Antonioni commented on

With considerable reluctance I sat down to refresh my memory of Antonioni's Blow-up after a moment of forgetfulness at the local British Council led me to rent it for a week. I'm not sure, but this might have been the third time I've been through it, driven by the cult aura around it and my being unsatisfied with the understanding of it.

And again, even though I found myself appreciating the story, its documentary value in terms of showing the Swinging Sixties in London or the detective mystery, I was nowhere near getting carried away with Antonioni's mastery. More importantly still, the deep philosophical and aesthetic strands in the film, so extensively commented on by critics and mentioned until today, constantly eluded my attention. It was David Hemmings character who was sending a signal I was able to decode with his jaded, amoral attitude towards life and women, but there is more to this film, admittedly, than just critique of the 60s loose ethic.

I'd probably have given up on Blow-up, which I actually did halfway through the film, if it hadn't been for one extra feature on the DVD. By accident, I hit the audio commentary in the DVD extras and soon learned that it was the entire film with subtle voiceover from Peter Brunette, a professor of film studies at Wake Forest University and the Antonioni expert. Step by step, without much noticing the scholarly intervention, yet enjoying it enormously for its depth and many-sidedness, I started recognising how nicely layered and superemely crafted Blow-up is. Some of Brunette's interpretations did no more than confirm my early intuitions, especially concerning the questions of morality and some scenes which escape easy explanation.

I like the way Brunette shed light on the epistemological drive of the main character in Blow-up, his desire to know, to discover the truth, to verify his interpretation of reality. Indeed, viewers are faced with the same challenges, trying to find answers to the most aching questions laid open by the photo shoot in the park and never actually managing to do so. And its in how Antonioni combined this whodunnit kind of story with the more philosophical and aesthetic dilemmas about the nature of visual art and its value as evidence where the Italian director's picture truely reveals its masterly thrust. Brunette offers compelling remarks which could easily pass for academic quotes. For example, he argues that in Blow-up Antonioni wants to point out that all meaning is socially constructed and achieved only in group understanding, rather than individual understanding (made clear by the scene in the park when Hemmings sees the dead body but seeks another person's verification to establish firmly what he thinks is true or by the closing scene when Hemmins lets himself be drawn into a mime game of tennis and sees a ball where no ball is to be seen objectively). He also says that Antononi draws the audience attention to the fact that a visual image doesn't give us meaning directly, unproblematically, but that it's contextual (the stunning Yardbirds scene when a broken neck of the guitar becomes the subject of a fierce battle between the fans, but instantaneously loses its significance outside this context).

Lots of good language there:
1_ This is a propeller,
2_ When you blow up a frame, you enlarge it,
3_ This is Veruschka, a famous German model, popular in the 1960s,
4_ Paparazzi sneak up on celebrities to take their photos,
5_ Some films are made with a hand-held camera,
6_ Hemmings to Redgrave: Don't let spoil everything. We've only just met.
7_ A devil-may-care attitude is a reckless attitude,
8_ You can be stoned out of you mind,
9_ When you get as good as you give, you receive no more than you've put in,
10_ Hemmings likes being a step ahead in the film.