Blow Up
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Movie Reviews of Blow Up
Movie Review: Essential film genius: Antonioni's 'Blowup.'
Summary: 5 Stars
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
Movie Review: The Significance of the Visible
Summary: 5 Stars
More than any other film that comes to mind, "Blow Up" illustrates the adage distinguishing the novelist from the filmmaker: the former's concern is to make the significant visible whereas the latter's passion is to bring significance to the visible. Little does it matter that the film's protagonist fails in that quest. Antonioni manages to make the search itself so absorbing that the "whodunnit" motif of the narrative is incidental to the journey itself. "Pictures don't lie" is another old bromide being put to the test by this film's unique thematizing of the photographic process itself, and Antonioni's accomplishment is to preserve the spirit if not the letter of the statement. We leave the film believing in the power of the photographed image even if both its meaning and content remain inconclusive.
Watching the film in the theater was a spellbinding and unforgettable experience. Anyone who has seen the director's out-of-control if not disastrous "Zabriskie Point" and subsequently decided to pass up "Blow Up" should definitely reconsider. Just a couple of caveats: the film does, in fact, transfer quite poorly to a small video monitor, bringing excessive attention to dated features of the pop cultural landscape of the late '60's London scene. Moreover, because video cameras are now the everyman's commodity, while cropping, editing, and enlargening images are common practice in modern-day consumer culture, some of the undeniable excitement experienced by David Hemmings with each of his successive blow-ups is bound to seem much more mundane. And perhaps by now we fancy we know more about photography than either Antonioni or Hemmings, especially after the failure of even instant replay to be definitive about whether a touchdown was scored.
Nevertheless, if you have a large screen, some patience and a memory of the promise and challenges of an earlier technology, "Blow Up" still is capable of working at several important levels--as existential philosophy, as postmodern text, as compelling narrative (Hemmings is wonderful), and as a respite from many current overly loud, fractically edited blockbusters that, despite the sound and fury, signify nothing whatsoever.
Movie Review: "The unexamined life is not worth living." Socrates
Summary: 5 Stars
It's the swinging sixties in London, and Thomas is a fashion photographer who has grown weary of his hedonistic existence and finds himself on a quest for something more. By chance he follows a couple in a park, taking pictures of them as they wander and display their affections. Of course, nothing is as it seems and soon that girl will arrive on his doorstep willing to do anything to get the negatives. Has his camera captured an illicit affair? Thomas intentionally gives her the wrong negatives and immediately developes the right ones. Curiosity? Once developed, he thinks he sees something in one of the photos and proceeds to blowup the questionable image. He studies the results, and the more he searches through the pixels the more he begins to see. A dead body? A crime? He asks the girlfriend of an artist who who works adjacent to his studio, "That's the body? It looks like one of Bill's paintings." Earlier in the film we actually see Bill's work and he explains that trying to make sense of the components of art is like "trying to find a clue in a detective story." Thomas has indeed become a detective, suddenly aware of an existence that lurks under the surface of things. An illusive existence . . . imaginary? Everything about this picture questions structure and the idea of reality. Begining with a great Jazz score (the most improvisational of music), we see Thomas indistinquishable from a mass of downtrodden homeless men only to turn the corner and step into a Rolls Royce convertable. Things are not what they seem. A troup of mimes cruises through London pretending to see and interact with things that are not real and when they make a reappearence at the end of the film, playing tennis with imaginary rackets, we can almost see the ball bouncing from one side of the court to the other. In the end one might ask if Thomas really did uncover a murder or was it only imagined? Perhaps this is a question we might just as well ask ourselves concerning our own realities, but once you start questioning things, the answers will inevitably lead to more questions. In this alone there is value. As Socrates said, if we can believe Plato's account, "The unexamined life is not worth living."Movie Review: One of the Greatest Films of All Times!
Summary: 5 Stars
This may be the most emblematic movie to come out of the 1960's.It reduces everything we associate with the Psychedelic 60's...
consciousness expansion, the individualism,
the flamboyance, the hedonism and the self-indulgence... to a single philosophical question: "What is Reality?" and answers it with a resounding: "Who knows?"
David Hemmings plays a successful fashion photographer in "swinging 60's London" by day, who moonlights as an "artiste" in his off-hours. His fashion photography is done in color, his artistic work in black-and-white. One of Antonioni's key themes
is the contrast of the stark, unforgiving play of light and shadow in black and white film with the vivid garishness of color. One day, while shooting off a roll of film in Greene Park, Thomas, our photographer, follows the path of two lovers,
seemingly engaged in an illicit affair. When he develops the pictures and blows them up, he discovers what looks suspiciously like a murder. These suspicions are only exagerrated when the girl in the pictures (Vanessa Redgrave) shows up at his door and tries to seduce him out of the roll of film. Needless to say,
nothing proves to be exactly as it seems. The continuous frustration of expectations, the denial of human responsibility and compassion were, unfortunately, what the 60's came to be all about.
From the rollicking, partying mimes who open and close the picture, to the snake-like seductiveness of Verushka in her photo
shoot, to Yardbirds' guitarist Jeff Beck destroying his guitar in an angry fit near the picture's end, there's a surrealism to everything that's vertiginous. This movie just continually makes your head spin!
My one complaint is that no transfer I have yet seen has managed to restore the lushness and vividness of the original color print. That's a shame, because the greeness of the grass in the scenes in Greene Park is so surreal, it is "psychedelic," and that's essential to what's going on.
Watch this movie and be AMAZED!
"I thought you were supposed to be in Paris."
"I AM in Paris!"
Movie Review: The original "yeah, baby, yeah!"
Summary: 5 Stars
Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow Up" is a definitive critique of the 1960s...much like "Easy Rider", "Pierrot Le Fou" & "Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas". Like most of Antonioni films, the first time you see "Blow Up" you might find it intriguing but a little boring. The second time, you'll find it simply intriguing. By the third and fourth viewing, you'll be completely hooked and savor the careful pacing and Antonioni's masterful command of detail. Every frame, every image, every sparse word spoken is filled with nuance. Ultimately, I feel "Blow Up" is foreshadowing the Love Generation's failure to inspire long-lasting change in the world; while they got high, government conspiracies were transpiring: Pepper Land shadowed by the grassy knoll.
The DVD image is good, the sound decent and as I stated above, the film gets better with repeat viewing...so it's definitely worth buying. With the exception of the campy trailers, the extras are lacking. The commentary by Peter Brunette is especially horrible. How this guy was able to write a book about Antonioni confounds me. The man is such a PC wanker, constantly saying how loathsome the protagonist is (played wonderfully by David Hemmings). As in most writing, the protagonist was an extension of Antonioni; so if Mr. Brunette dislikes such a character, it's a good chance he wouldn't like Antonioni much. And why is Hemmings's character so loathsome? Because he's a talented professional who doesn't have time for imperfection and niceties? Because he's curt with vacuous fashion models? Give me a break. Perhaps Mr. Brunette should write for Ms and leave film criticism to people who aren't so easily offended. It's not like the man had any useful insights; he hardly has anything to say about the film (there's plenty of silence in the commentary) that doesn't get past the obvious. There are numerous scenes that scream for interpretation in which he doesn't offer any whatsoever. It gets quite vexing after awhile...that's why I shut off the commentary after a point.
It's best to let the movie speak for itself.