaning” of his films (whether it be L’avventura, La notte, L’eclisse, Red Desert, Zabriskie Point, The Passenger…oh, all of them except this one which is about that search) came after the editing was done. Sarah Miles even equates the last remaining image of a grainy dead body with her boyfriend’s abstract paintings. It should also be noted that Antonioni frequently used the phrase “reality” when talking about the temporal/spatial reality in front of his lens-it’s not existential by any means in its usage.
Antonioni said he instinctively shot his movies (the photographer in this movie doubles for Antonioni himself, and as you can see in the park scenes that the character’s actions were impulsive, not planned) like a still photographer or painter his actions are according to his instant whims. It became coherent for him when he rearranged the frames and began cutting, editing the films-hence that’s why we have the famous blowup scenes. In those famous scenes we see Antonioni’s search in his other movies (not this one as much; he said he made this film with his head, not his gut: self-reflexive) represented dramatically, visually, poetically. We see Hemmings find a Truth in the pictures he shot earlier. For Antonioni this is the reason why he made his films the way he did: to LEARN SOMETHING about the world, not preach about what he already knows.
Of course Antonioni’s overall point is that the photog blows up the image too far and the moment passes. He never can find out the whole Truth, only a part of it. He never knows who Redgrave was, what her involvement was, who the killer was, why the killing occured, who was killed, who profited from this crime. In other words the whole of the movie is metaphor for Antonioni’s own cinema pratices and aspirations. It certainly explains the openness that defines his style. It doesn’t seem to me to be a philosophical film, an intellectual film. Just an honest one. Maybe 3-5% of an Antonioni film has something like a moment of Truth, maybe it’s an accumulative discovery, but that number is massive for a fiction, feature film. I just made that percentage up, but you get the idea: most films are all artifice-on the inside and on the outside. That is what made Antonioni so special-he never lost that documentary conception of movies. It followed him forever and helped him see things most directors ignored. We learn much from an Antonioni film, but it’s not philosophical (in the above statement Antonioni divorces himself from abstract, philosophical concepts). We learn from Antonioni’s attentiveness. His films are poetical, after all. Even mundane things like a tree or lamp are interesting for Antonioni to study and if you linger on them in the right light you might just see something about yourself you never knew was there, but that’s painting, that’s poetry. Not usually cinema. In cinema we are used to action and drama. Antonioni was a gaint, because everything was fascinating to him and everything could be illuminating. It’s a world of possibility.
Of course, the film is also a fine murder mystery and you can feel free simply to view it as that if you’d like, it doesn’t matter. It is also a good character study. Hemmings is a blind character. Antonioni once said: “For me a director’s job is to see.” It would be the same for a photographer, but this character doesn’t care about anybody else, he doesn’t think about anybody else. It’s all about him-like Piero in L’eclisse. He can’t think of anything, but himself and his own immediate needs. He takes advantage of two young girls, abuses his models, and decides to get high and party rather than take moral action and tell someone about the body in the park. As you can tell he is the opposite of Antonioni’s personality (which is why Antonioni has the painter character talk about meaning; his central character is too egotistical and self-absorbed; he similar to Antonioni in that he photographs the world). He tells the models to shut their eyes for no reason (maybe to be like him), he sees Redgrave vanish, the photos vanish, the body vanishes, and in the end he vanishes.
But the tennis-match scene is a beauty of a scene. I’ve always seen it poetically. These are not mimes, actually, they’re university students who run about collecting money for charities for something called Rag Week in Britain. They ask Hemmings for some money at the beginning of the film and he grants them this request without really caring (like he later lets the protesting students put a sign on the back of his car without noticing that it falls off in transit). In the last scene the students pretend to play tennis (Why? Because Antonioni was a tennis-star in his youth, I guess, and he thought to be interesting to film) and Hemmings watches them. When the ball flies over the fence and he throws it back this is not meant to “symbolize” that his idea of the ball is good enough and that there is no Truth, but that the artifice of cinema (and all art) can find a Truth; a redemptive quality even if it is all make-believe. You can see the character’s self-reflection in his face after he tosses back the ball; he’s learned something about himself, about his behavior, and now he sees.
There’s something Picasso famously said about art which I think is relevant here: “Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”
Rumplesink
Second in a continuing series. A follow-up to my previous post ‘Nashville…What the hell’?
I’ve just finished watching Antonioni’s Blow Up and I was pretty underwhelmed on the whole. I didn’t hate it but I’m at a bit of a loss as to what it was trying to say. It did capture the spirit of the sixties, but it wandered a lot and I wasn’t impressed with David Hemming’s performance particularly. I found myself looking at my watch quite a bit and it was a full hour before we learn anything of Hemmings’ suspicions about the murder. The lack of resolution was a bit annoying and the last scene with the mime tennis match was just bizarre in a kind of meaningless way, it seemed to me.
The reason I watched this was because of its exalted status, and at this point I’m having a hard time seeing what all the fuss is about. I’m not trying to belittle this film in any way and I could certainly live without any snide comments along the lines of ‘the reason you didn’t like it is because you’re an idiot’ like some posters have been known to do.
I’d be grateful for anyone who really likes this film to try and explain why they rate it so highly. Maybe I’m missing something.