BLOW-UP (1966) C widescreen 111m dir: Michaelangelo Antonioni

w/David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, Jane Birkin, Gillian Hills, Peter Bowles, Harry Hutchinson, John Castle, Susan Broderick, Mary Kahl, Verushka

Director Antonioni's fascinating psychological puzzler about a young photographer who believes he's an accidental witness to a murder. You may find the story baffling, but you'll be held spellbound by the incandescent Redgrave and the photographer's nightmarish world. The film is an intelligent meditation on the power of the image, so the small screen is not the ideal way to view it.

From Georges Sadoul's Dictionary of Films: "A fashion photographer (Hemmings) by chance takes shots of a woman (Redgrave) which appear on being enlarged, to perhaps show a murder; but perhaps the murder is in his imagination.

"'It is a film that carries few autobiographical elements. I believe in this story, but from outside it' (Antonioni). In a superb depiction of 'post-Victorian' London, Antonioni followed up the ideas of L'Avventura on the uncertainty of recalling the moment that has already passed.

"'If not the greatest, Blow Up seems to me easily the most likable of Antonioni's later films; and its freshness and vivacity make one look forward to his future work with an eagerness one would scarcely have anticipated in the days of La Notte and L'Eclisse ... What one first notices about Blow Up is its tempo, its effect of spontaneity, its lack of mannerisms.' (Robin Wood). Blow Up is the only one of Antonioni's films to reach a relatively wide commercial market. Its success was probably due equally to its sexual scenes and the audiences' delight in puzzling out the meaning. However, Antonioni's attempt to depict the difficulty of any individual grasping 'objective' reality and his bold, stylistic use of color make this his most accomplished (if not best) film since L'Avventura."

From sfgate.com, 11 November 2017: "A new look at the masterpiece Blow-Up — and it’s worth taking by Carlos Valladares

"As Andrew Sarris once said, if you have not yet seen Blow-Up — playing in a new digital restoration at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive — see it immediately before you hear or read anything more about it.

"It may seem silly or redundant to issue that advice about a classic that’s been out for more than 50 years. But it’s needed: You must meander through the world of this English art-house puzzler — a critical and commercial smash in 1966, and Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s biggest career hit — with fresh, curious eyes.

"Over the span of Blow-Up’s 111 eccentric minutes, our sense of space degrades — beautifully, casually, inescapably. Here, Antonioni seems to be working through his art heritage. Giotto created space with a grounded aesthetic harmony; more than 600 years later, Antonioni shattered it.
Blow-Up added Pop to the melancholic Antonioni’s palette of modernity. The meditative qualities of his Monica Vitti-led tetralogy —L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), L’Eclisse (1962) and Red Desert (1964) — led some critics like Sarris and Pauline Kael to dismiss 'Antoniennui' as a stuffy power-grabber, an artiste afraid of the vulgar, slangy low-down. But with the new direction signaled by Blow-Up, Antonioni showed off his playful side.

"Antonioni took his cue from painters and photographers who loved the mass vernacular: Warhol, Richard Hamilton, Peter Montgomery, Robert Rauschenberg. Indeed, the finished film feels like the elegant hodgepodge of one of Rauschenberg’s 3-D combines: Brought under one roof are shards from the worlds of fashion, photography, rock ’n’ roll (the Yardbirds play a reworked dueling-guitar version of their 'Train Kept a-Rollin’'), jazz (the score is by Herbie Hancock), Brutalism and Hollywood Technicolor. Richard Lester was less afraid than Antonioni of true Pop, as seen in his today-undervalued Mod satire The Knack (1965), and Michael Snow dug deeper into a similar murder mystery in the avant-garde Wavelength (1967) — but Antonioni’s Blow-Up is the natural and vibrant midpoint.

"The film does not really want to solve its main murder mystery. It’s more interested in plopping the unkempt David Hemmings hipster into various staid, still places where he does not belong: fashion-photo shoots in his cold, white studio where he has to deal with models he thinks are “bloody bitches,” a Yardbirds concert with an improbably zonked audience, a flophouse for the poor where (like Joel McCrea in Sullivan’s Travels) he shoots his most 'serious' (safe) art.

“Blow-Up was a public sensation in ’66 for its titillating threesome among Hemmings and a young, fully nude Jane Birkin and Gillian Hills. This scene — which feels frisky and wholesome but no more advanced today — is said to have helped bring about the official end of the Hays-era Production Code. Today, it’s much more important to see the threesome as a cunning cover for masculine art. Passing off as some 'serious' 'investigation' into 'erotics or lack thereof,' it’s really just about the privilege of being a male artist, undressing women before the camera for the sake of a grand statement about drifting modernity, showing Birkin and Hills off as nothing but pretty young bodies, two easy satiric targets to represent ’60s London chic drabness. (Again, Lester’s complex Mod comedy The Knack had the edge on Antonioni, by giving center stage to the raw, Chaplinesque Rita Tushingham.)

"The centerpiece of Blow-Up is the 11-minute sequence where Hemmings’ photographer enlarges pictures of lovers in a park to uncover what seems to be a sinister plot. Most of the scene plays in intense silence, save from the serenely manic dribbling of water into the darkroom’s washbasin. Antonioni and Hemmings gawk at the photos with palpable unease, in harmony with other conspiratorial films of and about the 1960s: the films of Jacques Rivette (Out 1), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), The Conversation (1974) and Blow Out (1981). (The latter two were directly influenced by Blow-Up.) All these movies care less about the mysteries that make up their plots, and care more about zooming into sensations of loneliness, paranoia, confusion. The protagonists all hunt for answers that may not exist. Hemmings combs through the blowups like someone searching the Zapruder film for the Truth. The grain of a photo, its maddening ambiguity, halts the obsession for perfect satisfaction.

"It’s because Blow-Up doesn’t resolve itself that it’s a work of unbridled hope. Blow-Up captures the shivering flux-state between body and consciousness that so many filmmakers struggle to capture. Antonioni never settles on any of the Blow-Up combine’s many genres: all at once, it’s a satire, sexy romp, slice of life, rockumentary and a good ol’ fashioned piece of slow Antoniennui. In its cryptic tennis-match end, it suddenly decides to add sound to the list of senses that we can’t trust: If our minds can be fooled, is anything concrete or stable? But the path Antonioni takes to arrive at this epiphany is so meandering, so weirdly playful, it feels unsatisfying to say Blow-Up is 'just about' reality and illusion.

"Antonioni is like his photographer: perpetually unsure, always searching, cataloging anything, dissatisfied with everything, forever drifting in a world filled with meaningless signs (from smashed guitars to Vanessa Redgrave wandering the streets — doing what? Was that even her?). Antonioni’s details always add up to a potent 'too-muchness.'

"In the end, Blow-Up ends up escaping its creators and its ’60s moment. Maybe that’s what Antonioni wanted — a mystery to confuse many unsuspecting folks for generations to come."

BLOW-UP was nominated for two Oscars: Best Director and Original Screenplay (Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, Edward Bond; based on a short story by Julio Cortazar).