The Mime Tennis Match Blow-Up (1966)
The film's climax is a game with no rackets and no ball
The mime tennis sequence runs from roughly minute 108 to the final frame. It is the film's climax in the structural sense: the test of whether Thomas can act on his post-midpoint approach at the highest stakes the film can stage.b42 b43 b44 b45
The Rag-Week mimes return in tennis whites
The white-faced students who circled London at the film's opening pour out of the same jeep, now in tennis whites. Two of them — credited as Julian Chagrin and Claude Chagrin — set up a court with mimed rackets and an imagined ball. The others gather at the wire fence and watch in silence. The volley begins. (springback)
The visual idiom is the inverse of the Maryon Park inciting incident: same wide grass field, same wire fence, same white sky, but the field is now populated by figures playing inside an agreed performance instead of by a couple Thomas is stealing photographs of from outside.
"The match is the literal staging of the film's closing argument. Reality is whatever the people on the court agree is real. The man at the fence is being asked to agree." — Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com (1998)
The imagined ball flies over the fence
A mimed volley; one of the players hits a high return; the imagined ball clears the wire fence and lands in the grass at Thomas's feet. The mimes, frozen in their court positions, look at him. They wait.b43
The film holds the moment longer than it strictly needs to. Thomas at the fence has, at this point in the film, exhausted every other tool. The negatives are gone, the prints are gone, the body has been removed, Ron is in Paris, Jane has vanished into a crowd, Patricia has gone home. He has nothing — no camera, no print, no body — and the mimes are inviting him into a performance that has none of those things either.
The throw is a structural reversal
Thomas waits a long moment, walks to the empty grass, bends, mimes picking up the ball, straightens, and throws it back in an arc over the fence. The mimes catch the gesture and resume the volley. As Thomas watches, the soundtrack supplies the thock-thock of racket-on-ball — the only diegetic sound that confirms he has joined the performance.b44
"The thock is the film's most-discussed audio cue. It is the moment the soundtrack ratifies what the image alone could not. Thomas threw the ball and the world supplied the sound." — Film Colossus: Explaining the End of BLOW-UP, filmcolossus (2017)
The reversal at this moment is exact. In the Ricky-Tick scene the broken guitar neck was a real wooden object that became valueless outside the room (see The Yardbirds Club Scene). In the tennis scene there is no object at all, and the soundtrack supplies one — because Thomas has agreed to play the game on the world's terms.
"Antonioni's argument is simple and brutal. The photograph could not get the world to acknowledge a body it had captured. The mime court can get the world to supply a ball that does not exist. The difference is who agreed." — Senses of Cinema, Blow-Up review (2017)
The pull-back and the disappearance
The camera retreats from Thomas standing on the wide green field. He becomes small, then very small. In the final beat, the figure is gone — the grass is empty, the thock fades.b45
The disappearance is the film's verdict on the post-midpoint approach. Thomas reaches the right answer too late and too publicly; the world can absorb him only by erasing him. The reading the film invites — and that the Plot Structure page makes explicit — is that this is sound-tools-defeated in the political-fatalism mode: the right answer arrived, was given, and the world swallowed the giver.
"The pull-back is one of the most copied shots in cinema. Wenders, Antonioni's heir, used a version of it; so did Coppola at the end of The Conversation. The shot says the same thing each time: the man at the center of the picture is no longer the picture." — Geoff Andrew, Sight & Sound (2017)
The Chagrins
Julian Chagrin (born Julian Chagrin) is a mime artist trained at the École Jacques Lecoq in Paris, son of the Russian-born British animator Francis Chagrin. He went on to create the silent comedy character The Sound of One Hand Clapping and to work in television for several decades. Claude Chagrin (later Claude Whatham) was his sister-in-law and a separately credited mime artist. Antonioni cast them on the recommendation of Lecoq and trained the rest of the troupe over a long location shoot at Maryon Park. (springback)
"We rehearsed the volley for two weeks. Antonioni made us play it as if the ball were real. By the end of the rehearsal it was real to us. That is what he wanted on camera." — Julian Chagrin, Springback Magazine (2021)