Blow-Up (1966)
Blow-Up (1966), directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.
A fashion photographer in Swinging London seems to be enjoying life. He tools around town in his sports Rolls (great moving car camera work!), is mobbed by beautiful women he treats with disdain, buys up whatever props he needs, smokes and drinks what he wants.
Strangely enough, what excites him is stalking a couple in a quiet park and voyeuristicly photographing their encounter. Wait: the woman involved wants that film back. She really wants that film.
Fascinated, he examines blow-ups of the images and discovers something startling: has he accidentally photographed a murder?
One of the most analyzed and written about films of the 1960s, this is when a major studio first ignored the production code and started featuring light nudity, sexual exuberance, dope smoking and general bohemian triumph.
My interests lie more with story than with technique or theory, so I'll make just a few notes:
Fashion modeling and photography in film: that would be an interesting history. All I know about that world is what I have seen in movies, and it always seems superficial and unpleasant. The overwrought shooting session with the famous model seems to be near the center of what we imagine it is like.
A funny bit: the crowd fighting over a broken guitar neck. When it is tossed in the street it is just a bit of rubbish. People want it only when other people want it. (The band is The Yardbirds with young Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck).
We have a lot of unexplained plot points, but the one that really doesn't work for me is the character played by Sarah Miles. She must have some back story but I have no clue as to what it might be.
Freely quoted in De Palma's Blow Out (1981), where a sound engineer combines audio with still photos to solve a murder. Our photographer does the same thing, arranging a set of stills to try to recreate a moving reality, almost reinventing motion pictures.
The famous ending with the invisible tennis match staged by the Insane Mime Posse: what it means to me. Our photographer has always been between worlds: traditional straight society where one is supposed to care about a murdered man, and the new alternative culture of sex, drugs, and do your own thing, where no one cares about anything (that the rest of us understand). When he begins to hear the non-existent tennis ball, he has crossed over. The End.
Available on Blu-ray from Criterion. A have a film scholar's commentary track from an old DVD which is not very valuable, often just narrating the story. Sometimes he says "This part is mysterious" or "People disagree about this".
