Amazon.com essential video: This 1966 masterpiece by Michelangelo Antonioni (The Passenger) is set in the heady atmosphere of Swinging London, and stars David Hemmings as an unsmiling fashion photographer hooked on ephemeral meaning attached to anything: art, sex, work, relationships, drugs, events. When a real mystery falls into his lap, he probes the evidence for some reliable truth, but finds it hard to reckon with. Vanessa Redgrave plays an enigmatic woman whose desperation to cover something up only seems like one more phenomenon in Hemmings's disinterested purview. This is one of the key films of the decade, and still an unsettling and lasting experience. --Tom Keogh
Oh Pleeeeeeze! This mod movie is a real "get over yourself" kinda film. I felt like I needed a beret & an espresso just to watch it. Sulky behavior, models in go-go boots and cigarettes does not a movie-make!
Misguided censorship ruins the DVD Michelangelo Antonioni's view of Britain in the 1960's was a groundbreaking film that appeared at a time of turmoil and change in the lifestyles and mores of the Western world. Britain ruled supreme in pop music (Beatles, Stones, Animals) and in fashion (Mary Quant, Twiggy, Carnaby Street). The jazz stylings of Herbie Hancock were used as the soundtrack for the film, but the live Rock performance in the film was performed by the post-Clapton Yardbirds with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. To reflect the London fashion scene, Antonioni used the German model Verushka in a simulated photo shoot that has been called the sexiest scene in film history.
(As an aside, Verushka's real name was Vera and her father was one of the German army officers who attempted to assassinate Hitler in 1944; with the failure of the plot, he was executed and his family was interred in labor camps.)
When I first viewed this film in 1967, I was enormously impressed. The photography was brilliant and the audio was the first "surround-sound" I had ever encountered. (During the park scenes, I kept looking over my shoulder to see what birds had gotten into the theater!) When I again saw this film about 1975, it looked dated and out of fashion. Now, more than 40 years later, I see that it is a true period film that reflects much of the character and thinking of the time.
David Hemming's character in the movie (known as "Thomas") is not satisfied with his success as a fashion photographer and wants to become a "reality/documentary" photographer in the genre of Dorthea Lange or Henri Cartier-Bresson. To this end, he pretends to be a street person and spends a night in a doss house, a sort of cheap barracks accommodation with shared sleeping and bath facilities. Thomas sneaks his camera into this establishment in a paper bag and surreptitiously photographs the other guests as they shower and dress in the morning. The clicking and whirring sounds of his camera and the stop-action showing the photographs that were produced constituted the opening scenes of "Blow-Up". Thomas intends to use these and other such photographs in a book that he hopes will establish him as a "real" photographer. For some incomprehensible reason, this entire opening sequence has been deleted from the Turner/MGM DVD release. Instead, the movie opens with Thomas leaving the doss house in the morning, after the original opening photography sequence. In the original movie, Thomas then returns to his parked Rolls-Royce, places his camera in the glove box and drives away. We viewers are surprised; is he stealing the car? This scene has also been deleted. In this DVD release, he suddenly and inexplicably appears, already driving the Rolls down the street.
With the deletion of the movie's opening scenes, it is difficult to make sense of some of the later scenes in the film. At one point, Thomas meets with his publisher (an early appearance by Peter Bowles, later known for his performances in "Rumpole of the Bailey", "To the Manor Born" and "The Irish RM") and reviews the photographs he had taken at the doss house. This is the only brief chance viewers of the DVD have to see anything of the opening scenes.
Those opening scenes are important because they set the theme of the film. Thomas first appears as a down-and-out man, but turns out to be far from it. Viewers are put on notice that they can never be sure what is real and what is make-believe. This continues through the film's final scene, where the make-believe of the mimes' tennis game becomes more real than the murder that Thomas accidentally photographed.
The DVD is marred by additional deletions. Thomas develops the roll of film he shot in the park, studies the photos and sees something. (We viewers never really see what it is.) He makes a series of larger and progressively blurrier enlargements. Finally, he makes his largest blow-up, examines it, and instead of hanging it out in the open as he had the others, he conceals it between a pair of cabinets. This seems a fairly long sequence in the original film and it is only later that we learn of its significance. Of course, the name of the film comes from this scene. I can only assume that Turner/MGM felt this sequence was boring and deleted most of it from the DVD. When Thomas later finds his studio has been robbed, we don't even know what was taken or why he has this one enlargement left. There are other odd little deletions here and there in the DVD; perhaps there were some bad frames in the original film from which the DVD was made. When I purchased the DVD, I expected the half-second flash of full-frontal nudity of the 17-year old blonde actress to be deleted; it was sensational at the time, but not really a critical element of the movie. What I did not expect was the evisceration of the basic theme of the film by the deletion of the important opening scenes.
I might describe this DVD as a "Bowdlerised" edition, but perhaps "Turnerized" may be more correct. The DVD includes commentary by Peter Brunette, an academician. author and presumed expert on the films of Michelangelo Antonioni. I have carefully listened to his commentary twice through, and can only conclude that he never saw the original film. His comments refer only to this DVD edition. At one point in his commentary, Mr. Brunette notes that the clothes worn by Thomas at the doss house mysteriously disappear. Yes they do, because of another nonsensical deletion!
I would not normally recommend a DVD with so many deletions, but it seems that this flawed DVD is the only version of the film that is currently available. To see it in this form is better than to not see it at all. I give it 3 stars instead of the 4+ that the original film deserves.
Awesome and inspiring! The passion and art of photography are melded in this film so well. David Hemmings is brilliant. What a player, sorry I meant actor ;-)
Mind you, things aren't always what they seem in this film. Watch the film to know what I mean!
Top movie! 5 stars.
Antonioni rocks Blowup was Michelangelo Antonioni's first English language film, made in Great Britain, in 1966, and it's a flat-out great film, at a crisp 111 minutes. It was nominated for two Academy Awards; Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay- by Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, and Edward Bond- adapted from the short story Las Babas Del Diablo, by Argentine writer Julio Cortazar, and won the National Society Of Film Critics title as best film of 1967. Having first seen the two Hollywood films most influenced by it- Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, in 1974, and Brian De Palma's Blowout, in 1981, I did not know quite what to expect, since the former is also a great film- arguably Coppola's best, and the latter is a merely solid Hollywood thriller. Blowup is not only a great work of art, but a great work of philosophy. It is arguably as great as Antonioni's earlier Italian language masterpiece, La Notte, and the film caused a bit of a scandal upon its release, both for its showing casual sex and drug usage, and for its female nudity. Of course, forty years later, this all seems a bit silly, as tame as the scenes really are to the modern eye. The story follows an unnamed photographer (David Hemmings) who may or may not have inadvertently captured a murder on film, which may or may not involve a mysterious young woman (Vanessa Redgrave) who later visits the photographer in his studio, ready to have sex with him to retrieve the photos before he develops them. Both of the main characters are never named in the film, despite numerous reviews that call the two main characters Thomas and Jane. In watching the film twice- with and without commentary, I found zero in the way of evidence to support this claim of their being named, so I take it as one of those bits of information that gets repeated ad nauseam by bad critics until accepted, despite its being untrue. Possibly there were press kits that named the two characters, but they are not named within, nor in the credits. Yet, this very lack of names only makes the film all the more interesting, for not knowing the truth of these two characters only heightens their mysteriousness, and the events that ensnare the both of them. The photographer even sardonically comments in the film, when he's about to lay two girls- or `birds', `What's the use of a name?' Hemmings is a famed photographer whom we first see emerging from a London flophouse, just one of a crowd- not unlike the Carlo Battisti character in Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D., where he's gotten some great and intimate photos of the poor, which he plans on using in a book. He posed as a poor guy to get them, yet hops into his convertible wood paneled Rolls Royce. We then see him rather misogynistically mistreat a high fashion and clearly pre-anorexia nervosa anorexic supermodel (Verushka) in the grotesque Twiggy vein- whom, in a famed scene, he erotically `mounts', as he photographs her from above as she lies on the floor, five models who pose behind dark glass screens, and the two `birds' in pink and green pantyhose. We also find out he lives next door to an Abstract Expressionist painter, Bill (John Castle), and his girlfriend, Patricia (Sarah Miles), whom he has an unspoken attraction to, and who seems to return his feelings. In describing his paintings, Bill says he has no intent when he starts a painting, and that meaning only comes later. This is a key to the film, or at least the viewer's warning on how to take what they see....Others have laid bare the plot. Like Akira Kurosawa's classic film Rashomon, Blowup works on many levels, yet allows us to participate in the interpretation to an even greater extent than Rashomon. Photographs can lie- just ask AP photographer Eddie Adams, who, a few years later took the infamous photograph of a Vietnamese police commander shooting a Vietcong prisoner in the head. What was not shown was that the prisoner had killed many innocent people. By going beyond being a mere whodunit, and engaging the very the meaning of meaning, itself, Blowup (and it is Blowup, not Blow-Up, as on the DVD cover) illustrates the differences between the writer and the visual artist. The former elicits significance from things that need to be seen, while the latter does so from that already seen. In truth, there could be plausible and non-criminal reasons for all that happens in the film, and only the dull life of Hemmings spurs him on to imbue significance. That we can never know the real truth within the film is the real truth as to why this film never loses its hold in repeated viewings. On that score, no comment is needed.
Stylish Antonioni I couldn't find a Meaningful Title for this review but I don't think Antonioni would mind. I loved his Italian trilogy in black and white (La Notte, L'Aventurra and L'Eclisse ) (excuse probable faulty spelling)and stood in line to see Blow Up when it hit New York in the 60's. Wow...Antonioni in English and in color! I loved it but I hadn't a clue about what it meant. To me it was surface, color, style and glamour. I was young and arty and impressionable.
Now I'm seeing it again and, of course, the stuff that made it so cool back then--sex, drugs and rock and roll--are funny and quaint. But the film is still so good. I still don't worry my head about what it means--like a Matisse--I personally just enjoy it. I take it in and it feels good and it affects me. Later, I may have some insight about its meaning. It is so good that it has to have something besides surface beauty.
Antonioni had his finger on the happening scene at the time. It was a time of huge cultural change and one can read lots of books about what that meant. He just went there and shot this. It's a snap shot, maybe, of a moment in time--a very nice snap shot. People can look at it, at their leisure, maybe and figure out what it means to them.
I think A. is an artist who escapes being overly arty. Yes, the mimes were annoying but that's because we've seen them copied over and over since then--at the time they were fresh and had some sort of meaning--oops--there's that word again--meaning.
I didn't like it as much as the 3 Italian black and whites but I think I liked it better than Zabriskie Point. Maybe he knew his own culture best.
I do remember that, after this film hit, you couldn't walk around New York without some young guy photographing you. I remember falling asleep on the grass in Central Park, only to wake up, finding a guy's lens right about six inches from my face. The David Hemmings character who was supposed to be shallow bred a whole generation of wannabe sexy guy photographers.
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