Blow Up
So the “blow-up” here is not a bomb, but in fact a photo getting bigger. The “plot” is that photographer Thomas accidentally takes a photo of a murder while chasing a couple through a park, and catches it when he enlarges the photo. This plot takes roughly fifteen minutes of screen time. What else do we get?
The first twenty minutes is Thomas being an insufferable dick to a bunch of models he’s taking pictures of.
There’s a long sequence where two teen girls come to see if he’ll take pictures of them and he more or less rapes both of them, except it’s the ’60s so they’re fine with it, except they’re not for a while, then they are again, and then he doesn’t actually take photos of them. It’s the kind of thing that if you did it now you’d be convicted in under an hour.
The Yarbirds play a set, including Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. Beck destroys a guitar and amp. This is cool for atmosphere but does not advance the story one bit.
The murder plot is never really resolved, Thomas finds the body, doesn’t tell anyone, and then when he goes back again, it’s gone. I read a little background, and there are many stories of director Antonioni wasting money doing dumb shit like painting a road a slightly different shade of grey, and the movie is a “mood piece” and “ambiguous” because they just ran out of money and had to stop. Some great art is made under constraints, but I really think some grey studio goon should have come in and waved a budget around a bit more.
The end of the movie, murder thing forgotten, is Thomas watching a bunch of mimes play tennis. I have thought about this, there must be some point to it, and the best I can come up with is that you can’t photograph a mime act, it doesn’t make sense. So this is him removing the distance he has maintained with the world through a camera, emphasised when he “picks up” their “ball” to “throw it” back to them.