They started out as perfectly good pictures of the scene in the park. But the more Hemmings blew them up, the less they really revealed. Finally he reached full magnification, and they were nothing more than masses of dots – just like the unsatisfactory paintings of his artist friend, who lived across the alley.
I'm not sure it really matters whether there was a murder or not, but when I'm closely pressed by players of the Blow-Up Game, I suggest that Hemmings' camera photographed a murder and Antonioni's did not, even though both were aimed at the same place in space and time. This disparity may be a subtle pun, built right into the film. Is Antonioni trying to tell us that the more we blow up "Blow-Up," the less we will be able to learn about it?
If that is so, then what conclusion can we draw? My guess, a pretty obvious one, is that Antonioni is trying to demonstrate the unreality of modern life. We depend to a fantastic degree upon the media to tell us what is real. An event does not happen unless it is photographed, filmed, televised, and written up in the newspaper.
Perhaps Antonioni is suggesting that the media have gone wild, creating events that never happened and leaving real events unreported. Perhaps he is saying that many of us, like his photographer, would not know what to do if we were confronted by reality and didn't have the tube or Time magazine to tell us what to think about it.
Roger Ebert
1967 dC
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