Blow Up

MOVIE DESCRIPTION:

Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni's first English-language production was also his only box office hit, widely considered one of the seminal films of the 1960s. Thomas (David Hemmings) is a nihilistic, wealthy fashion photographer in mod "Swinging London." Filled with ennui, bored with his "fab" but oddly-lifeless existence of casual sex and drug use, Thomas comes alive when he wanders through a park, stops to take pictures of a couple embracing, and upon developing the images, believes that he has photographed a murder. Pursued by Jane (Vanessa Redgrave), the woman who is in the photos, Thomas pretends to give her the pictures, but in reality, he passes off a different roll of film to her. Thomas returns to the park and discovers that there is, indeed, a dead body lying in the shrubbery: the gray-haired man who was embracing Jane. Has she murdered him, or does Thomas' photo reveal a man with a gun hiding nearby? Antonioni's thriller is a puzzling, existential, adroitly-assembled masterpiece. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide

DVD FEATURES:

• Region: 1
• Number of Discs: 1
• Audio: Dolby Digital Mono
• Screen: Soft-Matted WSE for 16x9 TV
• Subtitle: Spanish, French, English
• Features:
  • cc Commentary by "The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni" author Peter Brunette
  • Music-only audio track
  • Two theatrical trailers
  • Languages: English & Français
  • Subtitles: English, Français, & Español

AWARDS

• Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

•     Nominated Best Director - 1966 (Michelangelo Antonioni)
•     Nominated Best Original Screenplay - 1966 (Edward Bond, Tonino Guerra, Michelangelo Antonioni)

• British Academy of Film and Television Arts

•     Nominated Best British Film - 1967 (Michelangelo Antonioni)

• Cannes Film Festival

•     Won International Grand Prix - 1967

• Hollywood Foreign Press Association

•     Nominated Best Foreign Film - English Language - 1966

• National Society of Film Critics

•     Won Best Director - 1966 (Michelangelo Antonioni)
•     Won Best Picture - 1966

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Cast:

  
       David Hemmings - Thomas
       Vanessa Redgrave - Jane
       Sarah Miles - Patricia
       Peter Bowles - Ron
       John Castle - Painter

• Director:

  Michelangelo Antonioni

• Producer:

  Carlo Ponti

• Screenwriter:

  Michelangelo Antonioni, Edward Bond, Tonino Guerra

• Cinematographer:

  Carlo Di Palma

• Composer (Music Score):

  Herbie Hancock, The Yardbirds

• Editor:

  Frank Clarke

• Production Designer:

  Assheton Gorton

REVIEW:

• A masterpiece of 1960s art-house cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up is a dizzying exploration of images, appearances, and existence amid the mod glamour of Swinging '60s London. Antonioni took his signature influence of existentialist philosophy, seen in such earlier films as L'avventura (1960), La notte (1961), The Eclipse (1962), and Red Desert (1964), and pushed it to full-scale reflexivity: instead of just questioning existence, he questioned the nature of reality itself. Just as Thomas blows up his photographs until they are pure abstraction, Antonioni uses deliberately odd framing, expressionistic use of color, and an extremely long telephoto lens, which crushes depth from the image, to make the film look both striking and opaque. Thomas himself is adrift in this world: absorbed in the surfaces of things yet unable to perceive intrinsic beauty, he finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish objective reality from the simulacra of advertising and fashion photography. By the end of the film, he is no longer certain if distinctions among image, illusion, and reality even exist. The film's brilliantly dense philosophical underpinnings aside, its Rear Window-esque plot makes it a compelling piece of work. Moreover, it features some of the most memorable sequences in cinema: the pantomime tennis match at the end of the film, the naughty ménage à trois on purple paper, and the almost farcically erotic photo shoot at the beginning of the film between model Veruschka and Thomas with his oversized camera lens. Blow Up proved extremely influential on younger generations of filmmakers; and it was later echoed by both Francis Ford Coppola in The Conversation (1974) and Brian De Palma in Blow Out (1981). ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide

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