Feedback and Blowup

In Antonioni's film, the protagonist draws a story out of a sequence of photographs he takes of a pair lovers in a park. As the photographer Thomas sequentially blows up certain regions of the photographs, he believes he has uncovered first a plot and then a murder. The turth behind the images is never revealed, and the audience is left to question whether such events actually transpired.

This process of teasing a dark narrative out of seemingly innocuous footage is repeated in The Conversation. In the case of Blowup, the author of the images actually photographs one of his prints and enlarges that in order to see deeper into the original. This feedback loop first reveals the figure of a gunman hidden in the trees and then shows a the outline of the victim's body. The images themself are ambiguous enough to suggest that they might simply be the result of the feedback loop. Thomas returns to the park and does indeed see the body, but there are no signs of foul play. There is not enough evidence to verify the rest of his story.

I think the idea of pulling a dark narrative out of spontaneous footage is interesting and worth persuing. When given a sequence of images, the audience naturally tries to tie them together into a story. In this film, as well in The Conversation and the work of George Legrady, the artist is curating the selection of source material in such a way the audience can develop their own narrative.