blow up (w&d michelangelo antonioni, w tonino guerra, julio cortázar, edward bond)

Blow Up is one of those films which has a constant presence at the back of the mind. You imagine you know it backwards. Which is why it’s so good to get the opportunity to see it again on the cinema screen and realise that, in keeping with the themes of the film, what you imagined isn’t necessarily the same film as the one that’s really there. 

For example, I remembered the fake tennis match at the end, but hadn’t remembered that it came, precisely, at the end. It’s an act of sheer brio. A dozen painted-faced youths turn up and play pretend tennis and that’s that. An act of consummate narrative brilliance, pulling all the theoretical threads of the film together whilst making it crystal clear (or crystal opaque) that there’s no use hoping for a neat plot resolution. 

In case you hadn’t got it, this is a film about perception. What we see, what we think we see, what we imagine we see and what we don’t see. Reading some of the notes about the film, there seems to be a suggestion that Antonioni wasn’t interested in dialogue, but this seems like another oversight. Besides the famous “I am in Paris” line, one of the great pre-Lynchian Lynchian moments, there are also some nailed on exchanges as Hemmings’ Thomas talks to Sarah Miles about what he has or hasn’t seen. At other moments the dialogue feels like another musical note in a film that is so obsessive about composition. The lines might feel as though they’re discordant, but that’s part of the film’s deliberate discordance. As is Hemmings’ hyper-active acting, which rather than being forced, feels representative of a time when there was a furious energy at play, but an energy which was never clear as to what its objectives were. 

There is even a latent energy in the propeller which Thomas buys, the implication of a movement which has been stilled. Which is also a way of viewing photography. Roland Barthes’ punctum: the moment which the photograph captures and the unseen life contained within that image’s crystallisation. It might be that Antonioni’s film contains a plea for us to look harder, to penetrate the hidden corners of the visible in order to glimpse the supposedly invisible. Something which a society which has become increasingly image-dependent, without in any way improving its faculty for reading those images, would do well to heed. Further to that, you can see in Blow-Up the way that history’s tendrils stretch back to that supposedly revolutionary time of the swinging sixties, which was far from being all that it appeared. Rather than being the advent of a utopic freedom, it was actually the dawning of advanced materialism. Another Antonioni quote states that he didn’t want the film to be a London film, but the images which capture a city at the beginning of a process of transformation towards the modern behemoth it is still becoming, make it unequivocally a London film. And one of the greatest, without a shadow of a doubt. 

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Note - Edward Bond has a scriptwriting credit for English dialogue, adding to the impression that the film’s dialogue was something that was taken more seriously than has been suggested. With the director, Guerra, Bond and Cortazar on the script side, one wonders if there’s ever been a stronger script team put together for a movie.