Reality v. Illusion

Alexandra Ramirez

Visual Literacy

Blow Up Paper

10/17/11

Blow-Up provided its audience with an authentic look at the propensity a camera has to detach its owner from the scene taking place through its lens. It puts into clarity the dehumanizing potential of photography – perfectly depicting how numb it can make you feel to reality. Blow-Up also introduces us to the characters of its time: impulsive, acquisitive, and bored.

David Hemmings, who plays a self-indulgent and equally self-important photographer, runs through this movie in a casual loop of a day in a life of someone in the world. He is perpetually in motion: moving from one event to the next, unable to focus on a single moment. We are witness to his sporadic and hasty judgments: wanting to purchase an antique shop even though his home décor shows he cares nothing for the historic, buying an airplane propeller for no particular purpose or usage, even trying to buy an unfinished painting from a nearby abstract painter. For each and every one of these objects, Thomas (David’s character) loses interest a few minutes after he encounters them. The perfect example is when Thomas goes to listen to a band perform at some nightclub in London and has to literally fight off the crowd when he catches the broken neck of the guitar one of the band-members threw out into the audience. He fights his way through the thick and hostile crowd, and even outruns some eager fans that attempt to follow him to retrieve the piece of the instrument, but when he has finally lost his pursuers and realizes he has obtained the object, he drops it and walks off.

The photographs of the “maybe murder” that Thomas takes in the park provide him with his only genuine interaction with reality. But, just like the times before, this interaction, too, is fleeting. By the film’s conclusion Thomas is no longer reflecting upon the photographs he took, just as his miniscule attention span no longer remembers his momentary desires for the painting, the antique shop, the propeller, or the neck of the guitar.

The results of Thomas’ photographs from his afternoon in the park are neither logical nor factual. By the movie’s end it still is unclear whether Thomas actually photographed a murder, or just believe he had. Although the photos look as though there is the silver hair from the possibly murdered man in the bushes, it is an interpretation of the picture not an actual reality. And when Thomas goes to the park to see for sure, the fact that the body is laid out in the open hints that perhaps Thomas’ interpretation is not as trustworthy as we first imagined. He also forgets his camera, the first time ever in the film he goes without it, and when he returns the next day the body is gone, once more suggesting his point of view is not based in actuality. Ultimately Thomas sees what he wants to believe he has been a witness to; in the exact same way the mimes at the end of Bow-Up believe they are witnesses to a tennis match. Thomas’ photographs depict a staged reality, and when we allow our minds to run away with possibilities we truly begin to play loose ends with reality and illusion.