Oana Urcan

Antonioni’s ‘Blow-up’

‘ Barthes has remarked that Antonioni’s interests are always with what is unstable and at the ‘interstices’ of things, where things quiver and risk loosing their identity; the in-between of surface and depth, figure and ground, water and air, inside and out, fullness and emptiness, that moment when things threaten to disappear, to lose shape, and that equally wonderful moment when they come to take shape. Antonioni’s fascination with relationships between them, along their extension, and, with their power to engulf.’ ( Sam Rohdie , Antonioni , p.100)

Even from the credit sequences of the lettering imposition against the grass in the park, we are presented with an ambiguity; we are not exactly sure what to concentrate on , the model clamoring in front of the photographer’s camera , or the green grass of the park. Throughout the film this uncertainty is always present, and through Thomas’s eyes we are aware of the blurring of reality, of distinctions between real and imagined.

‘ Antonioni selects only what is relevant to this central compositional principle, so that even the most incidental details fall naturally into place in the total picture. Nothing is definitively identifiable; outside the junkshop Thomas sees two feminine looking men walking poodles, and shortly after , in the park, a masculine looking woman in male uniform picking up litter with a pointed stick. Nothing is quite what it looks like........ The facade of Thomas’s house/studio seems to have no relation to the world behind it......Objects are separated from their functions or became wildly incongruous with the environment in which they are placed or the human behavior around them.’ ( Ian Cameron , Robin Wood , Antonioni , pp.126-127 ).

The sense of uncertainty also exists in the relationships that unravel throughout the film , they are ‘ unstable, enigmatic or deceptive .’ (ibid. p.127 ) The relationship of his neighbors, the artist and his girlfriend, is enigmatic because she seems to be on intimate terms with Thomas , and later she doesn’t seem to have a sense of identity within her relationship with the artist. Vanessa Redgrave’s character also -the relationship with the man in the park - which is not what it seems....we are left with no clear answers.

One interesting early episode in the film is when Thomas visits his artist friend who paints abstract compositions and ‘ can make no sense of his abstracts until he has finished painting them - the painting Thomas wants to buy or be given is the one that the artist has not yet identified’....because the painting reflects this shifting reality by becoming indeterminate.’ ( ibid, p.127 ). This is crucial to what Thomas will be going through - by taking the photographs in the park - we later come to recognize the abstract painting as having a striking similarity to Thomas’s blown up photo he is left with towards the end of the film, a blurred out of focus mass of black and white dots that cannot be identified. Of ‘ Blow Up’ Antonioni said:

‘I want to recreate reality in an abstract form. I’m really questioning the nature of reality. This is an essential point to remember about the visual aspects of the film , since one of it’s chief themes is to see or not to see properly the true nature of things.’ ( Arrowsmith , Antonioni , p.112 )

Here we have a successful young man in the ‘swinging 60’s’, where boundaries become blurred , of what is permissible and what not , pushing boundaries , drugs, success, freely available sex, etc , Thomas is an explorer, a sort of pioneer .....’ Antonioni here sets out to examine how a man can try to live in the more ‘advanced’ environment of modern civilization, instead of starting from the assumption that he can’t.’ ( I. Cameron , R. Wood , Antonioni , p.125 )

Through stepping into the park, he undertakes an adventure - he is not entirely happy with his life in London, he tells his agent ’ I want a lot of money , I want to be free , I’m leaving London , it doesn’t do it for me ’ - one expects a successful young man to be in control of his life , but he is not , life is uncontrollable. He takes a few ‘landscape’ shots, then he tunes into a couple kissing , he is the voyeur, the unseen eye - but he ends up being noticed - the first thing Vanessa Redgrave says : No , we haven’t met , you’ve never seen me’.

The scene I chose to discuss is where he starts developing the film, perhaps made curious by Vanessa’s interest in it (where we have another blurring of intent , she comes to get the film , he gives her a different one, then she lingers on to seduce him or be seduced by him ) and later the two young models come by and the ensuing romp - all of this as to distract him from the actual discovery of the murder he has witnessed. It is when he finally examines the photographs on the wall , that he starts realizing what he had witnessed - and he starts putting together the facts , a clue following another in the sequence of photographs . Vanessa Redgrave luring the man to a prearranged place, the killer hiding in the bushes, the shooting, the corpse lying behind a tree, far away in the distance, barely recognizable. ‘ There is a murder,then. Thomas unwittingly photographs both the corpse and the murderer, and later sees the corpse. He comes to doubt it’s reality and our own certainty is undermined but he is wrong and we are wrong. That is the point.’

( I. Cameron , R. Wood , Antonioni , p.133)

It is Thomas’s increasing distrust - in his own perceptions - that is central to the film and it starts with the discovery of evidence in the photographs. To convince himself ( and the audience ) he goes again to the park and sees the corpse lying there, very real in death. On his return to the studio he finds the place ransacked, all his prints gone, ‘ except one enlargement of the corpse, blown up so that it is scarcely distinguishable from the artist’s abstract paintings.’ (ibid p.134 )

All the ‘evidence’ he had was no longer there. He goes in search of his agent and finally finds him at a house party where they both end up staying till the morning.

‘ It is the logical culmination of a film, constructed like a poem of thematically related images, about the way in which perception can be tampered with, undermined and finally broken down. Thomas emerges from it at dawn with his camera, but it is to late - the corpse and with it, Thomas’s last chance to prove to himself the reality of what he has seen, has gone. (ibid .p.138)

The reappearance of the ‘ rag week ‘ students at the end of the film is a symbolic one. They stop in the park, to play an imaginary game of tennis, they look grotesque, faces painted white against the green of the grass - and Thomas being drawn into their imaginary game, he finally surrenders. ‘ His grasp of objective reality fatally undermined he is a lost (because disintegrated) soul.’ ( ibid. p.138 ) .......and the last shots show him diminished, small, disappearing in the green of the park, with the sound of an imaginary tennis game.

Through color, through the selection of only what is relevant to the overall composition, the cumulative effect of the episodes, the film is not unlike the artist’s painting.

‘The artist’s description in the film of how his paintings develop, spontaneously and subconsciously, so that it is only later, by finding a clue and following it , that he understands them, is probably intended as a ‘ testament’ description of how Antonioni makes his films’ ( ibid. p.138 )

The relevance of Thomas finding the clues to the murder is symbolic in the sense that it is the beginning of him changing - as a man and as a photographer - almost like a rite of passage, his individuation.

Bibliography

Antonioni , Ian Cameron and Robin Wood , Praeger , 1971

Antonioni ‘The poet of images’ , William Arrowsmith , Oxford University Press , 1995

Antonioni , Sam Rohdie , BFI Publishing , 1990