Blow-Up: My thoughts

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dedido13

New member
Hey,
I just saw Blow-Up (1966) for the first time :) Has anyone seen it? The film does a fine job of capturing the atmosphere and sights/sounRAB of the 60's, everything looks so different from today (obviously).

Blow-Up (1966): 3/5

I was inspired to watch this partly for the story similarities it shares with Brian De Palma's thriller Blow Out (1981). It's interesting, but I didnt find the photographer the most likeable character or nice person. He almost treats the girls he photographs like cattle, pointing at them and calling them "you", or something like that, and in one scene the act of photographing one model is almost treated like an extension of sex ("Give it to me... give it to me!" etc), and telling a girl to lie down and almost photographing up her skirt.
The cars, fashions and culture etc seem so different from today and were interesting to see. The film focuses on that style quite a bit.
I did wonder why
if David Hemmings snaps a murder, why didnt he go to the police? Then I thought that the drama group at the start/end were important as they could have "acted out" the park murder for the man to snap
He seemed self centered and too focused on his job.
I think Blow Out is the better film.
 
Blow Up is an important film but it's not without its flaws: it now looks very dated because it's rooted in the "swinging" 1960s culture and parts of the film seem ponderously slow (especially compared with today's films which almost always rely on fast edits and multiple angle shots to keep the viewer's attention.)

However, Antonioni was not so concerned with straightforward narrative (not much really happens throughout the film) but rather with symbolism and questions about the nature of reality and artifice. This is the talent of the film-maker as artist - to use the medium to explore deeper issues and not to just present a story.

Hemmings' character is bored, unsympathetic, emotionally detached and quite unlikeable. This is deliberate. Antonioni lets us know that the would of the fashion photographer (or this particular one) is hollow and essentially meaningless. In order to bring meaning and excitement into his life he discovers (or invents in his imagination) a murder captured on film.

This is-it-or-isn't-it murder is another metaphor: the nature of photography as reality or artifice. We often accept photos as proof of real events but much of the photographer's art is to fake and hide the truth, especially in the world of glamour and fashion where blemishes and other physical shortcomings of models are retouched (especially in modern times with the invention of computer-aided retouching) and a less than realistic world is portrayed through advertising etc. - a kind of stylised and idealised lifestyle.

And so the image captured by Hemmings' camera may or may not be real: you can't necessarily trust the image captured on film. Indeed, it may only be a figment of the photographer's imagination, looking for some meaning in his life where there is none.

Near the end of the film Hemmings comes across a mime troupe. Again we see the nature of artifice, of playing at something which is not there yet you could imagine it to be there.

At the end of the day I think Blow Up is also important as Antonioni's viewpoint of swinging 60s London as vapid, self-congratulatory and ultimately hollow - much like the central character in the film - and his next movie, Zabriskie Point, took a similarly jaded view of the end of the hippie period in late 1960's America. Hemmings' character was clearly based on celebrity photographers such as David Bailey and I think Antonioni did a wonderful job of showing us that the celebrity culture of the time (and 40 years later of this time, too) is essentially meaningless and without merit or purpose.
 
Yes, that's the ambiguity of it - was it real or wasn't it? It makes it all the more interesting that the people acting are miming - not only are they performing but they're performing without props - it's a sort of double deception, if you like.

Again, this is similar to the photographer's art - the first deception is staging a photograph - setting it up and presenting an "act" as real - and the second deception is retouching or manipulating the image to further remove it from documentary reality (this is especially true in fashion and advertising.)
 
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