Critics reviews

Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up has pretty much the greatest, most legendary fuck-you ending in all of cinema history: an imaginary tennis match between two mimes to conclude an oblique murder mystery. Somehow, it's also an ideal finale to this most hypnotic parable of alienation — and a perfect example of Antonioni's practically supernatural control of framing and mood.

It's moving and influential for the chasms it understands to exist between people, and for its perception of art as unable to bridge those divides. But the film is also weirdly idealistic, as art, for all its pitfalls, does awaken Thomas from his ignorant slumber. The possible murder in the park fulfills the intended function of modernism, highlighting the invisible constructions and frailties of society.

The film is strikingly original because it puts the two technologies of still photography and the cinema, and the formats of black and white and color, into dialogue with one another. As the photographer arranges the enlargements on his studio wall, the movie camera follows the movement of his eyes from one to another, "animating" the separate black-and-white images into a narrative sequence, like a film storyboard.

The debate about the film's merits and meanings seems endless, commentators arguing that Blow-Up is (amongst other things) a study of 1960s Mod culture, a metaphor for the creative process, a journey of sacrificial gifts leading to enlightenment, a story of impotence, and an autobiographical essay on the nature of perception. There's as much pleasure to be found in reading the staggering variety of interpretations as there is in watching the film itself.

50 years later, Blow-Up doesn't feel as condemning or censorious. The film observes and reports on its new world unflinchingly and with fascination; sometimes that shades into horror or repulsion, but sometimes into humor or (as in the last scene) a sense of immense, shocked, trippy possibility. There couldn't have been a more fitting gateway through which movie lovers could enter 1967.

Upon watching the film, dissociating it from its acquired significance, it quickly becomes obvious that Blow-Up is far more complex than it may seem, or at least has been understood to be. Its dealings with pop culture do not preclude it from depth and worth. In fact, at the end of a year in which politics, personal ethics and entertainment have collided in increasingly disturbing ways, Antonioni's study on life, death, art and meaninglessness feels more relevant than ever.

In the end, Blow-Up clarifies the underlying assumption of all films—that the false is as powerful as the real, and even uniquely attuned to insight in particular cases. We arrive through a constant array of memorable, enigmatic scenes and Antonioni's unique treatment of actors.

Even now, 50 years after its release, the enigmatic depths of Blow-Up continue to boggle the mind. Considering the arc of its main photographer character, Thomas—temporarily energized from his emotional disaffection when he discovers he has inadvertently captured a murder—one could read the film as just a cautionary tale of the dangers of being detached from the wider world. This surface theme, however, is enriched immensely by its qualities as a character study.

Blowup is a work of airy, heady conceptualism, but it is also ingenious and highly realistic as portraiture, a triumph of describing a type, one that surely lodged a popular archetype of the fashion photographer in most minds.

A prize ‘60s artifact, Michelangelo Antonioni's what-is-truth? meditation on Swinging London is a movie to appreciate—if not ponder. Just think of it as the equivalent to the Yardbird's guitar shard that the protag snatches and then tosses away.

As in the movie's entrancing, impeccably shot and edited sequence tracing the photographic enlargements, the images in Blow-Up itself keep suggesting larger scales, darker ramifications, and its sublimity of beauty and terror is of course the greater for leaving these questions unresolved.

What conflict there is in Blow-Up is captured in the opening clash between vernal greens on one plane and venal blues, reds, yellows, pinks and purples on another. The natural world is arrayed against the artificial scene; conscience is deployed against convention. If you've never seen Blow-Up, see it now, if only to see what part of the world was like 40 years ago.