Antonioni's Long Takes and Empty Frames Blow-Up (1966)
The Antonioni style is a vocabulary, not a list of techniques
Antonioni's recognized style across the Trilogy of Alienation (L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse) and Red Desert is a vocabulary of long takes, architectural framings, faces held until they begin to dissolve, and what critics called "dead time" — narrative stretches in which nothing dramatic happens but the camera does not cut away. Blow-Up takes this vocabulary into a more plot-legible register without abandoning it.
"Antonioni invented a way of filming the time that elapses between dramatic events. His films do not skip the dead time. They make the dead time the point." — Geoff Andrew, Sight & Sound (2017)
The long takes of Blow-Up
Three sequences in Blow-Up rely on extended takes that would have been cut in conventional 1966 American cinema:
The Verushka shoot runs roughly two minutes in close-coverage and rotates around the model with very few cuts. The shoot is staged as a single continuous performance.b5
The studio confrontation with Jane is built from long, slow camera moves through the dressing area and developing room as Thomas stalls. The phone-call-from-his-wife scene runs as one passage of dialogue without a cut.b22
The enlargement marathon is the film's most extended use of duration. Eleven minutes of one man pinning prints to walls, with intermittent reverse pulls along the line of enlargements. The sequence has cuts but the cuts are not dramatic — they ratify the duration, they do not interrupt it. See The Darkroom Sequence.
The empty frame
The empty frame is the more distinctive Antonioni device. Many shots in Blow-Up begin or end with the human figure leaving the frame, leaving the audience looking at architecture, foliage, sky, or grass for several beats before the cut. Three examples:
The opening doss-house sequence: the men file out, then leave the frame, then a long beat on the empty railway arch before Thomas turns into view.b1
The multi-model shoot: Thomas walks out of the room, and the camera holds on the five women standing with their eyes closed for a beat after he is gone.b7
The closing pull-back: Thomas in the wide green field, becoming small, becoming very small, then gone, with the grass holding the frame for several beats before the credits.b45
"Antonioni's empty frames are not stylistic mannerisms. They are the film's argument made spatial. The shot continues after the human leaves because the film is about the world that does not need the human to keep going." — Senses of Cinema, Blow-Up review (2017)
Architectural framing
Antonioni and Di Palma frame Thomas almost always in relation to architecture or fence-lines: through the chain-link fence at Maryon Park, through the doorway to Bill and Patricia's flat, against the white seamless paper of the studio backdrop, across the long bench of the developing room, against the wide brick wall of the railway arch. The compositions are not pictorial — they are diagnostic. Thomas is read through the boundaries he is on either side of.
"The fence is the film's most-used frame. Thomas is on one side; the world he is trying to know is on the other. By the climax he has crossed." — Idyllopus Press: Blow-Up Part Four, idyllopuspress (2018)
Why the style suits the film's argument
Antonioni's style and the film's argument are the same. The argument is that the photograph cannot underwrite a witness role the social world refuses; the style is a refusal to cut to the point and a willingness to let the audience see what does not advance the plot. Both are forms of patience: the patience to look at a thing without acting on it, the patience to wait for the world to acknowledge what the camera has seen, the patience to keep the shot rolling after the figure has left.
"Antonioni's long takes are the film's argument about what photography is for. You sit with the image. You wait for it to disclose itself. Sometimes it does not." — Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com (1998)
Influence on later filmmakers
The Blow-Up vocabulary — long takes, empty frames, the figure leaving the frame, the wide architectural composition — has been inherited by directors as different as Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas, The American Friend), Wong Kar-wai (In the Mood for Love), Michael Haneke (Caché, Hidden), Jia Zhangke (Still Life), and Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation). The pull-back ending of The Conversation (Coppola, 1974) is a direct quotation of Blow-Up's closing pull-back.
"Every director who has been called slow in the last fifty years owes a debt to Antonioni. Blow-Up is the picture that taught American studios it could be commercially viable." — Geoff Andrew, Sight & Sound (2017)