Blow Up

Michealangelo Antonioni, UK, 1966, 111 minutes

Antonioni’s masterpiece of British New Wave cinema set amongst London’s hippest denizens. Thomas, a photographer (David Hemmings) spends his time taking pictures of the loveliest models (spot the Verushka cameo!) in the outlandish fashions of the day. But, rather than a mere exercise in style and technique, Blowup is both a detailed portrait of a certain strata of mod London society and the emerging counterculture, and a satire of that same society. This is a film where irony resides in the gaze, doubly focused by the photographer’s lense. While Thomas enjoys the cachet of being a fashion photographer, as we see in the ménage-a-trois scene, he is also frustrated by the lack of creative scope. When he photographs a group of models, they are so utterly self-absorbed that his insults seem to bounce off right off their glossy faces.

While shooting in an eerily deserted park, Thomas happens upon an embracing couple. When the woman, Jane (Vanessa Redgrave), notices him, she demands he hand over his roll of film. Thomas refuses. It is only after he develops the prints that he notices something in the background of his shots: a body. Thomas obsessively makes increasingly blurry enlargements of the shot of the body in the hope of discovering whether a crime has really been committed. When Jane comes looking for the negatives of herself and her lover, Thomas is drawn even deeper into the mystery.

Review by Sarah Artt
Written for EUFS Programme Spring 2005

The first of Antonioni's three film venture outside his native Italy, Blow Up magnifies the problems inherent in his previous films. Again, one is never sure at which point substance and pretentiousness become distinct, and the whole thing seems to be reduced to a stylistic tour-de-force which overwhelms whatever meaning Antonioni attempted to communicate.

Thomas (David Hemmings) is a fashion photographer and during one of his experimental wanderings in an eerie park in London, he sees and photographs a girl (Vanessa Redgrave) who is accompanied by an old man. In his studio he develops the picture and notices the frightened expression in the girl's face. Further magnification towards the direction the girl is looking in reveals a man with a gun hiding in the bushes...

Antonioni, one has to admit, plays skilfully with the debate as to whether there is an accurate representation of reality or even whether there is such a thing which may be called objective reality. The asymmetries in perception between the human and the photographic eye - the first always subject to distortions caused by emotions - might be taken as comprising the central theme of Antonioni's films. Alienation between people - a favourite theme of Antonioni's repertoire - acquires in Blow Up wider modernist connotations, in a similar fashion to Coppola's The Conversation. And if the overall tone seems familiar it's because it has been taken up by Brian De Palma in Blow Out, a less successful attempt to tackle similar issues.

The slow pace and the understated performances should not inhibit the viewer from acknowledging the strengths of Blow Up, which in fact lie in the atmospheric treatment of the story, as depicted through Carlo Di Palma's delicate photography.

Review by Spiros Gangas
Taken from EUFS Programme 1993-94