Notes on Blow-Up

Unlike many other Antonioni films that are mise-en-scène-based (positive space), Blow-Up is a montage-based film (negative space). The film's elusive diegesis directs perspective onto what is beyond the frame, the space between two edits. Onscreen narrative is not only unreliable, it is constantly attacked, contradicted and undermined by paradoxical dialogue and impossible scenarios. Characterization is thwarted by dialogue; characters often lie and contradict themselves (in both the first antique shop scene and the scene where David Hemmings talks to Vanessa Redgrave about his wife). The characters are not concrete; they are fluid, like flickering specters under the camera (one scene even has Redgrave vanishing mysteriously into the crowd; at the end Hemmings' figure fades into the green field). They do not have fixed identities - when we first see Hemmings, he is an undercover photojournalist; then he becomes an arrogant mod-fashion photographer who disregards a protest placard; then he becomes a detective trying to solve a murder mystery through his photographs.

Narrative is further complicated with incongruent scenarios. Similar to the aesthetic of horror films, impossible time or geography is introduced to question the normalcy of the diegesis. There is a fantastic instance of creative geography when Redgrave runs out of frame after her initial meeting with Hemmings, only to run into frame again, a few scenes later, at Hemmings' studio, as if no time has elapsed in between. When Hemmings asks her how she knew his address, she just shrugs it off. Logic as confined within the film is defied here; it is a logic that hints at forces greater than the film's diegesis. We see this again when Hemmings leaves a studio teeming with assistants and models only to return, a while later, to a completely empty studio. When the model at the rave exclaims 'I am in Paris!' how can we know for sure that the house Hemmings stumbles into is really in London and not actually in Paris?

The linear quality of montage allows for multiple realities (if we inspect his varying use of distances, POVs, and timings, it could even be said that every shot is a separate reality) to be laid alongside each other, subtly interacting within an open set of probabilities. The incongruous object is our guide to this dissonance: the discarded guitar neck creates a riot in the concert room, but is regarded as trash in the streets; Hemming's doppelganger mistakes Hemmings' car for his. The narrative is thus always collapsing upon itself, because these realities do not become a cogent whole. The whole's instability creates a series of blind fields that extend beyond the frame; in other words, the frame does not contain, it endlessly expands; what we see is always fading into what we cannot see, and vice versa.

At the same time, it can be said that Antonioni's aesthetic is distinctly Japanese. Symmetry is avoided whether in the contradictory plot construction or the off-center framing. The mise-en-scène, in particular, does not develop around human bodies (unlike classical Hollywood cinema, humans are not the locus of camera movements). The camera tracks to put human shapes at odd angles with the lines of the spaces they're in; the space in the sets are often offset with odd corners protruding out (getting in the way of characters' heads), dissected by screens and large beams that obscure and intrude into the characters' bodies. It is this asymmetry that does not allow for facile interpretations: the film can be about the unreliability of photographic reality and images (even cinematographic reality, since it's fundamentally anti-cinema), a social reflection on 60's mod London, an elegy to mortality etc., but it is always more. Talking about it is talking around it; these are merely the cultural (local) aspects that can be understood; the enigma, the impossibility of knowing, is what we really love.