Blow-Up (1966)

Tagline: Sometimes, reality is the strangest fantasy of all.

Blow-Up movie storyline. A thought-provoking, art-house masterpiece from Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni – a view of the world of mod fashion, and an engaging, provocative murder mystery that examines the existential nature of reality through photography.

It was Antonioni’s first film in English, and quickly became one of the most important films of its decade, and a milestone in liberalized attitudes toward film nudity and expressions of sexuality. [The film in some respects resembles Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), and proved influential for other young filmmakers: i.e., Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), and De Palma’s Blow Out (1981).]

A desensitized-to-life, nihilistic, high-fashion London free-lance photographer Thomas (Hemmings), who lives a mid-60s life of excess (riches, fame, and women), becomes bored with his lucrative career of glamour photography. So he resorts to photographing, in documentary style, the seamy and sordid side of life in London, in flophouses and slums.

Innocently, he takes candid photos in a deserted park of a lover’s tryst-rendezvous between a kerchief-wearing, enigmatic woman (Vanessa Redgrave) and a middle-aged, gray-haired man in a light-gray suit. She pursues him to ask for the illicit photos, as he imagines that he has witnessed a scene of sexual intrigue – never thinking that he may have accidentally obtained visual, criminal evidence of a murder.

The climax is a suspenseful, obsessive sequence of the photographer processing and blowing up several pictures from his park visit, and magnifying them larger and larger to poster size.

As tension heightens, he pins the pictures on the wall of his living room – in sequence – giving them life as if they were individual frames in a motion picture. Ultimately, they reveal a riveting possibility. In the film’s finale is another indelible, symbolic image emphasizing the slim line between objective reality and illusion – a group of pantomiming students in white-face playing an invisible game of tennis with non-existent rackets and balls – and audience.

Blowup is a 1966 British-Italian mystery thriller film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni about a fashion photographer, played by David Hemmings, who believes he has unwittingly captured a murder on film. It was Antonioni’s first entirely English-language film. The film also stars Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, John Castle, Jane Birkin, Tsai Chin, Peter Bowles, and Gillian Hills as well as sixties model Veruschka. The screenplay was by Antonioni and Tonino Guerra, with English dialogue by British playwright Edward Bond. The film was produced by Carlo Ponti, who had contracted Antonioni to make three English-language films for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (the others were Zabriskie Point and The Passenger).

The plot was inspired by Julio Cortázar’s short story, “Las babas del diablo” or “The Devil’s Drool” (1959), translated also as “Blow Up” in Blow-up and Other Stories, in turn based on a story told to Cortázar by photographer Sergio Larraín, and by the life of Swinging London photographer David Bailey. The film was scored by jazz pianist Herbie Hancock. Except for the music for the opening and closing title and credit sequences, the music is diegetic, as Hancock noted: “It’s only there when someone turns on the radio or puts on a record.”[6] In the main competition section of the Cannes Film Festival, Blowup won the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film, the festival’s highest honour.

The American release of the counterculture-era film with its explicit sexual content (by contemporary standards) by a major Hollywood studio was in direct defiance of the Production Code. Its subsequent outstanding critical and box office success proved to be one of the final events that led to the final abandonment of the code in 1968 in favour of the MPAA film rating system. In 2012, Blowup was ranked No. 144 in the Sight & Sound critics’ poll of the world’s greatest films.

Directed by: Michelangelo Antonioni
Starring: David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, John Castle, Jane Birkin, Gillian Hills, Peter Bowles, Veruschka von Lehndorff, Julian Chagrin, Claude Chagrin, Susan Brodrick
Screenplay by: Michelangelo Antonioni, Tonino Guerra
Cinematography by: Carlo Di Palma
Film Editing by: Frank Clarke
Costume Design by: Jocelyn Rickards
Art Direction by: Assheton Gorton
Music by: Herbie Hancock
Distributed by: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Release Date: December 18, 1966 (US), March 16, 1967 (UK)