SOURCE: “Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up,” in Philosophy in Literature: Volume II, San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1992, pp. 415–420.

[In the following essay, Johnson considers the theme of uncertainty of knowledge in Blow-Up.]

Several friends with whom I recently watched Blow-Up felt the film was dated. I think they were paying too much attention to the clothing worn by the characters (especially the models), the hairstyles, the automobiles and the lifestyles of the central characters; these aspects of the movie made it obvious that it was produced in the Sixties. Still, the philosophical questions posed by Blow-Up are enduring ones: what can we know about events in our surroundings? To what extent can we be certain about empirical facts? In what ways can we be fooled or misled? Does technology help supply answers to these questions?

Prepare yourself for a visual treat. While using no special effects in Blow-Up, except some effective and unusual lighting, Michelangelo Antonioni created a masterpiece of cinematography. The film won the Best Picture Award at the Cannes Festival in 1966; Antonioni received the Best Director Academy Award nomination, and the New Yorker and Life rated the film “best of the year.”

Antonioni was already well known for his unusual camera angles, thematic use of color, long, lingering shots, and the slow pace of his films. The pacing and editing result in a sense of serenity in most Antonioni films, and the photography session Thomas has in the park (where he takes the crucial pictures) is very serene and peaceful, until the Girl confronts Thomas and demands his photographs. The pacing of the sequences in which Thomas examines his enlargements is still leisurely, but a sense of increasing tension and anticipation results instead of calmness.

Blow-Up would have made an excellent silent film. The most crucial sequences have no dialogue whatever. Antonioni shows the viewer the story; he does not simply tell it. When Thomas is examining his enlargements, Antonioni pans to follow Thomas’ vision. You, as the viewer, see the blow-ups in closeup, when necessary, and in the same order that Thomas views them. As a result, with no narration and no omniscient access to Thomas’ thoughts, you have the opportunity of seeing the enlargements as Thomas does; you may then draw many of the same conclusions about what happened in the park.

Antonioni uses a minimal soundtrack. He never uses music coming from some unknown source for dramatic effect. Most of the music is by Herbie Hancock. Cool jazz plays in Thomas’ photography studio and living quarters. The jazz creates an effective backdrop for the mod lifestyles of swinging London in the mid-Sixties. Herbie Hancock is a fine choice as a soundtrack musician. His mellow jazz fits very nicely with the mood of the film. The only other music in the film is by the Yardbirds; Thomas wanders through a concert they are giving (he is in search of the Girl from the park whom he thought he had spotted shortly before). The Yardbirds were among the finest and most influential rock groups of the sixties. Their guitarists included Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page. They were the first group to use innovative audio techniques such as fuzztone, feedback and modal playing. Their influence on later groups, especially heavy metal bands, can still be heard. The song that they played in Blow-Up is “Stroll on.” Please notice the motionlessness and individual isolation of the members of the audience at the Yardbird’s concert. The only people in the room who are moving are the musicians, one couple listlessly dancing in the back, and Thomas, who winds his way through the crowd.

There are two “natural” sound sequences in the soundtrack that should be given some attention. One is the repetition of the sound of a gentle wind going through trees. Wind sounds are in the soundtrack when Thomas takes his photographs of the couple in the park; you hear the same wind again when Thomas is examining his enlargements and forming conclusions about them. Also, listen closely to the “snap” sound that startles Thomas when he returns to the park to find the body. In the screenplay there is a suggestion that it sounds like a twig snapping, but, elsewhere, Antonioni hinted that it could be interpreted as the click of a camera shutter. We can be sure of one thing in this film. There was a shooting in the park, namely the camera shots made by Thomas. If the mysterious sound is a shutter click instead of a twig snap, then Thomas was shot as well (by more than just Antonioni’s movie camera).

Be sure to look at Bill’s paintings and pay close attention to what Bill says about them. Then, compare Bill’s paintings with Thomas’s increasingly enlarged photographs. Notice all the allusions to illusions in the film. Thomas creates visual illusions with his fashion photography using, for example, smoked screens. He also does a sight-of-hand magic trick with a coin while casually talking to the two young women who come to him requesting to be photographed. Antonioni created a visual illusion by having a large neon sign overlooking the park. The eerie light from this sign creates a mysterious and unnatural aura when Thomas returns to the park at night and sees the body by this light.

Thomas could have experienced sensory illusions because of his being over tired and the smoking and drinking that he does during the day (by my count, he consumed at least four glasses of wine, two glasses of scotch, three beers, and about six cigarettes; they were apparently marijuana; the way he smoked them, viz., taking long, slow inhalations followed by retention of the fumes in the lungs, suggests the cigarettes were not tobacco).

The mimes also must be watched closely. They form a counterculture that fits neither with conservative London nor swinging, mod London. Please pay close attention to the mock tennis game at the very end of the film and notice what happens in the soundtrack when Thomas participates with the mimes.

Finally, note that the principal characters do not have their names mentioned anywhere in the film. We know Thomas’ name only from the screenplay. Patricia, Bill, and Ron are the only characters whose names are mentioned. The models are, of course, nameless.

Critics were generally pleased with Blow-Up from the outset; however, Andrew Sarris provided an apt warning for the readers of critical reviews who have not yet seen the film. He wrote:

If you have not yet seen Blow-Up, see it immediately before you hear or read anything more about it. I speak from personal experience when I say it is better to let the movie catch you completely unawares.¹

I think Sarris is correct. Hence, I have already said too much to nonviewers of the film. I strongly urge you to see Blow-Up before continuing, and I urge readers who have not yet seen it to stop reading many pages before this (while you are accomplishing that task, you might as well try believing six impossible things before breakfast).

While the characters and lifestyles depicted in Blow-Up are dated, the philosophical issues raised are not. Some contemporary reviewers recognized this and sought to draw attention to it. In response to possible negative responses to the film, which were likely, considering the trailer used for publicity purposes in America, Carey Harrison wrote:

… Blow-Up is not a study in decadence. His easy life cramps the central character’s initiative, and contempt for his own success has upset his values: he regards fashion photography and the fashionable world as utterly unreal, documentary photography and the outside world as completely ‘real.’ The discrimination is too glib, and the shock is all the more severe when he discovers that the outside world is just as opaque as the sets inside his studio. There is no ‘more real’ world.²

Harrison’s point is that the social setting of the film is secondary to its significance. The importance of Blow-Up resides in the epistemological (and, perhaps, ontological) issues it raises. The triumph of Blow-Up is that it reveals the limitations of technology, in this case, perception-enhancement technology; even after the machines have done their work, human perception and interpretation must come into play. The tragedy of Blow-Up lies in Thomas forced acknowledgement that the “real” world can be as difficult to understand and decipher as the illusory world of fashion advertising he creates in his studio.

Perhaps the scenes used to establish Thomas’ lifestyle are about the epistemological theme of the film in that they provide an empathetic basis for his personal confidence. When Thomas has his camera and can view things through the lens, he feels in charge; he exhibits no hesitation. In the course of the film, this confidence is severely eroded. Harrison agreed; he wrote:

As a photographer he believes he has a consuming, satisfactory relationship with reality, the surface of reality, the subject matter of his art. And the crisis he experiences is with his material, not with the women in his life. By means of the camera he believes himself to be a faithful interpreter of reality, and when his means prove fallible, all his self-confidence is challenged. For the first time in his life, it seems, he realizes how deceptive reality can be, that all his life it has been unfaithful to him and his camera. The audience experiences the film as a series of similar discoveries.³

Harrison, sensitive to the epistemological problems Thomas confronts, was well aware of the extent of his failure and of the probable personal effect this had upon him. He commented:

He believes his photographs tell the truth. But now that the corpse has disappeared, he has no means left of telling this adventure at all. Who will believe him, without the body or the photographs? Not only his mode of expression but his mode of perception is threatened: the fallibility of his perception, made real to him when he discovered what the camera had seen and he had missed, is now endorsed by losing all the evidence of that discovery itself.⁴

By the end of the film, Thomas, who begins as a character exhibiting complete self-confidence, becomes a person who is not sure of anything at all; he seems horribly diminished. Harrison phrased this conversion well; he suggested that “… the Thomas once so sure he could interpret what was real, confesses himself a doubting Thomas.”⁵

Harrison stressed (appropriately) that Thomas should not have become so despondent. As a professional, he should have been well aware of the limitations of his medium and his craftsmanship; he should have taken these limitations into consideration. Harrison made this point by comparing a photographer with a scientist:

As a scientist does, working in a stricter symbology than the artist, a photographer understands what a medium of communication or a mode of perception is: it is a construct, more or less fallible.⁶

Just a scientist should be constantly aware of the tolerance ranges of her measuring equipment and the metaphorical status of her theories and models (Thomas certainly should have known that models are metaphors), Thomas should have given consideration to the technical limitations of his camera (especially without a telephoto lens) and the developing and enlarging processes.

Another contemporary critic concentrated on the personally tragic elements in Blow-Up. Macklin emphasized that Blow-Up reflects Antonioni’s world of “disengagement and sharp contrasts.”⁷

There is certainly personal, social disengagement separating the characters, but Thomas (and the others) also seems to disengage themselves from London and the world while trying to be cool. Unfortunately for them, their coolness comes crashing down. This is happening by means of slow erosion for Patricia, but it occurs in a comparative rush for Thomas. In the end, he is a loser; Macklin remarked, “Blow-Up is a film about ignorance and loss—something gone, gone in a way that Hemmings [Thomas] disappears from the green earth at the last flickers of the picture.”⁸

More recent reviews of the film are quite favorable; it has endured well, and it may, one day, be regarded a classic. Leonard Maltin ranks it “∗∗∗ [frac12],” while Pauline Kael, of the New Yorker, gives Blow-Up a mildly negative review while not commenting at all on the epistemological topic of the film.

Notes

1. Andrew Sarris, “No Antoniennui,” The Village Voice, December, 1966, p. 19.

2. Carey Harrison, “Blow-Up,” Sight and Sound, 37 (Spring 1967), p. 60.

3. Ibid., p. 60.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. F.A. Macklin, “Blow-Up,” December 9 (1967), p. 141.

8. Ibid.

9. These data were obtained from: Leslie Halliwell, The Filmgoer’s Companion, Sixth Edition, Avon, New York: 1977; and James Monaco and the editors of Baseline, The Encyclopedia of Film, Perigee Books, New York: 1991.