Blow-up

The opening scene: anarchic mimes huddled on an army truck run freely and noisily in the streets. Their flamboyant reality interspersed with the perennial gloom of the poor who exiting a shelter. A hobo walks past a Muslim man with purple turban. Mimes arouse the strolling nuns. The hobo drives a luxurious car. The mimes excite the dull city streets. The hobo encounters the mimes, smiles and rejoices. Is the car his? Did he steal it? He seems disconcertingly comfortable behind the vehicle. Minutes later he is giving orders and photographing a gorgeous woman inside a studio. He is a top-class photographer who has spent time as a homeless to capture the reality of their life. From the onset of this movie, I become aware of the fickleness of reality and how dependent I am on the camera. Things only contain value within their context. Antonioni’s message percolates throughout the rest of the film. Progressively, the protagonist becomes embroiled in a network of complex visual effects and quasi-paranormal activity.
The story plot follows a photographer for a day, possibly the strangest day of his life. He exits a homeless shelter, drives to work where he rides atop a model and photographs her face, photographs a playful couple in the park and heads back home to reveal the pictures. While revealing the pictures, he is faced with the inopportune opposition of the female girl in the park to print the photos. Finally, as he begins to recreate the events of the couple he uncovers a murder. While trying to find his editor to confirm the murder and verify the truth he has uncovered he gets drugged up in a party and awakes to find that the body has disappeared.
In the scene of the apartment, when the photographer develops the film, notice the clever juxtaposition of filmic and photographic storytelling by Antonioni. The sequence is a remarkable exposition of how the mind mounts truth on top the saddle of reality. But the real, as it maybe, is often bereft of truth for it is always perceived by imperfect beings. Without a sound, or a soundtrack accompanying the sequences, Antonioni’s montage marvelously crafts the events that happen (or not) in the park. It is symbolic to the senseless meaning donated to events witnessed by our unsound minds. Or is it simply the photographer manipulating reality? Could it be that he hasn’t slept in days and he is just hallucinating the reality? Antonioni’s film is a vehicle for his philosophical thoughts on visual reality.
Scenes that clearly express the vitality of contextual reality are the ones during and after the underground concert. Antonioni shows a moribund young audience attending a performance. The guitarist triggers the crowd’s reaction when he smashes the guitar and tosses its nose to the audience. The photographer must run for his life when he captures the coveted item now that the crowd has exploded in wild enragement. Outside of the concert hall, the nose of the guitar loses all meaning. It becomes useless. The photographer chucks it away because it is meaningless; the nose it’s simply useless. To underscore the contextual meaningless of the piece of guitar another person approaches the object, picks it up, studies it, and finally tosses it again.
To conclude, Antonioni gives yet another example of contextual reality. After the photographer fails to retrieve the body, he is distracted by the same group of mimes that catalyzed people in the streets in the opening scene of the film. The mimes begin to play tennis with invisible equipment. Initially, it is hard to believe their play. Slowly, as the photographer smiles and the camera follows the ball, it is hard not to visualize what is happening. One of the mimes hits the ball so hard that it bounces out off the court. The camera follows the ball’s trajectory. There is no ball, but the camera sees it because it believes it to be there. The photographer chases after the ball and returns it to the mimes. Then a faint sound of a ball being stroke reaches the ears of the photographer. He is an accomplice to the mimes’ reality. All meaning is interpersonal. No truth or reality exists without another’s confirmation.