BLOW UP (1966) is the perfect metaphor for watching Antonioni's 60s stuff. It's basically a statement on watching movies themselves, the way we construct meaning, parse reality, place things under a magnifying glass, only for all our hard investigative work to go up in a plume of smoke. The existential mystery at the center of BLOW UP really speaks to the weird, maddening logic of Antonioni's work. You play detective a lot. You hunch, guess, and try to solve the puzzle where no solution is available. People just suddenly disappear, like in L'AVVENTURA (1960) or L'ECLISSE (1962). You then have to reframe the world you thought you were experiencing and search for deeper significance. The irony of this brand of storytelling? The more you blow things up, or attempt to code narrative structure into the riddle, the less you see, the less you grasp, but also the more you squint to get a better look. 

We do a lot of squinting in BLOW UP. Does this photographer see what he actually thinks he sees? Has he accidentally photographed a well-orchestrated murder? Has he prevented a murder? Was there even a murder at all? Is there a larger conspiracy at play, one that indicts a woman who was having an adulterous affair? Who was the man in the bushes? Was he the husband? A jealous lover? A contracted hitman? Why was the woman so desperate to get those photos? I mean, she was willing to trade sex to reclaim them. Would they incriminate her? Exonerate her? 

Just what exactly is going on here? 

The challenge of these questions is that we're never given a glimpse into what "really happened," despite the so-called photographic evidence. Photography is said to capture reality as it is, but as we enlarge these photos to get a better look, we're left examining a swarm of dots and blots reflected through ominous light and shadow, making the crisis of interpretation even more thrilling to solve. Photographs can capture perspective, but perspective can sometimes distort reality. What we think we see in an image versus what's actually there might be miles apart, and it is this existential power that allows the image to open tall tales in our minds. Maybe on-site evidence is all we need to confirm that we did, in fact, see a dead body in those grainy prints. When we return to the scene of the crime, we actually do see a dead body. Not in a picture, not on a film print, but face to face! That's the smoking gun, right? Right? Well, not exactly. We forgot to bring a camera, and brute reality unrecorded is the same as fragile evidence. 

Think about that paradox—photography can distort reality but it's also sometimes our only tool to capture the truth. 

The photographer's very vocation seems to reflect and prepare us for this mystery. It is his job, you'll recall, to capture a version of the ideal woman and then peddle that version as the standard of beauty. The media, however, has always been in the business of selling us a warped version of the ideal feminine, even when we subconsciously accept it as fact. Like the photographer, our society looks but doesn't always see things as they really are. There are times when photography is used to grasp reality, while other times when it is used to deceive us. Reality or illusion, how can we photographically tell the difference? As it happens in the context of the story, the dead body mysteriously vanishes a day later, as well as the woman and the original photographs. It's a familiar vanishing act to Antonioni's work. A Hitchcockian red herring technique that diverts our attention away from genre expectations and challenges us to think about the ways we watch movies.

What makes BLOW UP such a fascinating study is how it uses the photographer's journey to mirror every cinephile who watches BLOW UP, and cinema generally. As the photographer studies his black-and-white images, tries to learn what happened in the park, and imbues significance to the events, cinephiles are engaged in a similar process with BLOW UP itself as a cinematic text. We're trying to imbue meaning on BLOW UP and grasp what it's really about. Taken together, our images become a kind of rorschach test to engage with the very meaning of "meaning" itself, which enters us, I think, into the purest form of art available in our culture. You see, in my opinion BLOW UP was never intended to be about solving some murder-mystery whodunit. That's all genre distraction. Antonioni never pays out on that premise because his lights are focused elsewhere. And the key, I think, to what he's up to has something to do with those final 10 maddening minutes.

In an utterly brilliant turn of events, Antonioni (once again) switches gears from narrative to avant-garde mode. Rather than offer a solution to the mystery we've been following, he takes us into a surreal dream space where we watch a troupe of mimes play imaginary tennis. WTF is a welcomed first reaction to this moment, as the air of unreality is delightfully thick and jarring, especially in relation to where we've been so far. It makes no sense narratively, and yet it's completely in lockstep with everything we've seen so far. Watching people chase an imaginary ball that isn't there feels about as fitting as a photographer grafting interpretation to events that never really happened. If you think Antonioni is showing his cards, think again. A second twist on the moment reveals that the photographer has joined the game, as he returns a "ball" that was launched over the fence. We hear an actual tennis ball now being struck back and forth, but never see the ball itself. Are we hearing what's actually not there? Or can we safely assume the game is actually being played? Maybe the photographer really did see a murder? Maybe he didn't? Is Antonioni just messing with us now? This is starting to feel a lot like the phantom tangerine in BURNING (2019). So many questions, so few answers. I friggin love it. 

BLOW UP is not at all what it seems to be about. The main narrative thread is there, yes, and you think once you’ve enlarged it you’ll grasp it, but then it slips from your fingers again. That’s all intentional. It
doesn't depend on what we see or hear. It depends on what we *think* we see or hear, and the maps we use to forge insight and meaning. BLOW UP, in other words, is a film about what it means to watch and interpret and dissect cinema itself. Worlds within worlds of interpretation lie at the bottom of this well. I've merely given you my own. Now go watch the film and discover your own.

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