Miming Utopia – Community at the Crossroads in Antonioni’s Blow-Up

Abstract

Abstract This article examines how different forms of community are staged in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up (1966) and analyses their social, political, epistemological and aesthetic dimensions. The focus on community helps to explain how the film’s self-referential engagement with visuality and the depiction of Swinging London interconnect. The article argues that Blow-Up distinguishes two paradigms of community within youth counter-culture: ‘community as delusion’ and ‘community as utopian potential.’ The former is unwittingly complicit with the very power structures counter-culture opposes: the mechanisms of consumer society with their concomitant effects of reifying and isolating the individual. In contrast, the mimes embody community as utopian potential in different respects, as is shown in a comparative analysis of the two paradigms based on the following parameters: static/dynamic, old/new, creativity, visuality, technology and commodification.