BLOW-UP u.k-Italy (1966)

Director Michelangelo Antonioni Producers Carlo Ponti, Pierre Rouve Screenplay Michelangelo Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, Edward Bond Cinematography Carlo Di Palma Music Herbie Hancock, The Yardbirds Cast David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, Veruschka von Lehndorff

Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s first film in English, Blow-Up is a movie of firsts. Regarded as a seminal work of the 1960s it liberalized attitudes towards the depiction of nudity and sexuality in film. Made by MGM, it was the first British movie to depict full-frontal female nudity and in the U.S. the studio created a subsidiary, Premiere Productions, to distribute the film as a way of bypassing Production Code censorship. Not that Blow-Up is all about sex, rather Antonioni’s attempt to portray the cool of London’s Swinging Sixties demands the inclusion of sex, drugs, and rock and roll to be effective. The film is about ways of seeing, and it is apt that it challenges the notion of censorship and what can be viewed by adults. An Italian poster Blow-Up tells the story of a successful fashion photographer, for the movie Thomas (David Hemmings), loosely based on contemporary created by one photographers David Bailey and Terence Donovan. Nihilistic of the masters and misogynistic, Thomas is the ultimate unlikable anti-hero. of Italian film Shooting supermodels like Veruschka von Lehndorff for his job posters, painter Ercole Brini, has satisfies his lust and ignoring the attentions of women like become an iconic Patricia (Sarah Miles) satisfies his ego. But Thomas suffers from a image of post-war cynical ennui about his successful lifestyle and has pretensions Italian cinema.

The 1960s 53 to be seen as an artist, photographing London’s poor in an effort to publish a monograph. His boredom means he abandons a fashion shoot to walk the streets of London. He takes a shot of a couple in a park, one of whom, Jane (Vanessa Redgrave) is alarmed and asks him for the roll of film. Curious as to what it contains, Thomas enlarges the shot and thinks he has captured an image of a murderer and his victim. “Some people are bullfighters, some people are politicians. I’m a photographer.” Thomas

What seems like a murder thriller is so much more as the audience is left to decide what Thomas really saw. They are also asked to question what is really going on in society. Antonioni’s exquisite images of beautiful people suggest a cultural malaise in Britain as perhaps only an outsider can. On top of which his cast features actors Hemming, Redgrave and Miles in the bloom

of youth and a cameo appearance by The Yardbirds, including The image of the Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. Aided by Carlo Di Palma’s model and photographer freewheeling cinematography and an unflinching script he co- mid-shoot sums up wrote with Edward Bond and Tonino Guerra, Antonioni makes the voyeuristic a film that is beautiful to look at and resonates with all that was sexuality of the thought to be avant garde at the time, yet lifts the lid on the film, and was turbulent human emotions experienced beneath its gloss. reproduced using photolithography Enigmatic and haunting, Blow-Up is a film to see—and then for some posters. watch again more closely. CK

54 The 1960s