Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie's plot.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up offers us a subtle and highly subjectivized simulacrum (to borrow a term from Jean Baudrillard) of the modern world, circa 1966. The film follows the travails of a successful fashion photographer, Thomas, played with puckish insolence by David Hemmings. Whilst scouting for fresh subjects in a park one afternoon, Thomas photographs a mysterious couple flagrante delicto. Upon returning to his studio loft later that day, he develops the pictures and, like James Stewart in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, discovers that he has inadvertently stumbled upon a murder. But Antonioni is not interested in the details of the murder itself, as in a typical detective story, but rather with how the protagonist’s perception of the world—and his material relationship to it—is altered by this event.

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The film opens with a crosscutting montage that juxtaposes a scene of college students, dressed as mimes and rampaging through London in an open-topped car, with images of old tramps wandering about, looking aimless and dejected. The noise, youth, mobility, and high spirits of the “Rag Week” celebrants contrast sharply with the silence, old age, sluggishness, and despair of the homeless men. It is among the latter group that we first see Thomas, emerging from a doss house, looking shabby and disheveled. A moment later, he takes out a camera and runs toward a shiny black Rolls-Royce convertible parked in a back alley, and we suddenly learn that he has been “slumming”—posing as a vagrant and surreptitiously taking photographs of derelicts in their milieu as subjects for a new book.

This striking transformation of Thomas from penniless old man to affluent young hotshot powerfully demonstrates Antonioni’s Marxist concern with how technology, materialism, and consumer culture affects human behavior and corrupts human relationships. Here, as in later incidents in the film, Thomas is seen to be amoral and opportunistic, a confidence man and a voyeur—he is not in the least bit concerned with the old men’s poverty and suffering, only with taking their pictures and the material wealth he will gain from this.

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As a fashion photographer, Thomas is a creator of illusions that define a certain kind of young urban lifestyle and Antonioni’s flagrant use of the loud, splashy, attention-grabbing colors of billboard advertising—a visual association elevated to unholy extremes in his next film, Zabriskie Point—brings to the surface the transient sensation and hollow artifice that lies at the heart of all pop culture consumerism. In his previous work, Red Desert, Antonioni spray-painted both the man-made décor as well as the natural setting as a means of giving concrete expression to the heroine’s neurotic state of mind and her ameliorative aestheticizing vision of a world despoiled by technology and pollution.

He does the same in Blow-Up, painting doors, fences, poles, and the façades of entire buildings to express the exhilaration and alienation that characterizes life in a large modern city—what Baudelaire called “fugitive desires.” One such example appears early on, when the camera sees Thomas approaching a crossroad in his black convertible and a blue bus and yellow truck quickly rush across the screen to blot out the image. This sudden obliteration of people and objects suggests an abstracting of the phenomenal world and a spontaneous dissolution of solid forms. As in Impressionist and Fauvist painting, everything is reduced to a play of speeding, blurring colors and flat, ambiguous surfaces of coruscating light.

A similar color effect occurs when Thomas is seen driving to an antique shop and he passes by a large building that is painted a rather garish shade of blue. The unnatural blueness of the building is at once both beautiful and ugly. It is beautiful insofar as it mirrors and echoes Thomas’ own sensibility as an artist who creates an imaginative vision of the world that contradicts nature. It is ugly in the sense that, like the protagonist, the blue building seems conspicuously out of place and alienated from its surrounding environment. In a manner similar to van Gogh and Ernst Kirchner, Antonioni utilizes chromatic disharmony and displacement as an oblique indicator of the spiritual malaise in Thomas’ life.

Even the trees and the grass in the park are painted greener than green, like the trees and the grass in Monet’s plein air paintings or the forest retreat in Godard’s Weekend, drawing our attention to the falseness of the idyllic setting and undermining the idea of leisure space as natural and spontaneously enjoyable rather than as something man-made and deliberately constructed solely for the pleasurable delectation of our senses.

However, the most telling use of color occurs, of course, in Thomas’ studio, which is full of purple paper backdrops. The door on his darkroom is also painted purple and early on he is seen wearing a purple shirt. What’s more, his secretary wears a purple sweater, he shouts at a model in a purple dress, one of the two teenyboppers he has sex with wears purple leotards, and The Girl (Vanessa Redgrave) he encounters in the park wears a purple skirt.

Whereas, the Fauvist/Expressionist color scheme of Red Desert was dominated by various shades of red and pink, fluctuating like danger signs, the décor in Blow-Up is mostly characterized by a shamelessly tacky palette of purple and blue. This becomes most explicit when—in a scene that recalls the harem fantasy in Fellini’s 8½—Thomas indulges in a casual orgy with the two “birds” who have been pestering him to take their picture, and the three of them thrash and tumble about in a pile of crumpled purple backdrops. (Incidentally, Blow-Up was the first major commercial film to feature a glimpse of female pubic hair—Jane Birkin, the soon-to-be-wife of Serge Gainsbourg, takes the honors here.)

Like Corrado (Richard Harris) in Red Desert—who hacks apart a wooden shack where an orgy took place, leaving no trace behind for any future occupants of the soon-to-be-evacuated coastal town—Thomas gleefully destroys his own scenery just as he quite literally wallows, and even revels, in its extravagant artificiality. Here, he is both creator and destroyer of his environment.

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The contrast between the bright colors of the dramatic world that Antonioni presents for us and the symbolic one which Thomas uncovers in his black-and-white photographs is itself ironic. Psychedelic colors make the “real” world of the film seem exaggerated and hyperbolic like a fantastic “surface” reality, while the “captured” and reconstructed world of the photographs appears ominously stark, grainy, and documentary-like—the bare, denuded core “essence” of reality.

In the central montage sequence of the film, the camera—in place of Thomas’ eyes—slowly moves back and forth from one photograph to the next, and likewise, Antonioni cuts back and forth from the pictures to the protagonist looking at them. It is here that we start to get a sense of subjective reality: the director’s camera plays upon the surface of the photographs, making us aware of their artifice yet at the same time animating them so that they assume a life of their own. This instance of “camera ontology” succinctly demonstrates Baudrillard’s theory of visual media as “hyperreality”—a concatenation of images which exists for it’s own sake as a narrow, restrictive, one-way narrative commentary on the world.

The Girl, who is a precious and effete personality in the protagonist’s encounter with her, is vivid and passionate in the photographs. The visual illusion of still pictures brought to life—created by editing and a shifting camera—is complemented by an aural illusion: while studying the blow-ups in his studio, Thomas hears the sound of the wind blowing through the trees just as he had heard it in the park. This sound of wind rising, becoming louder, and building to an eerie crescendo recalls the ominous, forbidding sound of the wind sweeping over the Mediterranean at dusk in L’Avventura.

Since the act of looking at these enhanced images effectively reconstructs an event that the protagonist—and the audience—never actually saw with the naked eye “in real life,” technology is shown to reveal a new surface of the world that is normally hidden from view. Antonioni’s own particular brand of phenomenological Neorealism is concerned primarily with the process of seeing through a camera as a way of exposing an ultimate truth, or a lack thereof, that underlies the surface of the world.

The curious self-reflexivity of this scene is an epistemological hall of mirrors: Antonioni’s camera looks at Thomas looking at photographs which are blown up larger and larger so that eventually they are reduced to nothing more than an abstract collection of dots, a Rorschach test in which almost anything can be read. Like the paintings of the tormented artist son in Pasolini’s Teorema, made two years later, the received cultural baggage and semiotic referentiality or signification of the image is eliminated until all that remains is purest subjectivity of the spectator. It seems that Thomas won’t follow his own advice, given to the models earlier in the film, to “close your eyes and stay like that.” Much like Hitchcock or Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, Thomas’ curiosity and compulsive scopophilia indicts both himself and the audience in turn. In a sense, he has “shot” the dead man with a camera lens just as the assassin has done the same with a bullet.

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Later on, after nearly all of his incriminating blow-ups and negatives have been stolen from his studio, his neighbor, Patricia (Sarah Miles), comments that the sole remaining picture of the corpus delicti resembles one of her lover’s Jackson Pollock-style Abstract Expressionist drip-canvases. And so, picture-making technology mediates reality only up to a point. Once the threshold of referentiality has been crossed, the suspicion of a murder in the park gleaned from a series of enlarged photographs would seem to say more about Thomas’ own paranoid state of mind than what his camera may or may not have recorded. Some followers of Jacques Lacan have even interpreted the film as a reflection of the incipient œdipal anxieties which structure a person’s subconscious mind.

This subtextual aspect of Blow-Up has been compared to the controversy surrounding the various interpretations of the Abraham Zapruder film as a definitive and reliable record of the Kennedy assassination—with particular emphasis on the notorious spectre of the “grassy knoll.” Brian De Palma’s 1981 semi-homage to Antonioni’s film, Blow Out, also makes reference to current political events such as Chappaquiddick and Nelson Rockefeller’s death. Even Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in USA, released in 1966, contains similar allusions to the Ben Barka kidnapping in France.

The possible incidence of adultery and The Girl’s desperate efforts to retrieve the film suggest the scandalous fallout of the Profumo affair. Vanessa Redgrave, with her thick, dark brown hair and affected temptress-naïf manner—hinted at by a schoolgirl outfit and arms folded seductively over her breasts—seems meant to evoke, for a British audience at least, then-recent memories of Christine Keeler. And the striking blow-up sequence appears to have influenced the opening shot in Polanski’s Chinatown, in which a cuckolded husband reconstructs his wife’s adultery in a wooded area by rifling through a series of grainy black-and-white still photographs. Ironically, later on in that film, a police lieutenant falsely accuses the private-eye protagonist (Jack Nicholson) of having photographed a murder.

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The artificiality of the world in Blow-Up is also expressed in Antonioni’s deliberate framing of subjects in architectural space. Thomas does this to his models when makes them stand in a receding diagonal line. When the propeller he has purchased arrives at his house, The Girl comments on how it will balance out the straight lines in the studio as a piece of decorative sculpture. These lines are even given a touch of phallic humor in an early scene when a model (Veruschka) lies perpendicular to a vertical beam supporting the ceiling of the loft and mimes copulation with Thomas’ long telescopic lens, thus demonstrating the latent sense of sexual aggression and (meta)physical domination implicit in the act of taking someone’s picture.

When Thomas pours himself a drink and contemplates his blow-ups, Antonioni’s camera uses the shadowed, glossy back surface of the photographs to fix and frame the protagonist in space. This in itself is a striking example of how an obsession with photographic images determines the protagonist’s behavior, and how new-fangled gadgets and technology—in its altering of one’s perception of the world—can serve to dwarf and overshadow the spiritual development of man. In this respect, the shot is comparable to the celebrated opening sequence of Antonioni’s earlier film, The Eclipse, in which persons and objects are reduced to abstract shapes and graphic motifs that seem to be virtually interchangeable.

Even when Thomas visits the park, the defoliated trees seem to frame him symmetrically on either side like a de Chirico palazzo. The fence and roadway that cuts through the greenery is layered with perfect ascending, concentric mounds. The hills surrounding the park are so unnaturally precise in their formal contours they almost seem to aestheticize nature—like the Fascist architecture Antonioni saw encroaching upon the Po Valley of the his youth.

The enclosed setting could be intended to represent the Garden of Eden, an idyllic realm of insouciant, uncomplicated sexuality, with the voyeuristic lens of Thomas’ camera—or the barrel of an assassin’s gun—as the intruding snake. The park itself resembles a classical Roman landscape painting, evoking the Arcadian spirit, and the notion that a contented life is to be found in the serenity of the country, away from the hustle-and-bustle of the big city.

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The film has the same day-in-the-life-travelogue quality as Antonioni’s earlier La Notte and Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7. In the first half of Blow-Up, Thomas is narcissistic and complacent and tends to speak in facetiously gnomic phrases (“Nothing like a good disaster to sort everything out” and “I haven’t even got a couple of minutes to have my appendix out!”). But by the end, he is often at a loss for words and can barely complete a sentence let alone an action—the sparse, elliptical, and often opaque dialogue is reminiscent of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter.

Ironically, it is just when he discovers a sense of emotional commitment and social obligation in his life that his self-justifying cynicism and arrogant indifference toward others is replaced by a growing sense of impotence and defeat. In the final scene, speech is phased out of the film entirely, leaving only a silent form of physical communication unmediated by language and social pretensions. His boredom, agitation, and ultimate ineffectualness is evident in silly, childish, spontaneous actions like rolling a coin over his knuckles, grimacing and lip-synching wordlessly to a song in his head while music blares on the car radio, or triumphantly clicking his heels as he runs up the roadway leading into the park.

We only come to know Thomas through oblique, incidental gestures and unresolved bits of conversation that accumulate tangentially over the course of the film. When showing photographs of the doss house to his agent, Ron (Peter Bowles), at a restaurant, he remarks “I wish I could make tons of money and then I’d be free.” While the venality of his character is hardly in doubt, the source of his restless frustration and general anomie remains a mystery. We don’t see how more money would make Thomas free or even that he himself believes this. When he tells The Girl about his “wife” and “couple of kids,” it is not certain whether this story represents his vague desire for a more committed life or merely an attempt to impress her. And the childlike enthusiasm and simplistic tone of self-congratulation in his telephone call to Ron, telling him of how he had just prevented a murder, speaks volumes about Thomas’ underlying insecurity and the lack of any real constructive social purpose in his life.

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All throughout the film there is a recurrent pattern of relationships left unconsummated and work left undone. Just as he appears on the verge of establishing meaningful contact with someone or about to finally resolve himself to some efficacious deed or another, he is immediately distracted by something else that pops up. His shirtless tryst with The Girl is curtailed by the arrival of the propeller. His phone conversation with Ron is interrupted by the arrival of the two “birds” and their coffee preparation is interrupted by a sudden interest in the wardrobe. And after Thomas’ rather feral lovemaking session with the girls, his promise to photograph them is interrupted by a renewed fascination with the blow-ups.

He returns to the park later that night and discovers the body of the dead man but, for once, he forgets to bring his camera. The metaphysical quandary that nags at him now seems to supercede the banal activity of merely taking pictures. Shortly after, while driving around town, he catches a glimpse of The Girl in front of a shop window and stops to pursue her but is distracted by the sound of a Yardbirds performance at a nearby discothéque, and so he wanders in off the street (amusingly, the sign by the entranceway warns him to “KEEP CLEAR”).

At the concert, he competes frantically with a mob of hysterical fans to retrieve a broken guitar neck as a kind of prize or souvenir but immediately discards it once he is outside again. Along with the procurement of the propeller or, even earlier, the anti-nuclear protest sign that he mounts in the back of his convertible before it falls out onto the street and is run over, this last incident may be Antonioni’s Marxism speaking again about the folly of impulse purchases and the vanity that people often project onto useless, decorative objects, as well as how they lose interest in them once their instant cachet of newness wears off. This seems to refer back to an earlier scene in the film, when the old man at the antique shop refused to sell Thomas any of his wares (“there are no cheap bargains here, you're wasting your time...”)—indicating that there are some things in this world money can’t buy.

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Upon returning home, Thomas finds his neighbors, Patricia and Bill, blissfully, wordlessly flagrante delicto, in a scene that may be an innocuous, self-referential parody of the last seven minutes of L’Avventura when the lonely, fearful, guilt-ridden Claudia (Monica Vitti) catches the moral weakling, Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), making out with vacuous good-time girl, Gloria Perkins.
Much like Sandro in L’Avventura and Corrado in Red Desert, Thomas’ self-absorption and general dearth of conscience—the subordination of his better moral judgment to a capricious pleasure principle—manifests itself in absent-mindedness and a wandering attention span. He resembles Odysseus in the way he is continually thwarted by chance encounters which cause him to lose sight of his mission. Indeed, the film’s meandering, episodic plot does seem to have elements of classical epic. His meeting with The Girl recalls Odysseus first catching sight of Nausikka on the beach of the Phaicians, while the rock concert and the marijuana party afterward all suggest a ritual journey through the Land of the Lotus-Eaters—the Mod underworld of stoned cop-out escapism.

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Many critics have considered Blow-Up an artistic self-portrait for Antonioni in much the same way that 8½ was for Fellini. The character of Thomas was supposedly based on the meteoric rise of the unabashedly cynical, self-promoting young celebrity photographer, David Bailey, who, interestingly enough, began his career in photojournalism, exposing backstreet slum-life in Britain as well as famine and war atrocities abroad, before graduating to the more alluring realm of Carnaby Street, Vogue fashion layouts, Rolling Stones album covers, and Catherine Deneuve’s bedroom.

However, there can be little doubt that Thomas’ tyrannical treatment of his models—ordering them to “Wake up!” and “Smile!”—echoes the Antonioni’s own martinet handling and objectification of his actors, most notoriously, the theatre-trained Vanessa Redgrave. The final scene in the film seems to best support the argument that the film is a kind of self-reflexive confessional for the director. When Thomas searches around the park again the next day, the body of the dead man is no longer there, and the wind blows through the trees with a chilling indifference, reminiscent of the trees at the end of The Eclipse portending the Cuban Missile Crisis. In both films, the whole scene is too calm and peaceful, eerily so. Instead, he finds the Rag celebrants engaged in an imaginary game of tennis and this pantomime brings together all that had been previously hinted at in the film. The camera pans back and forth, following the imaginary ball, just as it had panned back and forth in a repetitive motion as Thomas’ eyes flicked indecisively across the surface of the photographs in his studio.

Here, we see how the camera creates an illusion by suggesting the presence of an object that is not there. If the ball does not exist, then perhaps the body in the photographs—which was represented by the same camera movement—never existed either. And just as Thomas had the illusion of hearing the wind blow through the trees while inspecting the pictures in his studio, he now “hears” the sound of the “ball” being batted to-and-fro across the tennis court. His participation in the charade indicates that he has come to accept what his eyes cannot see as well as the limits of what visual information can really tell us about the world.

The final shot—a bird’s-eye view of him standing alone on the barren grassy field—echoes the opening title sequence in addition to the circularity of the film’s logic: did Thomas take the photographs while an actual murder happened in the park, or does he merely believe that such an event took place because of his own underlying insecurity and paranoid feelings of alienation? He suddenly vanishes, as if erased by some vengeful, unseen god (the director?), and we are left confronted with the irony that Thomas, a masterful creator of illusions, might himself be only an illusion after all—suggesting a Cartesian mistrust of the world as gleaned through the senses. His subjective reality is but a trick of Antonioni’s camera and imagination, calling into question the maxim that the camera never lies. One contemporary critic, Bosley Crowther in The New York Times, considered the film a parable about “the dehumanizing potential of photography.”

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The mimes may be a kind of Felliniesque commedia dell’arte device like the doomed, ethereal Il Matto in La Strada crossed with Luigi Pirandello’s titular Six Characters in Search of an Author—they demonstrate the mystical uncertainty that ultimately lies at the heart of the phenomenal world and the essential epistemological tentativeness of what we often take for granted as “reality.”

The tennis game, of course, refers to a leaner time in Antonioni’s own life before he became a successful filmmaker, when he was a student attending the University of Bologna who supported himself as a champion tennis player, selling his prized trophies to buy food and pay the rent. Blow-Up was its maker’s greatest commercial and critical triumph—an odyssey through a modern city, following the protagonist from feigned poverty to the false security of wealth and ending on a note of final lingering doubt about one’s place and purpose in the world. As such, it seems a trenchant comment on the nature of success and what it does to people and how the love of money often leads to anxiety and self-deception. By transposing the Marxist concerns of his Italian films to the hip urban centers of “Swinging London,” Antonioni demonstrated once again that this malaise of modern life is not caused by technology and consumer culture but rather by man’s failure to adapt to the conditions of the new environment he has created for himself.

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TECHNICAL NOTE: Blow-Up is best viewed in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio which should be available on DVD soon.


Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older