Blow Up | David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave | Grim vision, beautiful images

Blow Up | David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave | Essential film genius: Antonioni's 'Blowup.'

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Blow Up

	Blow Up David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave Warner Home Video, 2004 average customer review:based on 157 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Grim vision, beautiful images

Someone changed the title music, to begin with. If you leave the menu on your screen and listen, you will hear the original title music, a brief rock interlude followed by a wistful jazz piano. The strident, cacaphonous trumpet you hear under the titles is the wrong music. -- If Blowup looks and feels different from the four Antonioni films that preceded it, one reason may be that Antonioni used an English editor, Frank Clarke (uncredited). The pace of the movie is far faster than what a viewer of L'Eclisse or La Notte would expect. -- Critics and the public are correct in viewing Antonioni as a dark pessimist about human nature. He sees us as sadly unequipped for the challenges of reality, relationships, moral judgment, etc. The theme of the movie is how easily the photographer is distracted from the serious business at hand, i.e. the apparent murder captured by his camera. He is no match for the reality before him, and drifts from one diversion to the next. The wonderful scene of the Yardbirds playing to a catatonic audience, and our hero coming away with the worthless trophy, sums up the director's view of him. But the key scene of the movie is when the photographer, suspecting the murder, leaves his studio without his camera, finds the body in the park, can't photograph it, and returns to the studio to find that all the prints and negatives of the event have been stolen in his absence. -- Antonioni invited the debate about whether anything at all happened -- the murder, the photographs, the scene in the park, etc. -- by having the imaginary tennis ball at the end of the film begin to make plocking noises, and by having the photographer disappear. Today the question of reality seems far less pertinent than the shallowness of the photographer [who may also be the artist, according to some] and his inability to confront the real in an adult, responsible way. But it can be argued that if human perception is so skewed by selfish concerns and shallow desires, the human race never really perceives a real world at all. Only the next pleasure, the next gratification, the next need or project. The human world we see around us, colored by war, famine, violence, and the colossal indifference of man to his fellow man, may be a world built by creatures who do not have a reality. Only a stubborn need to be safe, to be blind. Possibly this is the sense of those last troubling images.

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Essential film genius: Antonioni's 'Blowup.'

The world lost one of its greatest film directors recently. Known for his radical narrative style, Italian film genius Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007) depicted the alienation of man in the modern world in his powerful films. His films typically pondered existential questions of mortality, loneliness, emptiness, and moral decadence. While his quintessential film, L'Avventura - Criterion Collection (1960), earned Antonioni international recognition--exemplifying his film aesthetics of slow pacing, spare plot, a narrative structure that relies upon a series of apparently disconnected events, and a theme of spiritual isolation in a world obssessed with material wealth--it was his first English language film, Blowup (1966), that brought Antonioni major success.

Blowup is about the reliability of memory. Inspired by Julio Cortázar's short story, "Las Babas del Diablo," Blowup tells story of a mod London photographer, Thomas (David Hemmings) who, in the course of a single day, discovers he may have inadvertently preserved evidence of a murder while taking photos of two lovers in a park, a murder which may or may not involve an enigmatic woman, Jane (Vanessa Redgrave), who later visits him in his studio desperately seeking the film. Once the film is developed, blowups (enlargements) of the grainy photos seem to reveal a body. Or do they? Upon returning to the park without his camera, Thomas finds the body, but the film, pictures, and body vanish while he attempts to find a witness. Like L'avventura, Blowup is an unsolved mystery, so don't expect a typical Hollywood ending. Throughout the film, there is a sense of ennui amidst a swinging 1960s culture of fashion, pop music, marijuana, and easy sex.

The film includes celebrity cameo appearances by Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck playing together as The Yardbirds, and Monty Pythoner Michael Palin in a crowd scene. Blowup was also the first British film to depict full frontal female nudity.

Hopefully the Criterion Collection will add Blowup to its catalog, digitally remastering the film and enhancing the sound quality. Highly recommended

G. Merritt

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Blow-Up

Antonioni's existential mystery scandalized some in the 1960s with its cool, casually erotic atmosphere of sex and drugs, but still made a sizeable dent at the box office. In addition to the film's central puzzle--was there a homicide or not?--Hemmings himself is a kind of cipher, playing a detached, unsmiling artist bored with his decadent life. With its mod flavorings and occasional surrealist touches--like a pantomime tennis game--"Blow-Up" is an intriguing, unconventional thriller that makes you question the nature of reality and illusion.

Absolutely Great Film, absolutely worthless commentary.

It's tragic, not giving this disc 5 stars. The film deserves more then 5 stars. But the commentary, is so unbelievably poor, it's almost beyond belief. It's as if this person hasn't seen it in a while, and just gave some worthless criticisms as he watched it for the second time.
I've had discussions with friends while watching this film that would be 100 times more interesting, and enlightening.
Like someone else suggested, please Criterion, do a serious release of this phenomenal film.

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Antonioni gem

With yesterday's death of Antonioni, I feel compelled to say something about this film. Its 1966 release in the U.S. was an adrenalin rush, its plot captivating, its mood seductive. It made a star of Hemmings, not to mention the model Verushka. It caused a frat brother watching it to shout, "There it is!" Watch it and figure out what he was shouting at. Watch it and ask yourself, "What's the significance of the number 3?" This film created lively discussion in my college English class upon its release. A must-see Antonioni film.

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