Blow-Up

I loved Blow Up when I first saw it on a rough looking DVD many moons ago. I wasn't sure what a cinematic experience would be like but as always at the Prince Charles, it was transformative; the print is exquisite and Antonioni's beautiful but unstuffy and unpretentious shooting style is so fresh, and London so well rendered, the movie could have been made yesterday. What was, upon my first viewing, a film about an expression of the swinging 60's is now, clear to me, as an indictment of it. It does not glorify how awful the magnetic main character is and how unhelpful and vapid and selfish his friends are. He is popular and talented to us, simply because he says he is and acts like he is, a dangerous prophetic warning in the 60's for the decades to come. David Hemmings is incredible and he's playing a man, not of his time, but of a time about to end. His way is (thankfully) at an end; he's violent, self-interested, he only knows the value of something by how much other people want it, he barely has an idea of his own outside of his job. He's a perfect, nasty, ugly, sexy bastard and a perfect protagonist for this film. Blow Up is a tough movie: breathing room, periods of silence, a lack of resolution, meandering and fetishisation of how the photochemical process works can be a turn off for most, but it's exactly why I love it. I love that it asks more questions than it answers. I love the sequence with the guitar neck, I love the mime sequence at the end, it's bravura filmmaking of a bygone era. The film clearly shows you right and wrong but it doesn't tell you. Hemmings' character is a photographer after all, not a journalist; The loudest moment in the film is when he takes advantage of the two girls in a way that Antonioni codes as wrong but always at the fringes it allows the main character's (and society's) acceptance of it let it play out in full. It's a difficult sequence to watch but a powerful and necessary one. The film is an anti-thriller, the work an influence on DePalma and Polanski and Edgar Wright. It's darkly comic, it is showing you the fringes of real evil. It seems to be about nothing but it's loaded with screaming subtlety. It's ahead of its time but shows a bygone era, before paparazzi and mobile phones but also manages to show us how far and how little we've come.

The artist sees in his painting what no recipient of art, no matter how interested he is, sees, as well as a film director, no matter how versed we are in the world of cinema. More secrets appeared to him. I once read about the end of the masterpiece of the controversial Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni BLOW-UP, the sentence "a plot twist without a plot", I understand his intent, but I do not agree at all with this sentence to describe this exact ending, the end was at the heart of the plot. At the beginning of the film we see the city of London as if it was one of the cities of the Italian realism films by Federico Fellini, then a journey in the world of the beloved photographer Thomas as if he was the hero of one of the French New Wave films, then a murder and **** mystery, and then .. blowing up all of the above with illusion.. After I finished this film, I thought to myself: If I become a filmmaker one day, I will do what Antonioni did in this film? Do I have the guts? Now my answer is no. Who am I to finish my film with a tennis match without a tennis ball or rackets?