Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film, Blow-Up, is one of those movies that seems to be a primary text in the cinephile world. And so I had heard the one-sentence premise: photographer thinks he may have accidentally photographed a murder. But that is not what the film’s about! Yes, it’s a simple American plot-centric take. But that story only takes up a third of the film. And it is absolutely not the point. So much more happens in this film, but most people could only hang on to the murder thing because it’s the closest thing to a plot. How they must have hated the film, then!
I loved it! I did not expect to even like it. Sixties’ political conspiracy movies are not my scene. But, thank heaven, it’s not that. That feeling is certainly thrown in, after the rash of assassinations around that time and the obsessive inspection of the Vapruder film that claimed to capture JFK’s killer. But you know what else is in there? Mimes. Mod fashion shoots. A Yardbirds concert attended by zombie-like fans. A wooden propeller. The poor and homeless of London as art. Misogyny. Sex. Pretentious artists. Drug-addled parties. A hundred odd dialogues that seem to refer to things we are never shown.
The majority of the movie follows the nameless photographer protagonist (apparently the script called him Thomas) in and out of his Rolls Royce, bouncing between photoshoots with models whom he despises, scoping out an antiques shop that might be for sale, and generally being a stereotypical swinging sixties London boy. And, yes, after the unexplained interest a young Vanessa Redgrave shows in confiscating pictures he took of her in a park, he begins to arrange and enlarge the images, crafting a narrative of murder out of pixels and shapes and the direction Redgrave seems to be looking. As we are drawn into the obsession (in an eleven-minute thrilling, dialogue-free scene), the things he thinks he sees become alternately more clear and more abstract to us, too.
But here’s the proof that this isn’t the point of the movie: while he’s trying to track down clues, he is constantly (and willingly) sidetracked by anonymous sex, a rock concert, a drug den binge, and his beautiful new propeller. The possibility of a sensational crime is what keeps him stumbling back into his studio or the park, but it’s not enough to truly interest him. With all the fab life around him—and the bored, empty faces of those “enjoying” it—how could a boy focus on something like murder?
The only happy characters in this film are the mimes who feature in the beginning and the end of the movie. Everyone else is so over it. Immediately after a spontaneous ménage à models, our photog lays like a corpse while the girls put his clothes back on him. During the Yardbirds concert—where only one couple is dancing— a mob of young people watch the guitarist fly into a rage and destroy a speaker and then his own guitar, while they just stare blankly. Like the dead-tired workmen filing out of their squalid flophouse in the opening scene, their eyes register only a glimmer of despair left in a void of routine.
Cut to the mimes. They are students out raising money for charity as part of a local custom called Rag Day, but they run everywhere, pile twenty people into one car, gesture wildly, smile euphorically. We don’t yet know in the beginning that this will be the only real emotion in human eyes, but when they careen into the park at the very end, their chaotic joy feels like an affront to the film’s ennui. They strike up a mimed tennis match. The camera and characters follow “the ball” as it arcs across the park. Oops, it flies afield, where our gawking photographer must run and return it. After his mimed throw, the camera stays on his face while the sounds of a tennis match takeover the soundtrack. Suddenly, the photographer disappears.
I don’t even want to take the film apart looking for a well-worded meaning. I just want to watch this inherently fascinating character do unexplained things, momentarily become absorbed and enlivened by the study of his photographs, and drift across London and into a world where sight and image lose all meaning. Because it’s captivating and beautiful and magnetic. And I—like everyone else in the film—don’t care one bit about whether Vanessa Redgrave killed a guy in the park. There’s just so much pretty stuff to look at.