Abstract

This paper focuses on the work of the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni to articulate a non-empirical, film-philosophical vision that presents important and unexplored potential in contemporary eco-feminist approaches to culture and nature. Taking Blow Up as a case study, this paper maintains that the film operates as a precise statement against the philosophical underpinnings of the capitalist-patriarchal ideology it depicts in its narrative and formal elements. The film uses and frustrates familiar rhetorical frameworks of Humanism and classical Hollywood cinema, such as the appeal of deductive reasoning, appeal to emotions, narrative closures and the use of the female body as object of desire. In this, the film complicates the application of established empirical and rational approaches to nature and the body in modern culture. This paper maintains that Antonioni’s cinematic vision uses mise-en-scène and swinging London as a potential theatre of another historical and philosophical approach to nature and culture in modernity. In this view, Antonioni’s film does not simply oppose or criticize the capitalist and patriarchal aesthetic regime that he portrays; he arguably uses its fetishism in its full figural force. In Blow Up the division between the subject and the object is reconfigured, re-coded and ultimately shown in its temporal, impermanent limits. The film itself, suggests that empirical reality is no sufficient ontological ground for historical processes of perception to occur. This film-philosophical approach to Antonioni’s work opens new and interesting avenues in contemporary eco-feminist discourses.