Whether or not one agrees that Blow-Up deserves to be called a film classic is perhaps ultimately unimportant. What is clear is that it will continue to fascinate serious moviegoers. This is probably because it rests firmly on what I call the three keystones of film art—three ingredients that have been intrinsic to it from the beginning. These are the ease and gracefulness with which it treats the real world as malleable, while seeming to faithfully document it; the success with which it spatializes time and abstract thought; and the degree to which it is able to enlist the detached-but-involved interest of the eavesdropper and the voyeur. (pp. 2-3)

Antonioni has always avoided a self-conscious display of his mastery of the medium, but in Blow-Up he enters a new dimension. By transforming Cortazar's amateur photographer into a professional one, a would-be transcriber of life as well as...