[In the following essay, Wagstaff argues that in Blow-Up Antonioni confronts the theme of ethical perception and the process involved in separating the “signal,” which ought to be paid attention to, from the noise, which distracts from it.]

From 1960 onwards, Antonioni’s films analysed characters whose world had been put in crisis by some event: the disappearance of a lover, the death of a friend, the end of a love affair, a nervous breakdown—these were the starting points of the tetralogy of The Adventure (L’avventura, 1959–60), The Night (La notte, 1960), The Eclipse (L’eclisse, 1962) and The Red Desert (Il deserto rosso, 1964) respectively. Antonioni used for his analysis sex. Men and women didn’t just make love in his films; love-making was a sign, related to notions of alienation and commitment; it was treated for its meaning, revealing how his characters perceived reality and the ethical choices they made on the basis of that perception.

People tend to think Blow-Up is a lighter film than Antonioni’s previous ones. They think that because it is confusing for the viewer, Antonioni meant it to be ambiguous, and if he meant it to be ambiguous, then he did not mind whether we understood what he was trying to say, or maybe he wasn’t clear about what he was trying to say, or maybe the overall meaning of the film was not so terribly important: perhaps its glittering surface was what he was really offering the viewer. But Blow-Up is not so different from his previous films; it just goes a little further. It is not a love story, but it is a story about love stories that are not really love stories: Thomas and Veruschka; Thomas and Patricia; Jane and the murder victim; Jane and Thomas; Thomas and his wife; Thomas and the aspiring models; Bill and Patricia. Even in this film, a character’s relation to reality and the world is largely coded in cinematic terms by means of sexual representation. The only parts of the film that are not in some way concerned with putative love stories are the scenes relating to the dossers, to the Rag week students, and to the Yardbirds’ rock concert, all of which can be shown to have a very precise accessory function, of a basically didactic nature.

Let us challenge many orthodox interpretations of the film, and assert that Blow-Up is not about illusion and reality. That is a metaphysical question, and Antonioni is concerned with ethics: what is the right thing to do? The only way his characters can know is by accurately perceiving the world they are in, and knowing and understanding themselves. The world must have meaning, which is perceived by means of a commitment to the concrete reality in front of them. They know and understand themselves by looking back on what they have done, by reinterpreting what their commitment has been to the world in front of them.

That is why three of the films in the tetralogy and Blow-Up end early on the morning after; it is the morning after when the characters look back and understand where they missed opportunities, and where they failed to engage actively in the reality before them. Thomas’ artist friend Bill says about his paintings: “They don’t mean anything when I do them—just a mess. Afterwards, I find something to hang on to—like that … like … that leg. And then it sorts itself out. It adds up. It’s like finding a clue in a detective story.” Antonioni himself, replying to a question about how he came to the idea of the mimed tennis game, said: “You are asking me how ideas come into being. They generally have a very confused history. They pop up all of a sudden, and then gradually become clearer. Just as they do in poetry, I believe: some words come into the poet’s mind, and then they sort themselves out and become verses.”

The interviewer on this occasion wanted to push Antonioni into an interpretation of his film, that it was about reality and illusion, and Antonioni refused to agree. The question was this: “Reality is therefore just appearances, in the film? Esse est percipi? Reality equals appearance, illusion, dream?” Antonioni’s reply was: “I wouldn’t say that the appearance of reality is equal to reality, because appearances can be many, but I don’t know about this, and I don’t believe it to be the case. Reality is perhaps a relationship [emphasis added]. But I’m not accustomed to disembowelling the themes of a film from a philosophical point of view; that’s not my job.”

Blow-Up represents the process of perception. We watch Thomas perceive. And we see that it is an ethical relationship with reality that determines his perception. In the tennis match at the end, he is asked to pick up the ball; everybody is looking at him, willing him to do it; he thinks, and decides to do it. He has to put down his camera to do so. If you stand back, and look only on the surface, you will see nothing. just as Thomas sees little of Patricia’s suffering, just as he fails to see what Jane is doing, and just as the camera finds when it backs off Thomas at the end of the film, and he disappears. He wants the pictures of Jane to finish off his book tidily.

It is to be a book that will use stark images of human suffering as a contrast to other, softer photographs, and for which Thomas pretended to be a dosser. His ‘documentation of reality’, his book, his neo-realist photographic documentary, was going to be the product of the same nonchalant non-commitment as his fashion photographs, and his portraits of Veruschka. Note that when he photographs Veruschka in a frenzy of erotic arousal, he is photographing only her face in extreme close-up, not the erotic body. It is a real situation, genuinely erotic: he kisses her, she responds—it is not an illusion. It is done to get a certain kind of photograph, and it is of no ethical substance. But the camera is not being used to analyse Veruschka, to put her into a meaningful context in space, or over time.

I am making Antonioni out to be a dull moralist. He isn’t. In all his films he combines a playful experimentalism with an exuberant sense of form. For example, Antonioni doesn’t accept the wide-screen rectangle for his images. He masks the frame to alter its shape in order to suit what he is photographing. We see this in almost every shot of Blow-Up, and it is particularly noticeable when he takes a middle-distance shot of a standing person, and masks out the entire screen except for the slim vertical rectangle in which the person is framed. He asserts his right to paint abstractly with the camera in the same way as a painter does. Much of Blow-Up is built on the rectangle, and plays with almost monochrome superimpositions of rectangles, which are then related to the notion of framing.

But the concern with form is apparent on an even larger scale in Blow-Up. The film starts and ends early in the morning, with a sort of chorus, the Rag week students. Within that frame, it starts and ends with Veruschka, firstly being photographed, saying that she is going to Paris, and lastly at the pot party, saying that she is in Paris. Within that frame there are at the beginning the five fashion models whom Thomas photographs in his studio, and at the end, the impassive spectators at the rock concert and the fashion dummies in the shop window in front of which he throws down the broken guitar neck, just before he goes to the pot party. Within that frame are the two visits to Bill and Patricia’s house, and his two exchanges with Patricia. Within that frame are the two encounters with the aspiring models. Within that frame are the two visits to the antique shop, the two encounters with Jane, and the two sessions of enlargements, each leading to a different re-interpretation of the scene in the park. Directly after the scene in the park, Thomas meets the publisher of his photographic documentary, Ron, in a restaurant, and offers the immediate, uninterpreted version of the park scene as a feature of the book; we and Ron are also shown the photographs that are the product of the night spent at the Camberwell Reception Centre, with which the film started. After the first re-interpretation of the park scene, Thomas telephones Ron. After the final interpretation, he again sees Ron. Thomas as a fashion photographer, as an artisan, needs no interlocutor but the market. But as artist, as documenter of the real, he needs an interlocutor, his publisher. As man, he has Patricia, and perhaps Jane. In the pale light of the ‘morning after’ he still survives as artisan and technician, but he has learnt some hard lessons as artist and as man: he has failed to get his publisher interested in reality, and he has rejected Patricia’s call for help.

In order to know how you should be acting, you have to know what is the reality that is before you, and in which you have to act. Cinema invites the audience to look at a film and interpret it. Antonioni’s films invite us to watch a character looking at reality and interpreting it. The character finds the task difficult, and Antonioni’s point is that the task is difficult. His main characters are often weak, but that is because they have difficulty reading the world, and Antonioni knows that it is difficult. So we, the viewers, share in the difficulty of the task of interpretation that Antonioni sets his characters. But what Antonioni is telling us is not necessarily supposed to be difficult for us to understand. We must not transfer the difficulties facing the characters to the task offered the viewer. Antonioni is not trying to make his message difficult to understand; on the contrary, he goes to great lengths to make parts of his film very clear. The trouble is, viewers often cannot tell which parts are clear and which are not, and confuse the characters’ difficulties with their own.

For example, is Thomas married? In his studio, his telephone rings and he passes the phone to Jane, telling her it is his wife. When Jane refuses the telephone, he tells the caller: “Sorry love, the bird I’m with won’t talk to you.” He then progressively reduces his moral commitment to his wife, to the caller, with the following monologue: “She isn’t my wife really. We just have some kids … No. No kids. Not even kids … Sometimes, though, it … it feels as if we had kids … She isn’t beautiful, she’s … easy to live with … No she isn’t. That’s why I don’t live with her.” I don’t think Antonioni wants us to doubt the truth of what Thomas is saying. On the contrary, the illustration of Thomas’ weak ethical hold on reality and on the nature and purpose of human relationships that this monologue expresses depends on it being a true expression of Thomas’ difficulties vis-à-vis his wife, not ours.

A notion borrowed from information theory may help to explain how Antonioni’s films work. It is the aural metaphor of the ratio of signal to noise in a communication. If you want to hear a Chopin recital on an AM radio late in the evening, and you find a lot of hisses and whistles partly drowning out the music, you might try turning up the volume of the radio, only to discover that the interference gets so loud that you cannot hear the music at all any more. The Chopin nocturne is the signal that you are after, and the interference is the noise that the channel of communication produces while carrying your signal. If the signal is much louder than the noise, you can turn down your radio to hear the signal at a comfortable level, and the noise is thereby reduced to imperceptibility. It is still there, of course—you can’t get rid of it—but the Chopin nocturne completely drowns it out for you.

Let us apply this notion to life. Between men and women there is sexual attraction and desire. Let us call that a noisy channel. On top of that comes a signal of true feeling. But you get at the signal through the noise. How can you tell the signal from the noise? When Thomas photographs Jane, he hears noise: he sees lovers. Jane is a woman, having meaning (especially to a fashion photographer) as an erotic image, not as an initiator of action, least of all as a murderer. She is in a lush green world of nature, which reinforces that image, as does her embrace with her partner. This is all ‘noise’. When she rushes at him, he creates more noise: “You know, most girls would pay me to photograph them.” He plays a seductive sexual game. Jane says “I’ll pay you,” and Thomas replies teasingly: “I overcharge.” When she tries to grab the camera, he says: “Don’t let’s spoil everything. We’ve only just met …” Thomas doesn’t want the signal (Jane’s aggression and anxiety) to spoil the erotic noise. But Thomas sees it the other way around: he mistakes signal for noise and vice-versa.

When Jane comes to his flat, he carries on trying to interpret as signal what is in fact noise. Jane says: “My private life’s already in a mess. It’d be a disaster if …” Thomas replies: “So what? Nothing like a little disaster for sorting things out.” Thomas is trying to turn up the volume, and all he is succeeding in doing is increasing the noise to a point where it drowns out the signal altogether—Jane takes off her clothes, kisses him, laughs and starts relaxing. When Jane leaves, his desire motivates him to take a look at the photographs: still thinking that he is involved in an essentially erotic realm. He blows up the photographs, and becomes ethically committed to the reality that they represent, and is persuaded to invert the relationship between signal and noise. But, of course, Antonioni takes it one step further, because the photographic signal is carried by fragments of silver nitrate, which form a noisy channel; as Thomas blows up the photographs, as he turns up the volume to hear the signal louder, the noise drowns out the signal—in this case the noise is the grain of the photographic emulsion. Bill says of his paintings, which are compared to Thomas’ final enlargement, that he has to learn to decipher the signal in the noise. At this point, we are reminded of something I have quoted Antonioni as saying: “Reality is perhaps a relationship.”

If you think this is fanciful, think again about the scene at the Yardbirds’ rock concert. The group are singing an r&b song called ‘Stroll On’. They are singing to an audience whose responsiveness mirrors that of the five fashion models at the beginning of the film. While we, the viewers, are supposed to be paying attention to the signal of Thomas searching for Jane, and the audience to the signal of the music, one of the musician’s guitars starts producing noise, a crackling. The musician gets angry, and his attempt to quash the noise, by smashing his guitar against his amplifier, becomes the main attraction of the concert; it becomes signal, and in fact, when he throws the neck of his guitar into the crowd, the audience wakes up and responds in a way they had never responded to the music. So signal and noise are represented in a state of permanent reversal. Thomas responds to this new signal by fighting to gain possession of the guitar neck, but when he gets back on the street, he realises that out of context the neck is just noise, and throws it away. The rock concert is not a piece of swinging London, but an illustration of the semiotic structure of what Antonioni is trying to say.

The difficulty of discerning signal from noise is the difficulty that faces the Antonioni character in all his films. The most frequently repeated theme is that of discerning the signal of true human commitment in the noise of sexual attraction. But this is, in its turn, perhaps, a metaphor for the difficulty of perceiving the reality of the world in which we live. The signal/noise or figure/ground opposition is what makes choice possible, but it is also what makes that choice difficult. What people see as the ambiguity of Antonioni is better understood as his illustration of that difficulty.

And it is the very first thing he offers us. The credits of a film are usually lettering applied to a background. In the opening credits of Blow-Up, the lettering contains the image, which consists of shots zooming in and out of some women modelling bikinis on a stage for photographers. We even have the noise of sexuality here. Indeed, the film constantly returns to photography’s (and cinematography’s) transformation of women into images.

An interesting feature of Antonioni’s procedures is this: he does a lot with his camera to make it hard for us to orient ourselves in the scenes that he shows of Thomas’ life, and of London. Antonioni had always been famous for long takes. In this film, he fragments his shots, and so fragments our grasp of the pro-filmic world that is being represented. Most viewers never get a sense of the lay-out of Thomas’ flat-cum-studio. Antonioni creates this difficulty in order to communicate to us the difficulty of perceiving the real world if you are not ethically committed to it. However, when Thomas starts to get involved, then Antonioni starts filming space and time in a way that gives us a firm grasp of the pro-filmic world. The case of the montage of enlargements has been noticed by a number of critics. It is not a straight montage of still photographs, but is instead a carefully planned sequence of pans and zooms, isolating small parts of enlargements in a progressively didactic way. The interpretation of the world becomes easy both for Thomas and for us as soon as moral commitment is brought to the task.

The search for meaning on the part of a protagonist of Antonioni’s is prompted by a crisis. There is no such crisis for Thomas—if anything, his crisis is a product of the search. But the Rag week students replace that function. Rag week is usually Carnival, in England and in Italy. One has to admit that this conflicts with the lush foliage on the trees, but those are the result of the vagaries of the shooting schedule, and there is no doubt that the people are students (they are art school students in the script), and that the notion of Carnival, where conventional reality is overturned, is central to their representation. The film starts with a visual and sound antiphon between the students and Thomas pretending to be what he is not, a dosser, in order to acquire his representation of reality. It ends with the tennis match on the emblematic morning after.

The whole point of a tennis match is the ball. The game is a test of skill. Whether you get the ball over the net and in the court depends on many factors not directly in your control. When you mime the game, it all comes down to will. In a real game, if you hit the ball into the boundary fence, that is an error; it is noise. In a mime, everything is signal: if the ‘ball’ goes into the fence, it is because the participants all communally will it there. There is no chance, and therefore no ‘noise’. Thomas is willed into the game by the students. The woman in the red stripes points imperiously at him and at the ‘ball’ that has gone over the fence. As she does so, all the other students are shown leaning away from the fence, applying their will also to Thomas. In a sense, Thomas is for them like a real ball; he is the one element that is not directly under the control of their will. But if his will can be engaged, he too can participate. And he does. As Antonioni says, reality is a relationship. It is not that the game is an illusion, or that all reality is an illusion, but rather that it is will and choice, coming from understanding, that give his characters a reality in which they can act.

To return to information theory for a moment, we could say that a message that is predictable is clearly meaningful, though it may not carry much new information. If I get a Christmas card from my mother, it is clear what is its meaning, but it is an event low in information. But if I get a Christmas card from the governor of Arkansas, the message obviously carries more information, because it is so unpredictable. The trouble is, I wonder which of all the possible meanings was the one intended. The same is true of the end of the tennis match. The sound of the tennis ball that rises on the soundtrack, as we look at Thomas watching the game (the camera unexpectedly stays on his face, and doesn’t follow the ‘ball’) and as we see his eyes almost imperceptibly droop in discouragement, is loaded with so much information that we can have difficulty deciding what is its meaning. In this way, too, Antonioni makes us share the experience of his characters, faced with the enormity of reality, and not knowing which aspects to choose as a basis for action.