Anatomy of a Scene: the mimed tennis match in Michelangelo Antonioni’s ‘Blow-Up’
Michelangelo Antonioni might have hailed from Italy, but his depiction of London during the height of the swinging sixties was unparalleled. With Blow-Up, starring David Hemmings, the filmmaker dissects a world that has developed rapidly, giving way to sexual freedom, rock icons, new fashions and a world defined by images and art.
London during the ‘60s was the heart of these new cultural innovations, with fashion becoming more provocative and daring and celebrity culture growing even more. Antonioni’s film acts as expert commentary on the cultural developments of the period – where people worshipped idols and symbols that didn’t mean a thing, as we still do today.
Blow-Up follows Hemmings’ Thomas, a photographer whom we are introduced to after he has been shooting images at a doss house for a passion project. However, he is forced to shoot fashion photography to earn a living, which visibly irritates him. He finds no joy in commercialism, with Antonioni potentially commenting on the idea of art being turned into a commodity.
After various sexual encounters, Thomas notices that some photographs he took in the park contain a mysterious figure in the bushes pointing a gun. He only notices this when he blows the photos up onto a larger scale, subsequently becoming completely consumed by the fact that he might have just captured a murder on camera.
The movie offers no resolution as to whether there was a murder or not – Thomas finds a body in one scene, although it disappears later on. As the movie comes to its end, a sequence involving a group of students dressed as mimes plays out, although it has often left audiences confused. The mimes gather on a tennis court for an imaginary game, throwing an invisible ball back and forth – the others watching and reacting as though the game of tennis is real. Thomas walks over to observe and is expected to go ‘retrieve’ the ball when it is ‘thrown’ outside of the court, which he does. Then, he stands and observes the situation, and the noise of a real tennis ball being played with can be heard. The camera lingers on his face before he walks away, filmed from a distant angle from above, becoming a tiny figure among the vastness of the green field.
The scene is the perfect end to the movie, tying together Blow-Up’s themes of imagination/fantasy versus reality. There are many moments in the film where Antonioni argues that we often ascribe meaning to things ourselves or as a group, and we choose to believe in certain things, often through trickery, to get by. For example, when he goes to see The Yardbirds, Thomas walks into a crowd where everyone is standing like mannequins. However, when a broken guitar neck is thrown into the crowd, they go wild, acting animalistic as they trample each other to get it. Thomas succeeds, yet he instantly leaves the gig, tossing the instrument outside. It means nothing to him.
The fact that we never uncover the truth of the murder is vital to the narrative of Blow-Up. Some viewers find this lack of conclusion frustrating, but this misses the film’s entire point. Antonioni is concerned with imagination and fragmentation – Thomas has imagined the murder, and his obsession with it shows how far the human mind can go to trick itself or make one feel as though they are part of something larger than they actually are.
In a world becoming more and more dominated by commercialism, subsequently limiting artistic freedom, Thomas finds himself hyper-fixated on his photograph – a distraction from the new cultural landscape he is struggling to work through.
This final scene suggests that as humans in a society highly concentrated by images and differing sources of information – which make it hard to figure out what is real and what is fake – all we really have is what we ourselves choose to believe. This oversaturation is isolating, and the intrinsic rules and beliefs of our society can actually be rather absurd and at odds with our own core beliefs.
Yet, we must ascribe to them to feel part of something and survive, and Thomas inevitably succumbs to this realisation when he joins in with the mimes. He acknowledges that the line between reality and fantasy is very faint and that sometimes we have to imagine things or place meaning onto random items to succeed in a capitalist and consumerist society. It is a rather nihilistic view, yet one that is captured so beautifully, and Antonioni’s choice to end the movie with a silent, mimed game of tennis is a comment on the true absurdity of life in the modern age.
