Antonioni's Blow Up

First, I must say that I thought the film was beautiful and captivating. Mysteries tend to engage viewers but this was not the compelling aspect of the film - the drive of Blow Up was in its visual language, its poetic images. Anyone 'reading' the movie as a mystery would be disappointed, because the mystery is never solved, never explained, and all the questions are left to the viewer, unanswered and open. Though it has commonalities with a mystery-story: the femme fatale, the murder, the detective-protagonist... the movie is more of a lyrical riddle. I was impressed with its use of quiet visuals to tell the story. As I mentioned in class, I find that too often movies 'based on' novels or short stories depend heavily on the linguistics of the text, never translating and transcending the story fully into its new medium. These direct representations do damage to the narrative (with some exceptions). By translating the story literally, they create a secondary, diluted story that does not live up to the expectations of its own form, thereby discrediting the original at worst (i.e. no one wants to read the book that the box-office bomb is based on), or failing to express the original greatness, at best. Because Antonioni was not married to the text, he was able to escape the pitfalls of direct translation and create a film that utilizes the visual abilities of its medium.