All Eyes in Swinging London : Antonioni's Blow-Up and the Maze of Violence

Abstract

Antonioni’s Blow-Up, released in late 1966, is usually taken, on the one hand, to represent (celebratingly and scandalously) the youth culture of Swinging London and, on the other, the problems of (tenuous) relation between reality and its representation (the main protagonist thinks he discovers a murder by analysing photographs he has taken). Although most critics have attempted to link these two levels by means of some existential metaphor (most often: the main protagonist who represents the image-crazed youth of Swinging London encounters its biggest taboo, death, which is unrepresentable to boot), the paper proposes a more literal and political interpretation arguing that the abstraction of blurry grain of silver halide into which the image of the corpse finally dissolves in a series of photographic blow-ups is a way of representing something which also cannot have a proper image: the all-pervasive but no longer perceptible lowkey everyday violence which constitutes the propelling force of the supposedly emancipated “swinging” lifestyle.