Blowup | | Cast : | Vanessa Redgrave, David Hemmings | | Director : | Michelangelo Antonioni | | Studio : | Warner Home Video | | Format : | Closed-captioned, Widescreen | | Released Date : | December 18, 1966 | | DVD Released Date : | February 17, 2004 | | Language : | English (Dubbed), English (Original Language), French (Original Language), French (Subtitled), English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled) | | Audience Rating : | Unrated | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | August 01, 2005 | | Summary | David Hemmings International Man of Mystery | Content
 | This is an interesting 1966 "Art Film" that I don't claim to even begin to understand. It has some unique scenes and is fun to look at. Heck, any film with mimes playing tennis is worth at least three stars in my book. The sixties were a weird decade as my trip through the films of the era continues to confirm. |
| Rating | | | Date | July 30, 2005 | | Summary | A Masterpiece...... | Content
| Everything you need to know about film, about the 1960s and about cool is contained within. Time has been kind to this film, unlike many other acclaimed 'masterpieces' of the era and stands as a superb mystery as well as a time-capsule of 60s hip. Too many greta moments to thumbnail here and all are well worth the price of admission. A must have for cinema fans and the casual lover of mystery movies alike. Deserves 10 stars. |
| Rating | | | Date | July 24, 2005 | | Summary | The Incarnation and Withdrawal of a God | Content
| BLOW UP emerged from a short story by Julio Cortazar and returned to literature through its influence on Joseph McElroy's LOOKOUT CARTRIDGE -- but left a larger mark, of course, on two inferior (but still interesting) films, Francis Ford Coppola's THE CONVERSATION and Brian DiPalma's BLOW OUT. (I also detect its presence in DiPalma's SNAKE EYES.)
The film concerns the immanence of meaning -- and meaning's retreat. Early on, the Abstract Expressionist painter tells the central character -- a young, rather misogynistic photographer in swinging London -- that discovering the significance of his canvases is, for him, "like finding a clue in a detective story." The photographer clearly does not expect much meaning from his own work, which deals chiefly in surfaces -- and the highly artificial surfaces of fashion models at that.
And yet meaning appears anyway, stark and startling.
The park in BLOW UP is a kind of mythic space. It is nearly silent, almost empty -- just populated enough to seem uncanny. It is outside the city and outside time. A corpse may lie there, underneath some bushes, and seem eerily irrelevant. Mimes will take over the tennis court. Art can take us to this place, the film implies, but a million distractions will always keep us from grasping its secrets. |
| Rating | | | Date | July 15, 2005 | | Summary | Times they are a-changin ' | Content
| Vanessa Redgrave (* 1937) made her world-wide film-debut in "Blow Up" (1966) with her very slowly and erotically stripped back (as mysterious, murder-hushing Jane) - and she created thereby a long-lasting image. With her special sort of secrecy she built up a profumo-christine-keeler-affair-impression. If one examines Redgraves developing image profile more exactly - alike photographer Thomas (played by David Hemmings) in Michelangelo Antonionis movie is working in the darkroom making blown up photos, then one discovers, that nothing remains as it is in the beginning (and that is the message of "Blow Up" too). In the year 1968 she played among other things the legendary dancer Isadora or the sexually tractable Mrs Codrington (in "The Charge of the Light Brigade"), however 1980 (Playing For Time) she picked out a completely oppositely role: a Jewish survivor of a concentration camp (Julia). The power of pictures is a rapidly changing matter also in the case of Redgrave. This sort of trend-progress encircles the entire identity of an actress, but as a reacting subject with quite strong radiant emittance strength in addition, an actress again can arrange retroacts on the medium profile. It nevertheless surely does not remain without reaction-strength that Vanessa Redgrave strove for roles in films, which were occupied with the cultural heroes of British history so for example with Lord Byron or Churchill. As the sex-crazed, Christ-obsessed Mother Superior fantasising about Oliver Reed in Ken Russell's "The Devils" she won her longstanding disapproval of The Vatican. Visiting Fidel Castro (1962) or Yasser Arafat (1972) made two more different sorts of contracting parties. Finally in the film "If These Walls Could Talk 2" she played a lesbian woman (in the atmosphere around 1961 without any social acceptance), in "Howard's End" (and also in "Little Odessa") we experience Vanessa as a critically ill, death-nearing person (they didn't need to paint the face largely for this role). A way back to the "Blow-up"-striptease-performance surely would not be applicable for her today (image reasons), particularly because she briefly had been busy with lesbian ambitions. Nevertheless she is a mother of two daughters (Natasha and Joely Richardson) and one son (Carlo Nero, from a second partnership). In 1990 she argued around for the Marxist British labour party; she appeared in Sarajevo or donated 2002 a large benefaction, in order to support a Czech, anticommunist person, 2004 she agitated like a British counterpart of the US Heroe Jane Fonda against the Iraq war of the Bush administration. Times they are a-changin ' - however: everything Vanessa Redgrave begins, unquestionably is filled with power and possesses strength emittance ... |
| Rating | | | Date | June 25, 2005 | | Summary | Anonioni shows much and tells little. | Content
| Blow-Up, as the title suggests, is about the pictures. David Hemmings is the photographer putting together a book about the down-and-out in London. He decides to provide contrast for the end of his book by taking some shots in an idylic London park. He sees in the distance Vanessa Redgrave holding an older man in what appears to be an embrace. Hemmings begins photographing them and then is spotted by Redgrave who demands the negatives. Hemmings refuses.
Redgrave shows up later at Hemmings' studio. He gives her what he says are the negatives, but we find out moments later he has kept them and proceeds to develop his pictures.
The closer he looks at the blow-ups of his shots, the more intrigued he becomes with what he sees, which is a gun pointed at Redgraves' lover and then later a grainy shot of what may be a body. Hemmings goes back to the park, finds the body, and then returns home. Later his studio is vandalized and all his pictures are stolen.
This plot line appears thin for a two hour film and many Amazon.com reviewers are bored to death with what they think is a pretentious movie about people impossible to like and a story bereft of action and dialogue.
The Hemmings' character is impossible to like and that is just the point. Director Michelangelo Antonioni is more interested in what Hemmings' camera sees, and that is a world invisible to the naked eye. Hemmings' camera gives us frozen moments in time that are decisive moments in the lives of his characters. Only by looking closely with great patience can we unravel the mystery of life and death played out in a park on a sunny afternoon.
Blow-Up is a great mystery story and the mystery goes deeper than the murder in the park. Can we trust what we think we see? Clearly not. For those who would like to further their understanding of this question, I recommend Akira Kurosawa's great film Rashomon. Can we trust what the camera sees? Perhaps, but not from the long distance lense of Hemming's camera. He needed to go back to the park to confirm what he thought he saw.
Antonioni is a skillful director; he shows much and tells little, and he is careful to give us everything we need to make up our own mind. Our challenge to is see without prejudice, without projecting our own images and perceptions onto the blown-up pictures before our eyes. Highly recommended |
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