Blow-up, by Peter Brunette, from The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) It is difficult to say anything

new about Anionioni's next film, Blow-up, made in 1966. Literary critics, philosophers, anthropologists, and a host of others, slumming from time to time in the movies, seem invariably to have felt the need to talk about this particular film. One reason is that it was an international art-:house success, even beyond that of the trilogy (in no small part because of its steamy - for the time - sex and drug scenes), with a relatively well-known cast that had wider drawing power than less familiar Italian actors.1 Even more important, the film was made in English and placed in a more easily recognizable setting, and, for those reasons, it seems to be more immediately accessible than his earlier films. Above all, the film seems to have been tempting to commentators precisely because its meanings end up being so ambiguous and apparently multiple; in fact, the variety of interpretations inspired by this film is nothing short of astonishing. By the time Blow-up appears, it has become clear that Antonioni prefers to put meanings in play, rather than to follow a prearranged, clearly worked-out plan - as he himself has always insisted in interviews - and it is this factor, more than any other, that accounts for the wide disparity in critical interpretations. (This free play also strongly marks the rather tenuous relation between the film and the short story by Argentinian writer Julio Cortazar, "Las babas del diablo" [The devil's drool] on which it is ostensibly based.)2 Paradoxically, despite the film's many ambiguities, things initially appear much less complicated in Blow-up^ and the surface more welcoming. Antonioni himself also seems to have felt that this film marked a new departure for him, as he told an interviewer for Playboy magazine that it was completely different from his earlier films, because now he was examining the relationship between an individual and reality, rather than interpersonal relations (p. 48). (As noted in chapter 4, he said much the same thing to another interviewer about Red Desert.) Some elements do not change, however. For example, Antonioni continues the pattern established in the earlier films of indicating, even in the first few minutes, potentially enlightening ways of watching the film. Thus the intercuts between the merrymakers and the homeless men emerging from the "doss house" (shelter) with which the film opens are heavily, almost didactically, oppositional and seem meant to nudge us in the direction of seeing the film as a set of binary oppositions. Modestly, and ambiguously, Antonioni's earlier penchant for specific social critique survives in this almost too obvious contrast between the revelers of the "swinging sixties" (the mimes here are an explicit figural symbolization of the irresponsible and drug-besotted mod London seen throughout the film)3 - a historically specific phenomenon that the film seems, on one level, to want to document - and the oppressed and despairing men of the homeless shelter. Alternatively, in the context of the i96os, the anarchic revelers who refuse to play by the rules may very well represent that rebellion against authoritarian structures for which the decade is chiefly known, especially since many of the people that the merrymakers pass (for example, the nuns and the palace guard) are wearing their own sorts of uniforms, which connote repression. Thus the binary structure of the film is established from the beginning, but the exact terms of the opposition remain unclear. What might be called the "epistemological" theme of the film - most evident, famously, in the photographer's attempt to reconstruct the murder in the park by enlarging his photographs is also stated in the beginning when the photographer, played by David Hemmings, appears

to be simply one of the men filing out of the shelter early in the morning.4 Since he was hardly a recognizable star at the time the film was made, no one thinks that he is any different until he suddenly jumps into his Rolls-Royce. Thus the interrelationship among truth, reality, appearance, and art that will become increasingly important in the film is also posited from the beginning. Politically speaking, the film's stance is less than obvious, since any overt reference to local politics is, as in the opening workers' strike of Red Desert, reduced to a nearly empty signifier. Here, the Hemmings character comes briefly into contact with a "Ban the Bomb" parade and just as easily passes through it, when one of the protestors' signs, significantly, flies out of his open car. But as the astute Italian critic Lino Micciche has pointed out, the film is political in its own way, in its demonstration of the dissatisfaction that led to the political and social explosions of 1968.5 Micciche also believes, as mentioned in the introduction, that Antonioni more than fulfills the primary responsibility of the filmmaker, that of being responsible for his means of expression rather than simply' relying on regressive formal models. A more consistent and perhaps more important way in which Antonioni expresses his politics, as was the case in the earlier films, is in his exploration of gender issues, though now, for the first time, the director's focus is resolutely, even claustrophobically, on his principal male character rather than the female one.6 Critic Sam Rohdie believes that "the change from female to male protagonists... is accompanied by a change from a subjective camera and narration to a rigorously objective camera and objective narrative position" (p. i84).7 By "a rigorously objective camera and objective narrative position" Rohdie probably means that the film is shot from a perspective that is outside the characters, in contrast to the perspective of the earlier films, but this claim is not borne out by a close analysis of individual shots. The easy equation of male with objective and female with subjective may also show evidence of gender stereotyping that has more to do with the critic than with the filmmaker.8 The Hemmings character is in any case the complete narcissist, and one "socioethical" reading of the film might focus on his trajectory, throughout the film and culminating at its end, toward a more social sense of shared, participatory meaning. Since we see everything with one or two tiny but significant exceptions - from Hemmings's point of view (pace Rohdie's claim that the perspective in this film is "rigorously objective"), Blow-up is also about perception, specifically, artistic perception, and even more specifically, male artistic perception. Consequently, the director's self-placement here (especially since Hemmings is a photographer), as well as his own emotional identification with the central character (who is now, like him, male), is more complicated than in the films discussed thus far. (Or actually, in the case of identification -- male with male - it is presumably less complicated, at least in gender terms, than in the earlier female-centered films.) In fact, Antonioni himself has referred to this connection: "I came to know reality by photographing it, when I began taking it with the movie camera, a little like in Blow-up; in this sense, I think that it's my most autobiographical film."9 Hemmings's still camera and the movie camera used to make the film that the audience is watching are directly linked, visually and physically, as well as thematically. Thus, when Hemmings begins his erotic photo shoot of supermodel Verushka, Antonioni's camera performs a minicrane shot (the camera head, alone, seems at first to be tilting upward, but actually the whole camera is moving) directly alongside Hemmings's still camera, which is sitting on a tripod. Admittedly, this is a brief moment in the film, but the effect is to make 2

Hemmings's still camera itself appear to be moving down in tandem (it ends up approximately in the same place as the movie camera), thus further linking the two apparatuses in this shot. More conventionally, the still shots of Verushka taken by Hemmings are signified by various frozen jumpcuts in the film we are seeing, in other words, through the movie camera. Later, in the initial scene in the park, the movie camera pans back and forth, replicating both the movement of Hemmings's gaze and the movement of his still camera. Much later, when the photographer begins to put together the crucial blow-ups in order to reconstruct the murder in the park, Antonioni's movie camera abruptly zooms in on the still pictures as though forcefully to remind the audience both of its presence as mediating agent and its connection to the photographer's camera. It is difficult to fix Antonioni's intentions here, but virtually all of his films, as we have seen, can be interpreted as questioning, ambivalently, perhaps, the phallic, penetrating power of his own camera. His decision in this film to move to a male protagonist who is a photographer seems, among other things, to have been made to more directly foreground this problematic. Hemmings is an obnoxious human being, a predatory male who says he is sick of all the "birds" and "bitches" he comes in contact with. The models he lives off of are grotesquely anorexic beings, horribly made up, who have been turned into near-monsters. The screaming artificiality of their clothes, hairdos, and poses (underlined by the presence of artificial props such as clothespins, carefully placed out of sight of Hemmings's camera) strip them of any residual humanity. These women have been completely made into objects for the dominating male gaze, a literalization of a conventional power dynamic that, if contested by more recent feminist film theory, seems in full operation here.10 Furthermore, Vanessa Redgrave walks through nearly their entire scene together in his apartment naked from the waist up, in a supremely vulnerable position. The director seems to implicate himself as well in the creation of this vulnerability, since the camera performs an elaborate choreography to keep from showing her breasts (thus paradoxically foregrounding them even more, while still avoiding the threat of censorship). Hemmings's biggest compliment to her is that she would make a good model, and earlier in the scene in the park, several shots were aimed down on the Redgrave character, putting her in an extremely servile position visually. Hemmings treats the cockney "birds" with disgust (asking one of them her name and then quickly saying, "What's the use of a name?" and "Just tell me what they call you in bed") and pulls their clothes off, making them, like Redgrave, embarrassed and vulnerable as well. (Note also that their offer of sex - like Redgrave's - is part of an economic exchange, conditioned on getting something nonsexual from him in return, and that the "orgy" takes place on and through the blue background of the models' photo shoot, further equating the two groups of women.) They are "appropriately" servile when putting his shoes back on him after the orgy, before he ruthlessly dismisses them. Though on one level he may be critiquing "typical" male behavior in the person of Hemmings, the director seems also to be enjoying vicariously, as it were, the parade of women who show up to abase themselves at the photographer's feet. In fact, the director told interviewer Aldo Tassone: "I like the protagonist, I love the life he leads. When I was preparing the film I also led this kind of life and I had a lot of fun. It was an agreeable life, but one that I was leading in order to follow the character, and not because it was my own."11 It is important to point out that many male critics tend to see the film, and all its attendant self-reflexivity, as a benign exploration of the nature of artistic creativity and not in any way 3

as a critique of the male figure. Seymour Chatman, for example, takes Hemmings as nothing more than an unproblematic stand-in for Antonioni and his own artistic problems and sees Hemmings as a creative artist, in completely positive terms. The most negative thing Chatman can think of to charge the rapacious Hemmings with is "childlike amorality."12 The orgy scene, especially, has elicited from these critics vastly different readings from the one offered here. William Arrowsmith, anxious to defend the film against the moralists, thinks that the whole sequence of sexual rough-and-tumble on the violet paper is meant to convey the sense of animal high spirits and childish gaiety. Nothing is salacious or offensive about it; the dominant note is childish play, animal hilarity. . . . The whole scene is intentionally amoral, not immoral: there is no moral consequence to a tumble in the waves between two teenage Nereids and a wouldbe frogman.13 Nowhere does Arrowsmith consider the imbalance of power and vulnerability that now, at least, seems so painfully evident in this "innocent" scene. A continual blur of movement, the photographer is a crasser, nastier version of Piero in L'eclisse, never content, never able to stay still for even a moment. Hemmings tells his editor that he is "fed up with those bloody bitches!55 as though it is all their fault, and, most naively and unconvincingly of all, "I wish I had tons of money, then I'd be free." (At the moment he says this, the camera shows a photograph that he has taken of a homeless man: the jarring juxtaposition of visual and aural tracks here seems implicitly to call into question the nature of freedom, as least as it is defined for someone like Hemmings.) The polar opposite of Giuliana in Red Desert, so ill at ease in her reality, the Hemmings character is, in Penelope Houston's description, "a man who accepts, exploits and enjoys the contradictions of his society."14 Related to the exploration of gender relations is the reprise of Antonioni's long-standing depiction of marriage as a trap, especially for the female partner, and the character played by Sarah Miles is shown briefly in two scenes as apparently caught in an unfulfilling relationship with the painter, Bill, while helplessly in love with Hemmings. The photographer asks her at one point, "Did you ever think of leaving him?" "No," is the simple, undeveloped response. Appropriately for the swinging ambience of Blow-up, this couple does not actually appear to be formally married, but the relationship is in any case constricting. Hemmings is himself divorced and in speaking to Redgrave about his former wife can only brandish riddles. On a more formal level, aspects of the graphic and visual dynamic that we have been tracing reappear as well, as with the identical binary color scheme structure of Red Desert, which, in Blow-up, shows the buses and many of the houses in bright, sharply contrasting primary colors that alternate with ugly, gray cityscapes.15 Even the sickly looking grass with which Blow-up opens and closes is reminiscent of the picture of an unhealthy and corrupted Nature that was developed in Antonioni's film made two years earlier, and the opening binary opposition between the doss house and the revelers places the former in depressed urban surroundings (note the single, skinny tree Hemmings passes) and the latter amid a sparkling new downtown filled with modern skyscrapers reminiscent of Leclisse. Similarly, the striking, long-held extreme long shots and the visual and aural beauty of the wind in the trees, so much a staple of films such as L'eclisse and La notte, reappear in the scenes set in the park, investing them with a similar foreboding and existential resonance.

But rhythmically and in other, more important ways, the film feels completely different from those that preceded it. The long-take, expressive longueurs of the previous films have now been replaced, for the most part, by quick cuts and sudden, popping perceptions. A cynic might argue that Antonioni has speeded things up primarily for the benefit of his new, international audience with its presumably shorter attention span - we are, after all, a long way from the brooding, nearly wordless seventeen-minute montage that ends L'eclisse - but it is clear that these changes have important thematic implications. For Lino Micciche, it is as though the director is purposely avoiding all focusing of interest in order to call into question the idea that reality can have any "meaning" beyond that of its sheer presence. Antonioni does concentrate occasionally on minor, nonnarrative details, as when we briefly watch Hemmings, in a close-up of his hand, do a neat cowboy trick with a coin. But this seems more like a detail meant to build up "character traits" in the traditional way - like his double-take on the "queers" walking their dogs near the antique shop, or the various self-consciously insouciant things he does while driving around in his Rolls-Royce, or the ebullient kicking up of his heels when he first goes to the park - than an "object" or nonnarrative event focused on in order to gauge and savor its philosophical or symbolic resonance, the kind of thing that was often foregrounded in the earlier films.16 The only apparent exception to this purposeful lack of focus on real objects - and it is a major one - is the park, which is obviously central to the project of the film. According to Micciche, however, the park is foregrounded precisely to drive home the original point even more fully: "The profound truth that [the park] seems to offer ultimately reveals itself as absolutely unknowable, precarious, provisional."17 William Arrowsmith and Andrew Sarris, among others, have focused on the park in order to support their view that Antonioni's themes operate through fixed binary oppositions. Not surprisingly, therefore, the park becomes an important site of a traditional Nature/culture division that these critics find throughout the director's work. What they forget, though, is that every bit of Nature seen in Blow-up, especially the park, is in some way also a product of culture. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz once pointed out, Nature is in fact a cultural concept. We must go beyond these rigid, finally untenable binaries to find out what is going on here. If we move to the ending of the film, which, like all of Antonioni's work, revels in its openendedness, we can see that Micciche's distinctions, though provocative, are perhaps not quite subtle enough. For it is not that reality has no meaning, it is that it does not have any inherent, immutable, fixed meaning; rather, its meaning is always socially (and therefore historically) determined. Thus, by participating in the celebrated ball-less game of tennis with the mimes at the end, Hemmings can be seen as shaking off his narcissism (which actually amounts, in the epistemological context of the film, to a kind of solipsism), by implicitly admitting that reality is always unconsciously constructed^ and constructed socially^ that is, along with other human beings. Anything can mean anything, anything can stand for or represent anything else, anything can be anything, but only to a group, never to an individual (at least not for long).18 Once Hemmings accepts the authority of this group to name meaning and thus configure reality, he can "find" and return the ball to them.19 The director himself seems to have favored this more positive view of the ending, since he told the Playboy interviewer that the Hemmings character learns many things by the end of the film, "including how to play with an imaginary ball."20

Another way of saying this is that all reality and all meaning are achieved contextually^ by means of the frame around a given bit of reality, since someone watching from afar, not participating in the group's meaning-giving operation, would think that they were all insane. The importance of context and framing in the establishment of meaning is demonstrated earlier in the film when Hemmings fights wildly for the broken piece of guitar that one of the members of the Yardbirds rock group has thrown to the audience. Once Hemmings is out of the club, out of the meaning-giving context, he realizes that the broken piece has absolutely no value whatsoever, and tosses it away. Emphasizing the point, another man comes along, picks it up, examines it quizzically, and then throws it away again. (The film itself is "framed" by the mimes at beginning and end, and they themselves are doubled by the same patch of grass that is below the opening credits and that fills the film's final shot.) During the mimed tennis match at the end of the film, for a while we watch the photographer watching the invisible ball, but then he and we even begin to hear the sound of the ball. Here the inherent (but usually disguised) split between the visual and aural track that marks all films is used expressively, in this case, perhaps, to imply that membership in the meaninggiving group is always open to us as well. We are part of the way there, in other words, if not the whole way; an act of will, like Hemmings's, can presumably complete the loop of communication. It is also suggested that membership in this group is only a logical extension of film spectator-ship itself, through the film apparatus, which, after all, is already dependent on a group understanding of its cinematic codes. The camera ostentatiously participates in this construction of meaning from the beginning of this scene, when it "follows" the arc of the invisible ball through the air, over the fence. The camera then comes to rest at a specific point in the grass, implying that even if we cannot see anything there, the camera does, or better, it puts it there, through its very act of attention. The crucial presence of the cinematic codes (and the fact that meaning is never natural but always a product of an unconscious, group construction) is further, and wittily, underlined when the photographer suddenly disappears in a jump cut worthy of the early silent films of director Georges Melies, just before we read 'The End."21 This technique reminds us that the photographer is not a real person, but a fictional character, a graphic mark, a made-up "sign" for the purposes of the film, which the director can now decide playfully to delete if he so chooses. We are also forcefully made aware of the presence of the director, of a controlling hand, an Other, outside the confines of the story and the film itself. According to Seymour Chatman, Antonioni has said that Hemmings's disappearance at the end is the director's "autograph" (p. 145 ).22 Closely related to the questions that we have been exploring is what might be called the film's aesthetic theme, which is pronounced by another visual artist, the photographer's painter friend, Bill. Bill represents a curious doubling, on Antonioni's part, of the artist figure and suggests that one character was not sufficient to explore the ambivalences and nuances of this thematic area. This time around, Antonioni seems to want to make explicit the linking of abstract painting and filmmaking/photography that has been present in his films from the first. (This specific attention to abstract art, thematized even in the dialogue, may also explain why the cinematography of Blow-up is, paradoxically, itself much less abstract in design.) The first painting that Bill shows Hemmings looks cubist in inspiration. He tells Hemmings that "they don't mean anything when I do them, it's just a mess. Afterwards I find something to hang on to. Like that leg [he points]. Then it sorts itself out and adds up." In the plainest link to the unfolding film he is a part of, Bill goes on to say that "it's like finding a clue in a detective story."23

The second painting he shows Hemmings more closely resembles a drip painting by the abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock, which Bill claims has not yet come together for him and thus remains unfinished. Characteristically, Hemmings spontaneously offers to buy it. Later, after he has purchased a huge, unwieldy airplane propeller in an antique shop, the photographer himself indulges in a bit of aesthetic commentary when he borrows from Kant (without attribution!) to explain that he bought it because it is beautiful and that it is beautiful precisely because it is useless. Later, a direct link is made between Bill's paintings, Hemmings's photographs, and, by implication, the aesthetic project of the film, when the character played by Sarah Miles says pointedly that the photographs that Hemmings is enlarging have begun to resemble Bill's abstract paintings. Joining the question of the nature of reality with the aesthetic question is the heavily foregrounded relation of the photographs to the "reality" that they have purportedly captured. In an important and often-discussed scene, Hemmings blows up his negatives to a larger and larger scale in order to seek a visual truth, that is, a correspondence between representation and reality. In so doing, he constructs a narrative, just as a director does in a film, by juxtaposing the individual shots and organizing them through the same system of looks that we know, from film theory, is what holds a movie together* In other words, Hemmings the photographer tries to construct a narrative logic through what is essentially a cinematic montage, and again Antonioni's camera (and eye) pans back and forth between the images, linking itself with Hemmings's eye and his camera. In fact, Antonioni keeps following (and underlining) the trajectory of an eyeline match with Hemmings's gaze, a standard visual suturing device in film, the device that makes space psychologically consistent for the viewer. By the time Hemmings's blow-ups reach the third degree, the camera is cutting back and forth between the photographer and the still photos, as though constructing a normal shot/reverse shot - the character looks, then we cut to what is being seen. Here the process is, in semiotic terms, paradigmatic or synchronic, as he goes "deeper" into the image. But it is also syntagmatic and diachronic, that is, through time, as when the montage is constructed by using several different still photos* The effect is to lay bare and thus demystify the filmmaking activity itself, because it is precisely by means of these two axes, the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic, that the cause and effect dynamic of meaning is accomplished in the cinematic editing process. Most critics (and the director) have agreed that what this process demonstrates, paradoxically, is that the more the picture is blown up, to the point of abstraction, the less that is actually visible. This has never made complete sense to me, however, for Hemmings does in fact discover a gun and a body by means of the enlargements, and, when he goes back to the park, the presence of the body, at least, is verified by Antonioni's camera. It is as though the film were saying that "truth" can be arrived at even, or especially, through abstract representation. But what no critic to my knowledge has ever focused on is the fact that Hemmings takes a new photograph of a blown-up detail in order to blow it up even further. Yet this process cannot produce more bits of visual information that were not already there, and thus enlarging a photograph of an enlargement would be fruitless. This gesture of the photographer, fruitless or not, seems in any case to hearken back to something that Antonioni said years earlier, but that is especially appropriate for a discussion of Blow-up: We know that under the revealed image there is another one which is more faithful to reality, and under this one there is yet another, and again another under this last one, down to the true image of that

absolute, mysterious reality that nobody will ever see. Or perhaps, not until the decomposition of every image, every reality. Therefore, abstract cinema would have its reason for existing.24 Here we can see the way that the varying projects of Hemmings the photographer, Bill the abstract painter, and Antonioni the filmmaker neatly mesh. When Hemmings returns again to the park and there is no body, another question arises: if there is no body and no evidence of the crime (except for a photo with a bunch of dots, which only has meaning in the context of the narrative that is already gone and is no longer available for scrutiny, and in the context of the larger photos that have all been stolen), has there been a crime? Again, it is a question of shared social reality, as with the mimes5 tennis game at the end of the film. Thus Hemmings's desire to have his friend come and look at the body in the park is understandable; since reality is constructed intersubjectively, this external verification is crucial for the photographer, and when it does not take place, he cannot ever really "know" whether -the murder occurred or not. When Hemmings realizes that his friend is completely stoned, and thus not a good candidate for the intersubjective verification he seeks, he replies, out of frustration, but significantly, that he saw "nothing." (The complicating, asymmetrical factor here is that the camera [and thus the audience] did actually see something, even though it is no longer there.) Interestingly, the director told Playboy that the photographer, through his photographs, shows an element of reality that seems real, and it is. "But reality has a quality of freedom about it that is hard to explain."25 This very "quality of freedom" seems to represent the free play, the bad fit, between any "reality" and its representation, and this is perhaps figured, in the film, in the asymmetry just mentioned. In a similarly ambiguous vein, Antonioni told Aldo Tassone: "I wouldn't say that the appearance of reality equals reality, because there can be more than one appearance. There can also be more than one reality, but I don't know it, and I don't believe it. Maybe reality is a relation [rapport]."26 French critic Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier has developed a complicated but fascinating reading of this obviously crucial segment of the film. In an early essay entitled "L'espace et Ie temps dans la narration des annes 60: 'Blow up' ou Ie negatif du rcit," Ropars discusses the Antonioni film in the context of avant-garde film and fiction of the i96os. Her project is to outline the response of cinematic language to the deconstruction of classical narrative brought about by the French New Novel during this period, and more specifically, to chart exactly how Blow-up "intervenes in the conceptual displacement precipitated by this crisis."27 For Ropars, what is interesting about the montage of enlargements at the center of the film is that it has to proceed differentially, each image canceling the previous one. The pictures are pure fragments of space, but the enlargements cause the detail to erase the whole, thus allowing multiple, contradictory lines of narrative to be posited. Filling in some holes invariably opens others. For example, although it is true that the photographer "finds" a revolver through this process, it is impossible to determine whether the revolver, at this point, is merely threatening or has already been used to murder someone. This montage, which she calls a "negative mise-en-abime," a negative mirror within a mirror, will be opposed by another at the end of the film, when the mimes play tennis. The earlier montage contradicts the finale by showing the lack of connection between looking at the object and the object itself, which results from trying to find the exact connection between them (unlike Hemmings's concentration on the invisible ball, which almost seems to produce it). For

Ropars, this realization is tied up with the ontology of photography itself, a medium and form of representation that is based on a negative that reverses light, stops time, freezes gesture, and so on. The "blow-up" section differs not only from the ending but also from the rest of the film. All of the shots the photographer has taken in the park seem slightly different from what we ourselves have seen through Antonioni's camera. And besides, how can one of the photographs show the corpse if they are all represented in the film as being taken while the older man was still living? Ropars points out that "the body will be successively confirmed (at night), then erased (during the day)," but death itself can only be there as a kind of trace, an absent presence, a ghost that is both there and not there. It is this problematic, contradictory space or interval that interests her: "The instant of death can only be seized under the form of a trace (that single photo that remains hanging on the wall and which actually resembles a painting); it comes always either before or after, in the interval between the photograph and the filmic image: death can't take place, can't have a place, in the writing of Blowup."28 There is thus always another story beneath the surface that "doubles" the temporal thrust of the primary narrative, just as Hemmings's photos double Antonioni's cinematic image while calling it into question. "The center of the film thus defines itself as a decentering exercised on the film," Ropars explains. This process also results in a kind of a counter-meaning, a "subtle discontinuity" that runs throughout the<narrative embodied in the cinematic images and that disturbs it.29 Ropars gives two examples of what she means here. The first is "the doubling of the look," which derails the look of the character, Hemmings, from one shot to the next. The way this works is that the film constantly shows the look of the photographer, doubled by the look of the camera lens, but rarely gives the spectator the chance to look with the very same look as the photographer, and thus to identify with him. And it is within this difference that the look of the filmmaker, the camera, the film intervenes: "Between the aim of the [photographer's] eye and the represented vision what inserts itself is the interval of another look, which is absent yet active, a look of a camera that is distinct from the subject, which it doubles" (p. 215). The best examples of this particular doubling, Ropars says, are the pictures taken in the park, where there are gaps - for instance, when, after a cut from the photographer looking, the film shows a new, different shot of the photographer, when we expected a shot of what he saw, or when a succeeding shot shows him looking in the opposite direction from the one that "we expected. Another good example of this gap between the two "looks," not mentioned by Ropars, is the bit of self-reflexive play near the end of the film when Hemmings returns to the park the morning after the party to find that the body is no longer there. The camera, shooting down on him, shows him suddenly looking up at something. We cut to the familiar Antonioni shot of the tops of the moving trees, ostensibly from the photographers POV. But then, the camera pans back down, in the same shot, back on him, now standing up, indicating that he was not the source of the look (since he cannot be looking at himself), not the motive of this particular shot, as we had thought. One could also add that this doubling of the look is the only real resemblance between the film and the Cortazar short story on which it is based, where a similar result is accomplished by an explicit and regular alternation between first- and third-person narration. This impossibility of a unified vision is reinforced, Ropars points out, by temporal ellipses that are vague and uncertain (unlike the ellipses in classic narrative, which are always present but are usually clear and well marked). An example occurs when we cut from Redgrave with her naked back to us, to a shot of her laughing on the sofa. In this manner, according to

Ropars, both the logical and the chronological, which Roland Barthes identified as the foundation of all narrative, are undone (p. 2.15). Lorenzo Cuccu, the Italian critic who has probably written most trenchantly about the philosophical aspects of Antonioni's films, makes a point that is closely related to that of Ropars, though expressed somewhat differently. For him, in the last shot of Blow-up^ in which the "subject/* Hemmings, suddenly disappears, "the look that is making the film puts itself directly into question by means of its very exercise and its dynamic."30 Cuccu's view of the mimed game of tennis at the end of the film, as an expression of the communal aspect of meaning-giving, accords to some extent with my own interpretation offered earlier, but Cuccu tends to regard it in a negative, nostalgic light. He translates the mimes' actions as saying to the photographer: "Reality isn't necessary for your images either." "The game is played without a ball, mimetic fiction doesn't represent but rather substitutes itself for life, behind the image there's no mystery that is capturable as meaning, the search for meaning is only a fiction that serves to 'justify the image' " (p. 29). Like some other critics, Cuccu sees the final scene with the mimes as an undoing of the meaning that had ostensibly been found through the photographs. But Cuccu's reflections on the film's ending go far beyond this and are closely related to the scene in the park. Thus he provides a useful shot-by-shot comparison between the photographs that Hemmings takes in the park (as registered by Antonioni's movie camera, at any rate) and the photos that the photographer later blows up, showing in the process just how many of the latter are not included in the former. This offers specific, material evidence for Ropars's view concerning the gap between the look of the photographer and the "look" of the film itself. Specific moments emphasized by Cuccu include, for example, the shot in the original park scene (identified by him as shot number 6 of this scene), which is a shot from the side of the man and woman (rather than from the front, from Hemmings's POV), as they realize the presence of the photographer. What Cuccu calls the "Other Look" is present in other places besides the park, as well, for example, when the camera is following Hemmings in the car. First the camera accompanies the car, then slows down and stops, and then speeds up again to turn and follow it. "The look of the narrative seems to enter into the concrete contingency of the diegetic space," says Cuccu; "it seems to make itself an autonomous diegetic presence" (p. 41). And though neither Ropars nor Cuccu mention it, the film-maker's Other can suddenly manifest himself and his "look" aurally as well as visually, as when we faintly hear the wind moving through the trees in the park (a long-established Antonioni motif), even though we are now inside the apartment, watching Hemmings reconstruct the scene through his photographs. As for the sudden disappearance of the photographer in the last shot of the film, Cuccu sees this as a powerful statement of presence on behalf of the Other (especially since the shot itself is a jump cut from the previous shot): The final shot is a gesture by means of which the narrative accomplishes a step beyond the discourse, reopening its disquieting, problematic tension: with this act, the subject of the look [the originator of the film's look, that is, the filmmaker, the camera], cut off from every false pretext, presents itself in a "pure state" and remains alone before the enigma of the green lawn, which now reveals itself to be none other than the specular image of the Look itself. The classic symmetry of the "framed" 10

story/discourse thus transforms itself into an unexhausted circularity, in the reopening en abyme of the enigma, and the reflexion on the image finally achieves its own true target. (P. 43) For Cuccu, in other words, this final shot of the grass, after the photographer has been cinematically whisked away, represents a "pure look" on the part of the filmmaking apparatus and, by extension, the director. It reveals that the "true target" of Antonioni's work is a reflection on precisely what he is doing when he looks, that is, when he makes a film: "From the lucid, compact surface of conventional cinema [cinema della trasparenza] has emerged, at the end, in a purer form the 'cinema of subjectivity,' of 'pure self-reflexivity.' The final act of Blow-up has gone beyond the image/reality problem, toward the discovery of the subject of the look as true object of reflexion, as true enigma" (p. 43). But there need not be any contradiction between Cuccu's emphasis on Antonioni's self-reflexivity and the director's critical exploration of the "image/reality problem." Clearly the one implies the other, and neither makes sense alone. The last, most eloquent word belongs to the filmmaker himself: I don't know what reality is like. Reality escapes us, it changes continually. When we think we've reached it, the situation is already something else. I always doubt what I see, what an image shows me, because I "imagine" what's beyond that; and what's behind an image is unknown. The photographer of Blow-up, who is not a philosopher, wants to see more more closely. But what happens is that because he enlarges too much, the object itself decomposes and disappears. Therefore, there is a moment in which one seizes reality, but the moment immediately after, it escapes. That is, to some extent, the meaning of Blow-up. It might seem strange for me to say this, but Blow-up was in some ways my neo-realist film on the relation between the individual and reality, even if it has a metaphysical component precisely because of this abstraction of appearances. After this film, I wanted to see what there was behind, what was my own appearance in the inside of myself, a little bit like I had done in my earliest films. And what resulted was The Passenger, another step forward in the study of contemporary man. In Blow-up the relationship between the individual and reality is perhaps the principal theme, while in The Passenger, the relation is the one of the individual with himself.31

Footnotes

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