Blow-Up

Overview

Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni's first English-language production was also his only box office hit, widely considered one of the seminal films of the 1960s. Thomas (David Hemmings) is a nihilistic, wealthy fashion photographer in mod "Swinging London." Filled with ennui, bored with his "fab" but oddly-lifeless existence of casual sex and drug use, Thomas comes alive when he wanders through a park, stops to take pictures of a couple embracing, and upon developing the images, believes that he has photographed a murder. Pursued by Jane (Vanessa Redgrave), the woman who is in the photos, Thomas pretends to give her the pictures, but in reality, he passes off a different roll of film to her. Thomas returns to the park and discovers that there is, indeed, a dead body lying in the shrubbery: the gray-haired man who was embracing Jane. Has she murdered him, or does Thomas' photo reveal a man with a gun hiding nearby? Antonioni's thriller is a puzzling, existential, adroitly-assembled masterpiece.

Product Details

Release Date:	10/28/2014
UPC:	0888574098643
Original Release:	1966
Rating:	NR
Source:	Warner Brothers Publications
Language:	English
Time:	1:51:00
Sales rank:	3,244

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

David Hemmings	Thomas
Vanessa Redgrave	Jane
Sarah Miles	Patricia
John Castle	Bill
Jane Birkin	The Blonde
Gillian Hills	The Brunette
Peter Bowles	Ron
Veruschka von Lehndorff	Herself
Julian Chagrin	Mime,Mime
Jimmy Page	Himself with The Yardbirds
Jeff Beck	Himself
Susan Brodrick	Antique Shop Owner
Tsai Chin	Thomas's Receptionist
Chris Dreja	Himself
Melanie Hampshire	Model
Harry Hutchinson	Shopkeeper
Jill Kennington	Model
Mary Khal	Fashion Editor
The Yardbirds	Actor,Composer
Peggy Moffitt	Actor
Ann Norman	Actor
Susan Broderick	Antique Shop Owner
Ronan O'Casey	Jane's Lover in Park
Herbie Hancock	Composer

Technical Credits

Michelangelo Antonioni

Tonino Guerra

Edward Bond

Michelangelo Antonioni	Director,Screenwriter
Carlo Ponti	Producer
Tonino Guerra	Screenwriter
Edward Bond	Screenwriter
Pierre Rouve	Executive Producer

Editorial Reviews

A cinematic time capsule that distills the very essence of the swinging London of 1966, filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni's provocative art house hit remains a brilliant psychological thriller. David Hemmings portrays a British fashion photographer whose voyeuristic tendencies compel him to take pictures of a couple he sees embracing in the park. Upon making blow-ups of the images, he notices details indicating that a murder might have been committed: Returning to the park, he finds the body of the man he photographed. As the woman in the case, Vanessa Redgrave made a vivid impression and entered the ranks of stardom. Her participation in what was then thought to be a highly erotic sequence involving nude modeling helped lend notoriety to the film, which upon release was condemned by the Legion of Decency and other watchdog organizations. It's obvious today that, for his first English-language film, Antonioni was less interested in developing a Hitchcockian narrative than he was in capturing attitudes and images that, to him, symbolized the social upheaval of the times. Blow-Up is suffused from first frame to last with the "mod" and "pop" sensibilities that many in the '60s thought so corrosive. It would seem that the film risks feeling dated today, but it's really no less powerful thanks to the richness and complexity of Antonioni's vision. Multilayered and at times deliberately obtuse, Blow-Up still casts a hypnotic spell over viewers, and repeated viewings often reveal additional details and meanings.

Barnes & Noble - Ed Hulse

A masterpiece of 1960s art-house cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up is a dizzying exploration of images, appearances, and existence amid the mod glamour of Swinging '60s London. Antonioni took his signature influence of existentialist philosophy, seen in such earlier films as L'avventura (1960), La notte (1961), The Eclipse (1962), and Red Desert (1964), and pushed it to full-scale reflexivity: instead of just questioning existence, he questioned the nature of reality itself. Just as Thomas blows up his photographs until they are pure abstraction, Antonioni uses deliberately odd framing, expressionistic colors, and an extremely long telephoto lens, which crushes depth from the image, to make the film look both striking and opaque. Thomas himself is adrift in this world: absorbed in the surfaces of things yet unable to perceive intrinsic beauty, he finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish objective reality from the simulacra of advertising and fashion photography. By the end of the film, he is no longer certain if distinctions among image, illusion, and reality even exist. The film's brilliantly dense philosophical underpinnings aside, its Rear Window-esque plot makes it a compelling piece of work. Moreover, it features some of the most memorable sequences in cinema: the pantomime tennis match at the end of the film, the naughty ménage à trois on purple paper, and the almost farcically erotic photo shoot at the beginning of the film between model Veruschka and Thomas with his oversized camera lens. Blow Up proved extremely influential on younger generations of filmmakers; and it was later echoed by both Francis Ford Coppola in The Conversation (1974) and Brian De Palma in Blow Out (1981).

All Movie Guide - Jonathan Crow