Blow-Up 1966 ★★★★★
It begins with the photographer, a cocky male Brit, sitting atop his subject, aping copulation with her. His domineering sneer, holy attitude, and apparent power snakecharms all of the ladies who he “shoots” and who want to be “shot” by him. More on “shoot” in a minute, which the movie puns on.
He thinks his camera is a powerful totum, and I suppose it’s a phallic symbol as well. If we follow the storyline, which unfolds slowly, he secretly photographs two apparent lovers wandering alone in a park. When caught, the woman wants to buy pictures from him. He more or less tells her to wait and come to his studio. She does.
In what seems like seduction, it’s all power-play. The photographer eventually discovers, in his grainy splotchy photograph, which he blows up, something he did not expect. This begins what might be a startling change.
I say “might be.” The movie depicts a day in the life of our photographer protagonist, a man of swinging London amid modern-art and his sleek convertible. What he sees in the photograph seems to sweep all of that, plus the young girls, the drugs, and the rock and roll, away from his purview, at least temporarily.
What does he see? SPOILER. A dead boy. Well, at first he sees a man with a gun in the bushes. Here, once that happens, we think we’re in a spy picture, and the woman who comes to his studio and is quick to take her clothes off, well she’s probably seducing him to get those pictures for legal reasons. But then, later, after a weird threesome with two girls who are hounding him to take their pictures at his studio, he makes the discovery of a dead boy.
The movie offers moral change without moralizing. Our photographer, who wants enough money to do who knows what with, who has the power of the camera, allowing him to control (perversely I might add) whatever young woman he wants, he discovers something anew — the presence of death, of sin, of murder, or all combined.
What does this mean for him? The final scenes have him, seemingly, forsaking the partying lifestyle of the London hippies he lives amongst. Last, in the final scene, he goes back to the park to find the body. It’s not there.
He’s then confronted with the movie’s final images — the truckful of mimes, who are in the movie’s opening shot, find the photographer and enact and fake tennis game. He participates. Does this restore his faith in nonsense? Is it telling us that life at its heart is absurd?
In the final shot, the photographer is a man in a composition, a dot in an extreme long shot, not unlike the dots in his friend’s modernist painting, which shows up when the photographer returns home to find his wife having sex with another man. What does it all mean?
I think one thing being affirmed in the movie is that images do indeed have power, as the photographer initially believes via his actions, but they have a force of meaning beyond even his control. And where does that meaning come from? There’s a direct connection between his art and life itself, at the core of which is deception (via the woman he meets in the park) and death. We’re left watching him try to figure out to do with that realization.
“Blow-Up” has me thinking that there’s at least a book’s worth of material to write about it, which is always a good thing. For now I’ll stop, but these notes could just keep going if I had the time.