SOURCE: “Antonioni’s Heideggerian Swerve,” in Literature and Film Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 4, October, 1998, pp. 278–87.

[In the following essay, Schliesser argues that Blow-Up represents a cinematic dramatization of Heidegger’s writing on ways of seeing.]

In 1995 Michaelangelo Antonioni was presented with an academy award for his “lifetime achievement” as a filmmaker. In a parallel universe, such recognition would seem cruelly ironic. In our own, however, it is simply, depressingly suggestive of how Hollywood has typically treated its most gifted artists (for lack of financial backing, Antonioni has not made a film since 1981). I will not dwell on the film industry’s fickle relationship with Antonioni: it is, like the struggles of so many other visionary directors, an old and familiar story. What I would like to address, however, is the current revival of interest in Antonioni’s films after two decades of virtual neglect (the presentation of the Lifetime Achievement Award was followed by the publication of William Arrowsmith’s Antonioni: The Poet of Images and a veritable blitz of articles on the director), a critical interest unfortunately undercut by the nonrelease of Antonioni’s latest film in the United States.

But what is the present sense of Antonioni’s achievement? To what extent does hindsight command a reevaluation of his contribution to the cinema? I would venture an unorthodox answer to these questions by suggesting that the single greatest “achievement” of Antonioni’s “lifetime” is not, as is generally believed, the films of his tetralogy (L’avventura [1959], La notte [1962], L’eclisse [1963], The Red Desert [1964]), but rather his most commercially successful and hence possibly least critically appreciated film, Blow-Up (1966).

Critics have long concentrated on the philosophical resonances of Antonioni’s earlier films (whether seen as existential or, more recently, empiricist), which they tend to associate with the director’s signature long takes and silences, as well as the behavior of his typically alienated protagonists. Yet little notice has been taken of Antonioni’s transcendent attempt to engage such modern schools of thought more directly through a sophisticated process of adaptation, a kind of cinematic “downloading” of their primary texts. Seymour Chatman grants that Antonioni’s thematization of the visual in Blow-Up is “something quite new.”

According to Chatman, Blow-Up marks the first time “Antonioni directly engaged the question of art and in particular its links to illusion” (139). Yet Chatman underestimates the roles preexisting texts played in making Antonioni’s particular treatment of vision in Blow-Up so startling and revelatory upon the film’s release. In response to Chatman, I would suggest that Blow-Up may be better understood and appreciated through a careful look at its added literary dimension; the deceptive complexity of Antonioni’s later approach to filmmaking may also be better grasped through a recognition of his ability to inflect noncinematic source texts through his already distinctive, if not revolutionary, cinematic style. I would claim that Blow-Up constitutes not only a pivotal thematic turn in Antonioni’s oeuvre, but also a point of unprecedented stylistic maturity (Antonioni’s long takes and stunning visual compositions were at this point put at the service of story as well as theme and mood). The film reveals the heightened literary and philosophical sensibilities of a filmmaker known almost exclusively for his nonliterary emphases and is groundbreaking precisely because it arises from a graceful cinematic fusion of difficult source texts.

The compass setting Antonioni’s “new” thematic and stylistic trajectory was the Argentinian writer Julio Cortazar’s experimental fiction “Las babas del diablo” (translated and published in 1963 as “Blow-Up”); and it points, if less explicitly, in the direction of what Frederic Jameson has recently identified as “Antonioni’s Heideggerian and metaphysical dimension” (20). The movement from Cortazar’s short story toward a cinematic dramatization of Heidegger’s later writings on vision within the larger narrative framework of the film reflects a shift in what many have seen as Antonioni’s essentially existential perspective, and/or what Kevin Moore has recently, and rather provocatively, described as “Antonioni’s allegiance to an empirical stance” (25). In Blow-Up, the predominantly “psychiatric” and/or empirical interests of Antonioni’s previous films, and the moral concerns at the heart of Cortazar’s story, are ultimately transcended in the interests of exploring a deeper, modern metaphysical crisis (Cortazar 154). At this midpoint in his career, Antonioni gambled on constructing a modern philosophical critique of the visual in cinematic terms; he sought to screen a treatise on our perceptual relation to the world and what lies beyond it that was qt once provocative and accessible. The cloaking of Blow-Up’s phenomenological investigation in the guise of a murder mystery only partly explains the film’s broad appeal. The other side of the film’s persistent allure must be comprehended with regard to Antonioni’s informed openness to the modern problem of the visual. By analyzing Antonioni’s “adaptation” of Cortazar’s story, and his transformation of it into a suitable groundwork for a cinematic inflection of Heidegger’s contemporary critique of vision, one can begin to cast light upon Jameson’s provocative but rather cryptic observation about Antonioni’s later films, as well as redeem Blow-Up as the philosophic masterwork of the cinema that it is.

THE ORIGINAL TEXT

Cortazar’s short story is set in Paris and involves the enigmatic Roberto Michel, a French-Chilean translator who, “in his spare time,” is also “an amateur photographer.” After leaving his apartment on a Sunday morning, Michel strolls along the boulevards of Paris with his camera and stops in an “intimate square.” There he witnesses a scene which at first intrigues him:

What I’d thought was a couple seemed much more now a boy with his mother, although at the same time I realized that it was not a kid and his mother, and that it was a couple in the sense that we always allegate to couples when we see them leaning up against the parapets or embracing on the benches in the squares.

(155)

but proves progressively perplexing. “All this was so clear, ten feet away,” laments Michel. Michel’s speculations about the relationship between the teenage boy and the older woman continue to shift as the scene unfolds. The more he watches, the more baffling things become to him. His suspicions about the relationship between the woman and the boy grow, but he cannot put his finger on what exactly is bothering him:

Strange how the scene (almost nothing: two figures there mismatched in their youth) was taking on a disquieting aura. I thought I was imposing it, and that my photo, if I shot it, would reconstitute things in their true stupidity.

(Chatman 91)

Mistrusting himself, fearing he might be “imposing” the “disquieting aura” of the scene through a projection of his own thoughts and feelings, Michel eventually takes recourse to his camera. Although his eyes may play tricks on him, Michel seems to think the camera will not lie: it will locate the banal truth of what is passing before him and thus set things straight. It will, he believes, serve as a neutral medium between him and what he is seeing and thus prove that he is indeed “imposing” the “disquieting aura” of the scene. Ultimately, however, Michel’s faith in the camera’s capacity to objectively “reconstitute things” in their essential truthfulness leads him down the proverbial garden path: by implicitly denying the subjective space contained within the grain of the photograph, he remains blind to the possibility of also “imposing” a perspective on the scene via the camera’s limited field of view. Moreover, he fails to recognize that he is putting the camera at the service of another contrary desire: to purge the scene of the rottenness he instinctively smells at its core but nevertheless believes he may be tainting from afar through the projection of the disturbances in his own fractured interiority (throughout the story Michel intuits and worries about the fragility of his own psychological and emotional state). His impulse to restore the scene to a more benign state than the one he imagines for it is thus no less internally informed, arising from a trance of wishful thinking and an equally dangerous assumption that what preexisted his perceptual encounter of the woman and boy was inherently innocent.

The “scene” at the heart of Cortazar’s story (as Michel himself self-consciously describes it) thus thematizes a fundamental loss of faith in visual perception and a recognition of the fallibility of the mechanical documentation of perception (manifest in the limitations of the camera-eye). In the hyperrea! world of inflated visual simulation recently generated by the inventions of photography, cinema, and television—the buttresses of a world ever more dominated by the proliferation of electronic media—Michel begins to wonder if he can indeed “believe his eyes” or, for that matter, place any trust in the object which provides a mechanical extension of them. Cortazar reinforces this theme by destabilizing the narrative agency that governs the story. At first, Michel narrates the story—he speaks to us directly as “I.” But his initial status as an internal narrator (a character who participated in the story in the past and now reports it from a retrospective, discursive position) soon becomes eroded, and though he continues to speak (i.e. continues to enunciate the story), he begins to refer to himself indiscriminately with the first and third person pronouns (Cortazar 155). As Michel struggles to recall the event in the square, he switches from “I” to his proper name or the masculine pronoun: for example, “but Michel rambles on to himself easily enough, there’s no need to let him harangue on this way” (155). Yet in the following paragraph he reassumes the classic first person position: “As for the boy I remember the image before his actual body … while now I am sure that I remember the woman’s body much better than the image” (159). This confusion in narrative agency seems to result from the perceptual and moral crisis Michel endures after the key event in the story: “I think I now know how to look, if it’s something I know, and also that every looking oozes with mendacity” (160) Still, the causal/temporal relation between the impact of this event on Michel and his reliability as a narrator is left open. It is also possible that the destabilization of Michel’s psyche (which becomes manifest in his schizophrenic modes of reference) actually prefigures the destabilization of his perceptual framework and thus leads to his growing confusion.

However this happens to be read, at a very basic level, Michel’s psychological split mirrors the general rift between perspective and reality explored by Cortazar in “Blow Up”: as hard as this character tries, he can never quite find the right angle from which to see or report. Nor can the camera correct this problem: it records, but also from a particular vantage point; it documents, but leaves room for the imposition of narrative.

While Michel’s confusion seems at one level to emerge simply from his violent encounter with the ruses of visual perception, it is also specifically associated with the guilt he feels over his voyeuristic tendencies. By definition, the voyeur watches an event to the exclusion of actively participating in it. Thus, when the woman in the plaza notices Michel, she shatters the protective glass between him and the scene he has been surreptitiously observing and photographing. By confronting Michel, she makes him visible, now a part of the incident to which he had previously only been a secret witness.

To displace the shame he feels over being caught looking, Michel recasts his voyeurism as an expedient intervention on the behalf of a child: “the important thing, the really important thing was having helped the kid escape in time” (160). Briefly, he conceives of his involvement in the scene as voluntary and heroic, and deludes himself into transforming a traditionally amoral act (voyeurism) into a moral victory:

Out of plain meddling, I had given him the opportunity finally to take advantage of his fright to do something useful. … In the last analysis, taking that photo had been a good act.

(161)

As in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, the immorality associated with voyeurism is overshadowed by the possible occurrence of a much more severe moral transgression. On the surface, Cortazar has only changed the crime by replacing murder with molestation. Yet, in contrast to the conclusion of Rear Window, the rationalized sense of moral victory that accompanies Michel’s recollection of the incident is ultimately circumvented, rather than confirmed, by the photos he has taken in the square:

It wasn’t because of the good act that I looked at (one of the pictures) between paragraphs while I was working. At that moment I didn’t know the reason, the reason I had tacked the enlargement onto the wall.

(161)

Thus, at the end of the story, Michel can no longer stand upon the ostensibly moral effect of his intervention—the scene he believed he finally grasped and acted upon accordingly, morally, had in fact deceived him. Upon closer examination of the blow-up on the wall, Michel begins to consider what is unseen in the photo and yet the gathering force behind it:

The kid was less startled than he was suspicious, once or twice he poked his head over the woman’s shoulder and she continued talking, saying something that made him look back every few minutes toward that area where Michel knew the car was parked and the man in the gray hat, carefully eliminated from the photo but present in the boy’s eyes (how doubt that now) in the words of the woman, in the woman’s hands, in the vicarious presence of the woman.

(161)

From this point, Michel must envision what remains virtually invisible in the photo, but very much behind the scene. He does not literally see the man who is the real instigator of the seduction in his photographic record. Rather, the man (as key to the truth of the witnessed events) is a product of the narrative Michel has reconstructed from his memory and his speculative, guilt-ridden imagination:

When I saw the man come up, stop near them and look at them, his hands in his pockets and a stance somewhere between disgusted and demanding … I understood, if that was to understand, what had to happen now, what had to have happened then, what would have to happen at that moment, among these people, just where I had poked my nose in to upset an established order, interfering innocently in that which had not happened, but which was now going to happen, now was going to be fulfilled. And what I had imagined earlier was much less than the reality. …

(161)

Michel’s accidental return to the evidence usurps his brief moral triumph (and the subsequent exoneration of his amoral voyeurism), and he falls into sudden despair. The “reality” to which Michel refers (the man for whom the woman was only acting as a ploy) plunges him into feelings of desperate guilt and helplessness:

there was nothing I could do, this time I could do absolutely nothing. My strength had been a photograph, that, there, where they were taking their revenge on me, demonstrating clearly what was going to happen.

(162)

All faith in seeing is henceforth shattered in the story, the eye rendered “impotent” and “mocking” (162). And the eye’s extension, and recorder-the camera-becomes something “incapable of intervention” (162). Where Hitchcock uses the final revelation of the murder to affirm the status of the visual, Cortazar deploys Michel’s aporia to sever the presumed link between sight and truth.

In the end, Michel’s initial belief that he had successfully intervened on behalf of the boy is reduced to an “if only” fantasy:

and I leaned up against the wall of my room and was happy because the boy had just managed to escape. … For the second time he’d escaped them, for the second time I was helping him to escape, returning him to his precarious paradise. …

(163)

Thus in “Blow-Up,” Michel is at first haunted, then devastated by the superficially innocuous incident he witnesses in the square. His experience of self-deception unhinges his moral sensibilities from their basis in sight. When seeing is revealed as a “mockery,” the perceptual foundation of moral judgment and action crumbles, as does, presumably, Michel’s sanity.

THE “SWERVE”

Although my reading of “Blow-Up” is clearly only one of many possible interpretations, the story’s openness and complexity cannot be disputed. These qualities in and of themselves already make it seem an unusual choice for filmic adaptation, especially considering that most commercial feature adaptations tend to be based on conventional, realist fiction. Moreover, most feature-length film adaptations are derived from novels, where some form of condensation is usually required. The case of “Blow-Up” is just the opposite: because of its length and focus, Cortazar’s story actually needed expansion to work as a feature-length film. Such conditions have undoubtedly allowed Antonioni to maintain that he was only “inspired” by the story and state “that the only thing he really borrowed from (it) was the idea of a crime discovered by making a photographic enlargement.” Chatman has shown how Antonioni’s statements are “not quite true” by charting out many “other similarities” between the story and the film (139). While Chatman’s observations of the similarities between the two texts do reveal Antonioni’s tremendous debt to Cortazar, one may also understand Antonioni’s minimization of this debt in light of his divergence from the path of the original story. Although the central premise of Cortazar’s story is retained in the film, many other significant aspects of it are changed. One might thus conclude that Antonioni’s selection of Cortazar’s text was based in part precisely on its “openness”; that is, the text’s openness allowed him wide play with the original story’s theme of vision, a chance to significantly “blow up” and tailor this theme to his own philosophical conception of the modern crisis of the visual.

Antonioni’s divergence from his original source is at once subtle and dramatic. His approach to Blow-Up most closely resembles what Harold Bloom refers to as “clinamen,” a revisionary initiative which seeks not to confront an influential text directly, to aggressively challenge or refute it, but rather to “swerve” away from it and in so doing lead it in a new direction (14). Seen in this light, Antonioni thus holds onto Cortazar’s central visual problematic but “swerves” so as to veer away from the heavy psychological and moral implications of the story and shifts the emphasis of his film to a more purely metaphysical inquiry into the nature of the visual. But where does this swerve come into play, and where does it lead?

Chatman has suggested that Antonioni’s changes in characterization reflected his desire to shift the “problems” the protagonist faces in the story from the “psychiatric” to the “existential” (141). I would add to this by carefully considering the differences between the protagonists of the story and the film, and by relating this to an equally careful study of the director’s transposition of the original setting of the story. For instance, one may wonder why Thomas, the cinematic reincarnation of Michel, was transformed from an amateur into a successful professional fashion photographer. Why should this character have gone from introverted loner to extroverted hipster? As well, it may seem curious that Antonioni opted for “Swinging London” over Cortazar’s gray and baroque Paris, given that the latter setting seems much more in keeping with the mood of the first three films of the tetralogy. For that matter, why should an urban square have become a nonurban park in the film? Such changes were not arbitrary, or merely motivated by the inevitable expansion of the original story. They were, to be sure, the key to the success of Antonioni’s swerve from Cortazar to Heidegger, and his ultimate melding of these two sources.

INTO THE CLEARING

In general, the change from Cortazar’s dour Paris to “Swinging London” was central to Antonioni’s textual enterprise, as the inhabitants of this “mod” urban culture (at least those with whom Thomas interacts) have seemingly foregone psychological depth and introspection for beautiful surfaces. The chaos and distraction that characterize this milieu secondarily create a backdrop against which the later silences of the crucial scenes in the park become stunning, if not epiphanous.

Much as the central event of Cortazar’s story takes place in a city square, the crucial action of Antonioni’s film occurs in the park where Thomas discovers the couple and attempts to photograph them. Antonioni’s transposition of the square into a more natural, pastoral setting signals a conscious move away from the enculturated site of human interaction, morality, and the worldly issues that concern Cortazar. As a vast and mysterious openness essentially devoid of people, the park functions as the unmediated space wherein we may come into contact with that thing that Jameson calls “Antonioni’s Heideggerian and metaphysical dimension,” that entity that Antonioni obliquely referred to in interviews with Cahiers du Cinema following the release of Blow-Up as a “beyondness” (a term that sounds suspiciously similar to Heidegger’s “Being”).

When Thomas approaches the park, the position of the camera dramatically changes. Before this, Thomas had been depicted in close-ups and medium shots and had essentially dominated the mise en scene of the film. As he enters the park, however, he appears in an extreme long shot, framed by two large trees swaying in the breeze. This visual reemphasis suddenly sets us at a great distance from Thomas, and thus briefly ruptures our alignment with him as a filter character. For a moment, the pace and mood of the film no longer appears contingent upon Thomas’ point of view. Instead, his previously overbearing presence is dwarfed by the encompassing spectre of natural space that has come into view. The moment of his entrance into this place gives us pause, and compels us to change our own visual gears. But after the previous quickly paced, almost hectic sequences involving Thomas and his models, we welcome the reprieve offered by this pastoral space, and Antonioni makes the most of this, emphasizing the gentle rustling of leaves in the trees, the songs of birds, the quiet sound of the breeze. We continue to look at Thomas as he approaches, but from whose vantage point? Detached from his filter, we are left to gaze upon the open field and absorb it with a sense of wonder. The camera has ceased to be a mere recorder of Thomas’s distracted, chaotic movement-it has instead become an organ of receptivity, an open window onto the open meadows before us. With each long take, we are quietly swept up by the soothing yet humbling force of this vision, encouraged to ponder the stillness and mystery of what would ordinarily pass as mundane.

Gradually, however, the camera returns Thomas to the center of the mise en scene and forces us to reestablish an alignment with his filter. But just as the mood evoked by Antonioni’s representation of the park temporarily alters Thomas’s ethos in the story (he suddenly appears small and insignificant in the face of “beyondness” that is apparently shielded there), it thus also tempers our relation to him. When he spots a couple playfully walking up the slope, he still seems under the peaceful spell of the park. The image of the couple strikes a chord in him, but a very different chord than the equivalent image in the story struck in Michel: although somehow mysterious, it does not initially arouse suspicion, but rather seems a picture of romantic innocence, a perfect image to offset the predominantly dark and disturbing photographs of Thomas’s upcoming book. Unlike Michel, Thomas’s attraction to the couple is motivated by aesthetic and professional interests. The fact that this image is less immediately strange and arresting than that of the woman and boy in Cortazar’s short story makes its deception that much more powerful. Ironically, of course, the photos Thomas takes in the park prove to be his most beguiling and disturbing of all and lead to his complete disappearance at the end of the film.

While clearly more than “inspired” by Cortazar’s visual dilemma and the story he created around it, interviews after the release of Blow-Up indicate that Antonioni was simultaneously attracted to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s post-war writings, many of whose later works were characterized by an “explicit critique of visual primacy” (Jay 269). Many have seen Heidegger maturing to a point in these writings in which he actually privileged the acoustic over the visual, but Martin Jay has recently argued that Heidegger was actually concerned with the ascendancy of one type of seeing over another: “Contrasting the early Greek attitude of wonder, which lets things be, with that of curiosity, which is based on the desire to know how they function, Heidegger linked the latter with the hypertrophy of the visual” (270–71). Heidegger sought to undo the triumph of curiosity over wonder by critiquing curious seeing as “a peculiar way of letting the world be encountered by us in perception” (272). This curious or epistemological type of seeing is conceived of as “abstracted, monocular, inflexible, unmoving, rigid, ego-logical and exclusionary,” while its opposite, an ontological mode of vision, is “multiple, aware of its context, inclusionary, horizontal, and caring” (274). It was this latter “more benign version of sight, which refuses to stare aggressively at its objects” that Heidegger wished to reinstate in Western thought (275). By juxtaposing these two modes of vision and revealing the dire consequences of the former type, Blow-Up becomes a watershed moment in cinema, transcending those preceding films (Rear Window, Peeping Tom, and so forth) which had already begun to shadow the antiocularcentric writings of the post-war period. Antonioni’s achievement is to thus to swerve toward Heidegger’s position and construct his implicit critique of epistemological vision through the two technologies which seem to be its most vigorous promoters, photography and film.

Thus, from a Heideggerian standpoint, it is highly significant that Thomas follows the couple into a clearing rather than watches them in a small city square, and that this is the point where the open and receptive mode of vision registered by the camera at the beginning of the scenes in the park comes to an end. At the most literal level, the clearing in the park is where Thomas can get the best light. But the changed setting also corresponds to what Heidegger referred to as the “lichtung,” or forest clearing, his metaphor for the opening where Being reveals itself by coming into the light:

The forest clearing is experienced in contrast to dense forest, called Dickung in our older language. The substantive Lichtung goes back to the verb lichten. The adjective licht is the same word as open. To open something means to make it light, free and open, e.g. to make the forest free of trees at one place. The free space thus originating is the clearing. What is light in the sense of being free and open has nothing in common with the adjective “light” which means “bright,” neither linguistically nor factually. This is to be observed for the difference between openness and light. Still, it is possible that a factual relation between the two exists. Light can stream into the clearing, into its openness, and let brightness play with darkness in it. But light never first creates openness. Rather, light presupposes openness. However, the clearing, the open region, is not only free for brightness and darkness but also for resonance and echo, for sound and the diminishing of sound. The clearing is the open region for everything that becomes present and absent.

(Heidegger 384)

By transposing Cortazar’s original setting, Antonioni transforms Heidegger’s metaphor for the opening wherein Being both reveals and conceals itself into a cinematic image. In Blow-Up, the clearing becomes a literal, spatial form—the stage on which Heidegger’s visual metaphysics may be dramatized. Here the openness of the clearing provides us with the dual possibilities of brightness and darkness, as well as an image that is benevolent in appearance, neutral before it is put up for “desperate inspection before the eye” (Jameson 24). It is only when Thomas imposes himself upon the scene, attempts to “bring it into the greatest possible proximity to us” that its essential darkness is brought into the light only to blur out of focus again and again.

Although the scenes in the park superficially resemble Cortazar’s scenes in the square, Antonioni has reformulated them to reflect the paradox that Heidegger believed to be inherent in aesthetic reception:

In the thing-concept just mentioned there is not so much an assault upon the thing as rather an inordinate attempt to bring it into the greatest possible proximity to us. But a thing never reaches that position as long as we assign as its thingly feature what is perceived by the senses. Whereas the first interpretation keeps the thing at arm’s length from us, as it were, and sets it too far off, the second makes it press too physically upon us. In both interpretations the thing vanishes.

(Heidegger 156–57)

Antonioni depicts this “vanishing” through Thomas’s search for the transcendent image, his attempt to capture it, to freeze it with his camera, and thus bring the rendered object close. The photos taken in the park are thus too small to be revealing at first. Blown up, they are too near, too much “upon us,” and blur out of focus. As Chatman has already shown, the disappearance of the coveted object in the photographs Thomas takes in the park (its progressive blurring) eventually hastens a disappearance of the subject (Thomas) in the story. Thomas is ultimately victimized by the hubris Heidegger implicitly condemns in the above passage. By investing in a perceptual path toward the truth (a sensory epistemology), this character falls prey to the same fate as the object he is trying to capture and literally vanishes in the final scene of the film.

The realization of this critique also required significant modifications in the traits of Cortazar’s original protagonist. We have already seen that this character as re-drawn as a high-level professional instead of an amateur photographer. Now we may look at how this change functions with respect to changes in setting.

In Blow-Up, the often troubled, neurotic characters of Antonioni’s previous films have been replaced by cool, detached aesthetes like Thomas. A character like the guilt-ravaged Michel would have been more at home in the films of the earlier tetralogy. On the other hand, Thomas emerges from a new breed of counterculture artists who, rather than looking inward for inspiration, appear to glide upon the surface of things, promiscuously indulging in the visual temptations of the external world. While Michel’s amateur photography brings about this character’s psychological, interior unraveling, Thomas’s professional quest to obtain the perfect image leads him to destructive hubris. As an artist, Thomas is the genuine article. Yet he also represents the visual artist in his new mod garb, Antonioni’s blind alterego, an arrogant, reckless amoral presence through which the director could put a perceptual spin on the old ontological question. In the mod era, Being is no longer strictly a metaphysical problem; in this contemporary image saturated cultural context, being cannot be understood apart from seeing. Antonioni’s remark to Moravia that “to see or not to see is the question” suggests his belief that these terms have become completely interdependent (Chatman 138).

Unlike Michel, Thomas’s professional status give him license to violate certain moral imperatives. As I have already shown, Michel is aware of the amorality of his voyeurism but may retrospectively rationalize it as a condition which leads to what he sees as his moral action of intervening on behalf of the boy. When reprimanded by the woman (played by Vanessa Redgrave) in the park for infringing on her privacy, Thomas justifies his actions by coldly declaring, “some people are bullfighters. I’m a photographer. I take pictures.” In direct contrast to Michel, Thomas appears coldly professional, egocentric, aggressive, arrogant, and absolutely insensitive to the moral and personal issues which abound all around him. In the Heideggerian sense, such traits make Thomas quintessentially representative of the modern subject. Such a man “fights for the position in which he can be that existent which sets the standard for all existence and forms the directive for it” (Heidegger 283). Especially in the role of photographer, he stands for the agent of “the basic process of modern times,” making Heidegger’s figurative notion of “the conquest of the world as picture” literal (282).

By altering Cortazar’s original protagonist in such as way, Antonioni has created a character that epitomizes Heidegger’s “epistemological seeing” and its manifestation as a technological practice. Thus, when Antonioni detaches the film’s narrative from Thomas’s subjectivity in the park by virtue of a more distant, objective camera position, he may pose the alternative, or “ontological,” way of seeing for an audience not entirely sympathetic to the type of person Thomas represents. At such a point, for a brief but startling time, the camera becomes still, patient, a medium through which the world is absorbed rather than conquered.

As I have suggested, the force created by this visual reemphasis even seems to descend over Thomas for a moment. Indeed, the momentary opening of Thomas’s vision appears to lead him to the revelation of the couple and, subsequently, to the clearing. However, when Thomas becomes intent on photographing the couple and takes up a concealed position in a stand of trees on the edge of the clearing, Antonioni reassumes his critical representation of an aggressive, epistemological mode of looking. The minute Thomas takes aim through his camera lens, the previously open and supple image of the couple in the filed ceases to be contained within a revelation of Being, and becomes instead an object Thomas seeks to record, to capture. Combined with his zealousness to freeze truth in an image, Thomas’s arrogance and false sense of power compel him to raise his camera against the preferable ontological mode of seeing. Rather than letting things be, he succumbs to his desire to know the visual field of the clearing through the technological mechanisms of the camera. Hence within the context of Antonioni’s Heideggerian thematization of vision, Thomas’s desire to know ensues from a need to control and a failure to understand that “the visible deeply objects to our habitual objectification.” Such a desire is not without dire consequences for his character.

In retrospect, we may uneasily begin to wonder if, in casting the pall of his own gaze onto the clearing, Thomas has thereby rendered the previously open, neutral image of the couple into the dark deed that he later believes he discovers in his photographs. Although, unlike Michel, Thomas does not stop to consider that he may actually have imposed the scene, we may unconsciously wonder whether or not his resumption of an aggressive gaze has painted its own violence onto the scene. And if he hasn’t, what does it matter? There is thus something of a self-fulfilling prophecy at work here. Thomas’s hubris leads him to impose himself upon the clearing and, subsequently, impose a narrative on what he saw. As a result, his fate is to return to and disappear in the very clearing wherein the epistemological and ontological modes of vision clash.

But Antonioni never lets us get far enough away from Thomas during the film to be able to look down on him as the hapless victim of his own arrogance in the face of Being. As Thomas photographs the couple from his hiding place, we watch the man and woman from a distance against an essentially silent backdrop (at this point we hear only the sounds of the breeze and clicking of Thomas’s shutter) and must imagine what they are saying to one another. Given the lack of information conveyed in the soundtrack during this scene, we must guess about what we cannot hear, and the suppression of sound in the park scenes later forces us to fall back on Thomas, the consummate professional, and the details he has been able to capture through his lens. As well, the reconstruction and blow-up process that follow in Thomas’s studio become key to our own attempt to understand the events in the park. Although we may find Thomas personally distasteful, we become progressively dependent on him for story information and hence closely realigned with his visual perspective after the scenes in the park. At the same time, our brief experience of the ontological mode of perception in the park makes this alignment tense: after Antonioni presents us with an alternate form of vision, it is difficult to return to epistemological seeing without, at the very least, establishing some critical distance from it. Thus, in our simultaneous closeness to Thomas’s filter and our general complicity in a curious, aggressive visual relationship to the world.

During the scenes in the park, Antonioni’s representation of ontological seeing serves several purposes. First, it contrasts epistemological and ontological seeing for the viewer. Second, it allows Antonioni to detach himself from the artist protagonist of his film and emerge as implicitly critical of him and the spirit of technological conquest he represents. Finally, it shows that the camera need not simply be a tool at the service of domination. The camera can act much in the same way as the clearing described by Heidegger, opening itself up to light, becoming a revelatory tool of wonder.

The deceptive textual complexity and philosophical depth of Blow-Up become all the more significant when we situate it among the post-war films which constitute the cinema’s response to the strongly anti-visual thread of twentieth-century Western thought. While Blow-Up appears to form a continuum with other narrative films that thematized the relation between vision and violence, most notably Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1953) and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1962), it swerves from and, I would suggest, transcends its predecessors by offering not only a critique of the aggression inherent to modern vision and its supporting technologies, but also a cinematic conception of its redemptive alternative, Heidegger’s coveted “ontological seeing.”

The importance of Antonioni’s pivotal inquiry into the visual is reflected by later American film responses to it. His adaptation of “Blow-Up” stimulated a cultural and aesthetic fate for the Cortazar text which runs parallel to the central thematic of the original story: it was destined to be enlarged over and over, revised, remade in 1974 by Francis Coppola as The Conversation and remade again in 1981 by Brian DePalma as Blow Out. These films pay tribute to Antonioni’s most sophisticated achievement, while performing their own swerves from its provocative cinematic exploration of the limits of perception.

Works Cited

Antonioni, Michaelangelo. Interview with Cahiers du Cinema. 1967.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford P, 1973.

Chatman, Seymour. Antonioni; or, The Surface of the World. Berkeley: University of California P, 1985.

———. Reading Narrative Fiction. New York: Macmillan, 1993.

Cortazar, Julio. “Blow-Up” in Focus on “Blow-Up.” Ed. Roy Huss. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971.

Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art” in Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Haper and Row, 1977.

———. “The Age of the World” in Measure. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1951.

Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes. Berkeley: University of California P, 1993

Jameson, Fredric. The Geopolitical Aesthetic. Bloomington: Indiana University P, 1992.

Moore, Kevin. “Eclipsing the Commonplace: The Logic of Alienation in Antonioni.” Film Quaterly 48, No. 4 (1995).