Blow-Up
THE EMPIRE MASTERPIECE
MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI’S PEERLESS PICTURE
WORDS ADAM SMITH
BY THE MID-1960s, Michelangelo Antonioni had established himself as one of the titans of international cinema. A loose trilogy —L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961) and L’Eclisse (1962) —had minted his style: languid, unapologetically intellectual examinations of modern discontent, disconnection and (triple-word score) ennui, shot in pellucid black and white, usually involving middle-class types wandering through modernist architecture in search of meaning. They were the epitome of ’60s arthouse: flicks that had cinematic beatniks knowingly namechecking Sartre and Camus while secretly pondering a new set of bongos.
But with Blow-Up, his first English-language film and only his second shot in colour, Antonioni shifted his, ahem, focus, at least a little. Here was what looked at least like a thriller, an audience-friendly murder-mystery. A high-rolling London photographer, albeit one suffering from the trademark Antonioni existential anxieties, snaps a few pictures of a couple in a wooded park. Developing them later, he becomes convinced that he has witnessed a murder, a suspicion that only grows when the woman in question turns up and agitatedly demands the negatives.
All the apparatus of the classic Hitchcockian noir is in place: a crime, a femme fatale, and a looming sense of danger. But Blow-Up refuses to behave, to deliver the resolution or answers to which audiences were accustomed. The woman vanishes, the body vanishes, the pictures vanish. The reassuring comforts of genre seep out of the movie, snatched away, leaving our hapless protagonist, and the audience, bewildered and unmoored. The mysteries that Blow-Up intends to probe are, it turns out, much more interesting, and universal, than a mere corpse in a copse.