Blow-Up, 1968

Blow-Up, 1968 French subtitles and outside the horns honked in French and the sky hung with sounds I couldn't understand but inside the dark cinema were words like chair or camera and even the illuminated clock on the wall seemed to tick out minutes, seconds, not something foreign, not the Parisian rain nor the waiters hustling to roll the tables indoors, crumbs sliding off, while the umbrellas dripped red or blue or yellow and then the music in the street was gone. A matinee, the chairs mostly empty. A draft under the double doors led back to the lobby where a woman sat selling tickets, taking francs, rattling change to my palm. How did the film end? I can remember an image, the green leaves emerging from the chemical bath, the leaf's shadow becoming a gun, as ifto suggest nothing is what it seems. After the film, we crossed to the Left Bank where the streets were still draped with red, banners and flags, barricades cluttering the alleys, broken bottles as ifthere had been a party. The shops were closed. We ducked into the cathedral to get out ofthe rain. Silence except someone praying near the altar and the sound ofour shoes crossing the stone hewn in another age and carried on the back of some peasant who never saw completely what we could see then—the way the vaulted ceiling rose to the window or how the light emerged from the glass. Maybe once walking home he saw a woman digging onions from a frozen field, an image so clean and complete, so suddenly discovered 78 that it fastened like a hinge, that it made a window—lift up, said a voice, lift up and let us in—and when he died, regardless of the oil crossed on his forehead or of his children's faces, what he saw was the onion, the spade striking the ground. Kathryn Hall 79 ...