• Blow-Up

8/7/24 (Wed)

I had heard of Antonioni’s 1967 Blow-Up and figured it was about time I got around to it. Its reputation precedes it, of course, and it’s supposed to have been highly influential in its nihilistic cool. It seems a movie made more for critics rather than audiences – it was a big commercial success back in its day, but I suspect that had more to do with the brouhaha over the boobs and pubic hair.

A bored fashion photographer (David Hemmings) has all the money, women, drugs and time he could ever need. He carries on mechanically, but nothing seems to rouse him; a photo session with a gorgeous model, for instance, is filled with sexual innuendo but all filtered through his lens. He is unmoved.

Wandering with his camera one day, he snaps pictures of a couple interacting in a public park, only to discover upon developing the photos that he might have unwittingly captured a murder. We have only clues to go by: the woman (a sexy Vanessa Redgrave) notices him filming them and runs to him – alone – demanding that he turn over the photos right away while refusing to explain her urgency. Recalling her anxiety, the photographer deduces the murder only from blurs in the photos along with the couple’s apparent expressions. He indeed finds the man’s dead body in the park that night, but when he brings his camera to capture that the next morning, the body is gone. After purposely passing the wrong film to the woman to get rid of her, he discovers that she has given him the wrong contact number; he desperately seeks her and catches a glimpse of her on the street, only to lose her in the crowd. The murder, the body, the woman – all become a mystery existing only in the photos. The woman actually tells him, “You’ve never seen me,” implying that she wants him to forget about her but carrying other meanings are well. (A similar line occurs when the photographer runs into a model and says he thought she was supposed to be Paris. She says, “I am in Paris.”) There may not have been a murder at all; maybe the woman didn’t want to be filmed for other reasons, and the photographer may have just imagined the body in his desire for something exciting to happen. The film doesn’t resolve the puzzle.

The close-ups of the photos become like pointillist dots or the scribbles in the Pollack-like paintings on display (Antonioni was a fan), less and less clear as they become larger. One character points to a cubist painting and notes what he sees as a leg, which he says is “like finding a clue in a detective story”. But the clue is only a leg when viewed in context, i.e., it only has meaning in the big picture.

Similarly, the photographer enters a club where the Yardbirds, no less, including both Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page in their brief period together, are playing. Beck, upset with the static on the speaker, smashes his guitar in frustration and throws it into the crowd. The photographer grabs part of it and runs out, only to dispose of it on the street, interested simply in the thrill of the chase. A passerby picks it up and, unaware that this is some serious memorabilia, throws it back down. The object is only what he sees; again, he doesn’t know the full story.

There’s a weird scene at the end where white-faced mimes enter a tennis court and soundlessly play a game of pretend tennis, watched intently by other mimes. At one point, they hit the pretend ball out of the court and near the photographer. Unsure at first, he eventually picks up the “ball” and throws it back. As he looks on at the game, we hear the actual sound of balls being whacked. The camera pulls back, and it’s just him on a grassy field, from which he disappears as well in the next instant. I have no idea what that is supposed to be about. (As it happens, the mimes are apparently an English student tradition and not just dumb clowns, as one critic complained. Without knowing that, we don’t see the big picture either.)

The film is a bit too esoteric to take completely seriously, including curious touches like a propeller as art object and an orgy between the photographer and two women. I realize that the potential murder suggested by the prints energizes the jaded photographer out of his existential crisis, but I’m hard pressed to see why I should care. Still, the film is never boring, and it does give a good picture of the Swinging Sixties in London with the colorful clothes, horrible haircuts and casual sex and drugs. It’s hard to judge performances in this wandering piece, but Redgrave’s enigmatic portrayal stands out. The film has its moments but feels largely like a product of its day.