zardo,
I generally agree with this post, with one caveat I will cover below. The way I put what I think you are referring to is Blowup is very much an Antonioni film, despite it's singular aspect of being his first English language film, and Antonioni films are never only about any one thing. As you allude to, the lesson of them, what they are about, has more to do with the process of living, ways of being in the Existentialist sense, than about explication of some "truth" or other form of observation, inlcuding the didactic.
Where I disagree it is so much a disagreement that I wonder how we elsewhere agree so much! I am referring to your characterization of the comparison between his work and his life when he's not working. I understand your point, but I think it misses the more important comparison, which is between his "work" on such matters as the book, and of course his involvement in the photography of the woman in the park, and the increasingly anomic expressions he makes about his work in the studio with the models. Yes, I agree that it is great directing we see as far as Antonioni is concerned in those scenes. But the photographer, despite his evident craft and the ability he shows handling the whole process, is also seen as alienated from it. (You seem to suggest to the reader of your post that we should instead understand the photographer in these scenes as fully invested and happy in his work. I must disagree.)
The scene with Verushka, for example, ends as if it is some unsatisfying sexual encounter, no real connection between them. He earlier asks who she was sleeping with last night, implying some past connection. She tells him she is going to Paris, yet we later see them together at a party, her still in London. "I AM in Paris!" she rsponds to his questioning of the Paris story. The faux appearance of some sexual, even romantic possibility between them not coincidentally ends when the "work" part of the encounter has been accomplished. But other than making them both money, presumably, what else is accomplished?
This thematic approach, where the mercenary nature of the work leads to increasing anomie, is furthered first in the five models (Peggy Moffit being the most famous, I suppose) scene and even in the encounter with the two young women played by Jane Birkin and Gillian Hills. In the five models scene, even the mercenary motive is not enough to make all concerned finish the job at hand. He instead escapes from his studio, with his alienation almost literally chasing him out of the building. The encounter with Birkin and Hills in fact does lead to sex, but this time literally of the unsatisfying sort. The mercenary motive for the characters played by Birkin and Hills that led them to this encounter surely cannot be missed, as was the photographer's choice to take advantage of the situation, but leading only to the alienating conclusion. Even the encounter with Vanessa Redgrave's character Jane is very much about him wanting the pictures for his book, a mixed but still partly mercenary motive, and her desire presumably to not be found out for involvement (apparently) in a murder, what can be characterized as an economic motive of a general but still quite significant sense.
Now, having seen enough other Antonioni films, the notion that modern man, in his post-industrial world, finds human connections complicated and ultimately even prevented by economic conditions, hardly means two things. First of all it hardly means that we should blithely assume that genuine human connection would otherwise be easily obtainable, or even attainable at all. He is not driven primarily be some economic frame of reference as the basis or starting point for an exercise in criticism. Second as I mentioned above, the film is not about any one thing in any event.
among other things it is about are epistomology, specifically from an Existentialist perspective, and related to that is how we come to know truth, and of course how that search exploring how we come to knowledge affects what we learn as truth. Blowup also examines the relation between the characters in the film and the things in it, I think as some metaphor for an examination of being toward death. (I think this is not so great an insight on my part fwiw - clearly the central part of the film involves an examination of a "thing" that being the film of the shots taken in the park, slowly and surely not coincidentally revealing, through the technical process employed, a death, but also one where, in the specific world in which this process takes place, the humans in the scene have already been reduced to things, those being the images of them now frozen, not alive, on the film.) It is also an exercise that explores the limitations of the artistic process to get at truth (Blowup's use of photography being a rather obvious comparitor to filmmaking in such equivalent regard. In that connection please refer to an important scene in Ingmar Bergman's The Passion, where Elis Vergarus explains to Andreas Winkleman that his rather absurdly involved but well honed, even talented, hobby of photography can only show part of the truth of his human subjects through photographic portraiture.)
and I am sure I am leaving out some other things.
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