Cinema: The Things Which Are Not Seen

Blow-Up. An open Land Rover loaded to the head lamps with deliriously screaming people roars through London town. Painted and caparisoned in madcap masquerade, they leap down from their green go-devil and race through startled crowds like advance men for oncoming chaos. They crash into pedestrians, jostle a Guardsman on sentry duty, all but knock down a pair of passing nuns. Finally, they gang up on a baby-faced brat (David Hemmings) in a convertible Rolls, a mod bod with a pop mop who has plainly gained the whole world without losing his cool. He flips the revelers a fiver and then Rolls away as the camera follows him to see what it can see of life in the swinging generation.

What it sees becomes a far-out, uptight and vibrantly exciting picture. Blow-Up is the first movie made in English by Italy's Michelangelo Antonioni, the most sensitive and profound of cinema's anatomists of melancholy (L'Avventura, La None, Eclipse), and in the film he risks a screeching change of creative direction. His earlier films inhabited languid interior landscapes and unfolded with the large, slow motions of the soul; his new movie makes the London scene with a Big Beat abandon that almost shakes the film off its sprockets. But the change of means does not signify a change of meaning. Antonioni presents for public inspection a slice of death: the same cold death of the heart his stories invariably describe. Yet in Blow-Up, Antonioni's anti-hero holds in his possession, if only for an instant, the alexin of his cure: the saving grace of the spirit.

The anti-hero is a successful pop photographer, and the first third of the film simply follows the little snake as he glides around London taking pictures of naked old men and of models who might as well be. Among the models is Vogue's Verushka, whom he woos with his camera until they both collapse in erotic exhaustion. On a side trip to Woolwich, he happens to notice a pretty little park where a handsome couple is amorously straying. Nothing better to do, so he follows them, shooting on the sly, till the girl (Vanessa Redgrave) catches him at it and indignantly demands the roll of film. When he refuses, she offers him a roll in camera for the roll in the camera. Wondering why she wants the picture, he contrives by trickery to take the girl and keep the film.

Up to this point, Antonioni has made fascinating scenes but very little sense. Then all at once, in a brilliant episode of cinematic exposition, the photographer simultaneously develops his film and his dilemma. As shot after shot is blown up, both the photographer and the audience perceive without a word of explanation what the camera had accidentally recorded and the girl has desperately tried to conceal: the murder of her companion in the park.