Seuils, taches, indices : limites et émergences du visuel dans Blow-up de Michelangelo Antonioni

Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-up is undoubtedly a classic: winner of the Grand Prix at the 20th Cannes Film Festival in 1967, it is, to paraphrase Italo Calvino in 1981, a film “that never finishes saying what it has to say,” similar to works “that exert a particular influence both by imposing themselves as unforgettable and by concealing themselves in the folds of memory through assimilation into the collective or individual unconscious.” We will therefore re-read it both in light of the traces of other visions and other readings interspersed up to the present day, as well in light of the question of limits, their figures, and their effects. Beyond its implicit and explicit iconography and intertextuality, the “classic” Blow-up contains also traces and images that problematise the film's contemporary visual culture. As Roland Barthes understood in the early 1980s, “the contents and forms [in Antonioni] are equally historical.” The contemporary world depicted in Blow-up is one in which several times and several temporalities of images coexist: the past, the present, and also the future. And these scenes ultimately call our present into question.