Antonioni’s masterpiece Blow-Up, currently the basis of an exhibition that is on a one-year tour of Vienna, Winterthur and—till early April—Berlin, has a special status in the history of the feature film due to its penetrating analysis of photography: its mechanisms and its failures. While the sequence of moving images (and therefore the plot of the film in itself) is woven into a convincing narrative in keeping with the genre, the positive images drawn from a negative by the protagonist create highly problematic evidence for an event whose outcome is unclear. Because they are “blown up” the authenticity of the photographic image is here exposed to debate to an unprecedented degree.
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