Review of Blow-Up (1966) by Edith N — 19 Feb 2008

This film stars Vanessa Redgrave, who is clearly the crazy Redgrave. She famously accepted her Academy Award (Best Supporting Actress, [i]Julia[/i], 1977) with what has become known as the "Zionist hoodlums" speech. However, that was eleven years after this film was made; I don't think there were yet indicators. At the time, she was merely a Redgrave, and they're an esteemed acting family. Still--Vanessa isn't exactly hurting for work to this day. She is also to date the only Redgrave to actually [i]win[/i] an Oscar, though the family has a total of eight other nominations.

David Hemmings plays Thomas, a swinging London photographer. One becomes rather inclined to use words such as "hip" and "fab." He lives in the kind of world where a girl can go from freaking out that he's seen her half-naked to having sex with him--and her best friend. He takes those wild, crazy-looking photographs that are so distinctively Sixties. Women wear ridiculous hats, and there are big translucent sheets of coloured plastic. While on a break from this mad whirl, Thomas goes to a park to take some pictures, and he takes what he begins to believe is photos of a murder. He eventually gives the negatives back to the woman in the picture, but he keeps copies, and he blows them up (hence the title) to examine them for clues as ardently as any Kennedy conspiracy theorist. Like them, he quickly encounters a simple truth of film--it only captures so much detail, and if you try to blow pictures up beyond that, what you get is blobs of colour that are meaningless.

This is, of course, in stark contrast to what we have become accustomed to on TV. [i]CSI[/i] would have you believe that, with the right computer program, he should have been able to see individual blades of grass and the veins on the leaves behind the couple, much less whether they are struggling or embracing. On [i]CSI[/i], we would not have a plot. The man in the background would be found out at once to be imagined or real. Thomas would lose his storyline, would not slip into his obsession. He would turn his photo over to the police, and all would be solved in about a minute. However, Antonioni gives us a picture that can never be made clear enough to show the truth.

There is more to it than that, but I don't want to give away too much of it, because once again, we have a story where the point is to see things unfold. Antonioni, in this film at least (I've never seen any of his others), shows us what could become madness if left to fester. Will it? We do not know; the film ends before we would. Thomas has returned to the park, and he may well keep returning. He has seen something, and he can never really know what it was. Antonioni, in his first English film, has a delicate touch. He submerges us in Thomas's life and world, even though even Thomas doesn't really want to be. The visuals are striking, and those of us who were not there for it get a hint of what, if nothing else, people thought it was like.

In the end, this is about what people think they see and know. When Thomas takes the picture, he thinks it is of lovers. When he analyzes the picture, he thinks it is of a murder. And yet, even so, he is strangely willing to become entangled with one of the conspirators, because he has become accustomed to controlling women, all women, as he controls his models and his secretary and even the proprietor of the antique shop he visits. He cannot, however, control himself.