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A surface of forgetting: The object of history in Michaelangelo Antonioni's blowup

White straight leg jeans worn rolled over black half boots. A crochet dress. Red ankle strap shoes. Jeff Beck at the guitar. These objects are the British Mod culture Antonioni provides in Blowup (1966), and they stand behind some of the many questions this film raises today. Today, more than thirty years after it was first released in the United States, this film seems more weighted than ever with its historical and cultural place. It encapsulates an historical moment at the same time that it is itself littered with objects that evoke a memory of the past and a reduction of time. In Blowup, the past is transformed into objects like the photographs from the park themselves. As a character, David Hemmings's purpose in the film is to collect and then discard these objects. His repeated visits to the park are framed by his visit to the antique store, throwing away Jeff Beck's guitar and a nuclear protest sign and buying an airplane propeller. In contrast to the ways Blowup clearly dates itself today, the volume of criticism written about Antonioni has avoided analyzing the cultural moment into which this film inserts itself. The dominant formalist reception of Antonioni's films has, in effect, worked to erase the historical specificity of Blowup. Critics such as Robert Eberwein and Jack Turner have used Blowup as an exposition on Lacanian and psychoanalytic theory. Others, like Seymour Chatman, have concentrated on Antonioni's formal experimentation with the line between art and reality. To the present-day viewer of Blowup, however, the most memorable feature of this film is its creation of itself as an historical object and "period piece." Blowup has become a "period piece" not in the sense that it conveys an obsolete message, but in the sense that it encapsulates a cultural moment and allegorizes its own engagement, use, and place within history. From the top Vogue model Veruschka von Lehndorff, who plays herself, to the performance of the Yardbirds, Blowup captures the cultural moment in which it was created. It turns 1966 into a film, into an object, that the audience consumes. The perception that Blowup transforms its historical moment into an object arises both from the experience of viewing this film retrospectively and from thematic elements