Blow Up September 6th, 2008
“Blow up” (1966), by Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the deepest discussions ever made on the nature and the place of the image in contemporary culture, permanence and transitory, and on how we deal with the visible and the invisible phenomena.
The film tells the story of a photographer (Thomas, interpreted by David Hemmings) who may registered, by chance, a crime in a park. On developing his pictures he is startled to find what appears to be a man with a gun in the bushes and, in a later shot, a body.
Rushing back to the park in the middle of the night he finds the body, but on his return to the studio all his pictures have disappeared. When he returns to the park in the morning the body, too, has gone and Antonioni seems to say: It all might never have happened�
His investigation about the crime is made through successive magnifications of the photographic registers he shot accidentally.
In this process the picture appears in its essence, reduced to its materiality: nitrate of silver grains on paper. In other words, the image was not there and Antonioni now seems to ask us: what you see is what you get?
In short, we can say Thomas could not interpret images. His superficiality allowed him just to see photographies. He trusted the technical devices (which are tools), but could not deal with technology as production of knowledge.
Numa seqüência de 16 minutos, Antonioni nos confronta com o processo de revelar/ver/percerber e as relações desses atos com as relações de trasncodificar e ler. Acompanhe:
Thomas in the lab:
Thomas Watches:
Thomas Observes:
Thomas Looks Closer:
Thomas Misunderstands:
Thomas is Lost:
Thomas Doubts:
One Response to “Blow Up”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
May 3rd, 2009 at 7:16 pm
[...] in social networks. See the application running. We depart from a conceptual dialogue with the film Blow Up (Antonioni, 1966) to operate a rereading of the seminal essays by Vilém Flusser on photography in [...]