Blow-Up

On one level, Antonioni's leave of Italy takes him from personal storytelling into the realm of genre and plot, but he makes up for it in Blow-Up with one of his most theroetical and objective films ever.

The story is about a womanizing photographer on the search for inspiration by free wheeling with his camera and photographing anything for inspiration. His personal life is hollow because its lived in between the bed sheets with other women, but the camera is his art and also his motivation.

That comes with the unlikely photographing of a scene that is most likely a murder. His plain eye doesn't capture the event but the camera does. His fascination drives him to dig deeper and become obsessed. It leads to bad dealings with the people involved and his search for the "truth" comes up short and ends up at a stand still with the fascination still looming.

The photographer represents Antonioni himself. When Antonioni made the film, he did page by page of the original short story and shot for inspiration, much the same way photographer in the story does. The film is also a theoretical objective of the nature of truth. The camera is the instrument that captures the murder, but it doesn't reveal all. It is considered legitimate evidence in a court room but no body is collected and the images come from such a distance that it is all still questionable.

The point is that our protaganist does become convinced what he has captured is the truth and its leads him into a spiral personally. His problem is that he allowed the limitations of his art to dominate his life. Realistically, he can't prove that there was a murder. He can only give circumstantial evidence. The amazing thing Antonioni does is take a mystery film format and make it a platform to raise thought provoking questions about the identity of art and its grasp of truth.

Antonioni makes the film beautiful because he doesn't cave to the pressures he would later on. The film is slow, but the methodical tone and openness of the cinematography plays exactly into the idea that Antonioni is represented as the photographer in the story. The entire film is made from the viewpoint of a photographer searching instead of a filmmaker who takes editing and production into consideration first.