Lab 8 Instructions: Blow-Up

1. Susan Sontag speaks of photography as teaching us an "ethics of seeing," since "photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe." In some ways, Blow-Up is a dramatization of this process, a drama about the "ethics of seeing." Where does the right to observe become an issue in the film? How does the film want us to feel about the ethics of photography? In what ways does the film suggest a shift in the ways that the protagonist thinks about his work and his relationship to the things he photographs?

2. Sontag writes that "photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it.... Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out." In Blow-up, the protagonist seeks to better understand one moment of time by obsessively returning to and perfecting one image. How does the filmmaker want us to feel about the relationship between the photographic image and reality? What assumptions does the film make about the evidentiary or documentary qualities of photographs? What other kinds of images in the film require interpretation?

3. Sontag explains: "A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture." What assumptions does the film make about the evidentiary or documentary qualities of photographs? What challenges does the film pose to our assumptions about the reliability of photography?

4. Sontag argues that taking pictures is a way of "limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image." To what degree is this true of the film's protagonist? Is he using his camera as a shield to protect him from intimacy with the world? How does the camera become an extension of his identity, especially of his sexuality? What links does the film draw between his production of images and his alienation from human experience?

5. Sontag describes the "preemptory rights" of the photographer to "interfere with" or "invade" real world events. What kinds of power does the photographer exercise in the film? In what situations does he seem= powerless?

6. Sontag discusses the scene where the photographer shoots pictures of Verushka's body, claiming that its eroticization of the encounter rings false since "using a camera is not a very good way of getting at someone sexually. Between photographer and subject, there has to be a distance. The camera doesn't rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit and at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate." Do you agree or disagree with her claims about this scene? How would you characterize the dynamic between photographer and model here?

7. Blow-Up maps many different purposes which photographs might serve in contemporary culture. How many different functions can you list? What relative importance does it subscribe to the different kinds of photography?

8. Annette Kuhn writes: "A photograph can be material for interpretation =97 evidence, in that sense: to be solved, like a riddle; read and decoded, like clues left behind at the scene of a crime. Evidence of this sort, though, can conceal, even as it purports to reveal, what it is evidence of. A photograph can certainly throw you off the scent. You will get nowhere, for instance, by taking a magnifying glass to get a closer look; you will see only patches of light and dark, an unreadable mesh of grains. The image yields nothing to that sort of scrutiny; it simply disappears." A key moment in the film deals with the photographer's examination of a painting composed only of dots which requires close examination before it reveals its meanings to the viewer. What is the relevance of this scene to the film as a whole? What parallels and differences does the film draw between the process of interpreting the painting and the process of deciphering the photograph?

9. The film's ending is complex and haunting. How does the image of the mimes relate to the film's larger narrative and thematic development?

10. Is Blow-Up a detective story? Why or why not? How might we compare it with Chinatown which comes out only a few years later?

11. What aspects of the film seem most alien to the traditions of Hollywood storytelling? How might we account for those differences?

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