Nardelli, Matilde ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4582-1024 (2011) Blow-Up and the Plurality of Photography. In: Antonioni: Centenary Essays. Bloomsbury, British Film Institute, London, pp. 185-205.

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Abstract

Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) is still probably one of the best-known films ‘about’ photography, and one in which particular photographs play a prominent narrative and aesthetic part. Not only does photography as an activity permeate the film, but the snapshots of a lovers’ tryst that Thomas chances to take in the park constitute a central diegetic and formal motif, on which hang both the murder-mystery plot and the visually arresting sequence in which the photographs are filmed at length by the movie camera as the intrigued photographer enlarges them and scrutinises them in his studio. This complex and conspicuous narrative and aesthetic staging of photography has generated a variety of responses. It has been seen as a philosophical allegory of the nature of reality and our purchase on it; as a more or less conscious exploration of the specific ontology of the photographic image and the structures of seeing and knowing encapsulated within it; as a vicarious meditation on cinema itself – and, often, as all of the above together. In all of these interpretations, photography’s status as a reproduction of reality – even, literally, as a take of rather than on the real – is a crucial focus, however problematic or problematised this status is seen to be in the film. However, as I will argue, Blow-Up’s engagement with photography is also inspired by another fundamental sense of both ‘reality’ and ‘reproduction’ vis-à-vis the medium. As well as the reality in photography, the real captured within the image, the film addresses the reality of photography: the material realisation and proliferation of photographs – or, indeed, the ‘facts’ of photographic production and reproduction which, as we shall see, make photography intrinsically ‘plural’.

Item Type:	Book Section
Identifier:	10.5040/9781838711788.0017
Subjects:	Media > Photography
Depositing User:	Matilde Nardelli
Date Deposited:	12 Aug 2024 07:55
Last Modified:	12 Aug 2024 07:55
URI:	https://repository.uwl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10460

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