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Blow Up
Blow Up
Actors: David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, John Castle, Jane Birkin
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Genres: Indie & Art House, Drama, Mystery & Suspense
UR     2004     1hr 51min

Taking photographs of a couple making love proves deadly when the photographer enlarges the image and discovers murder. The film and pictures are stolen from his studio and the body vanishes. In this elegant balance of d...  more »

     

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Movie Details

Actors: David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, John Castle, Jane Birkin
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Creators: Carlo Di Palma, Michelangelo Antonioni, Carlo Ponti, Pierre Rouve, Edward Bond, Julio Cortázar, Tonino Guerra
Genres: Indie & Art House, Drama, Mystery & Suspense
Sub-Genres: Indie & Art House, Classics, Mystery & Suspense
Studio: Warner Home Video
Format: DVD - Widescreen,Anamorphic - Closed-captioned,Dubbed,Subtitled
DVD Release Date: 02/17/2004
Original Release Date: 12/18/1966
Theatrical Release Date: 12/18/1966
Release Year: 2004
Run Time: 1hr 51min
Screens: Widescreen,Anamorphic
Number of Discs: 1
SwapaDVD Credits: 1
Total Copies: 0
Members Wishing: 30
MPAA Rating: Unrated
Languages: English, French, French
Subtitles: English, Spanish, French
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Member Movie Reviews

K. K. (GAMER)
Reviewed on 10/1/2022...
This had lots going on with the story line and takes you into the studio and other areas of a photographers. A young Vanessa Redgrave is in this if you are a fan!
1 of 1 member(s) found this review helpful.

Movie Reviews

The Significance of the Visible
Samuel Chell | Kenosha,, WI United States | 01/10/2005
(5 out of 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."
Very stylistic and avant-garde, but still makes sense. Great
EGD | 10/15/1999
(5 out of 5 stars)

"Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film adaptation of Julio Cortazar's "Blow-Up," perhaps Antonioni's best known work, represents a truly great adaptation of a short story, though the film on its own still stands as a great artistic acheivement. It is a remarkable example of an international work (an Italian director working with a British cast), a project which can easily go awry. David Hemings and Vanessa Redgrave both give excellent performances, but most important, it is a highly stylized somewhat avant-garde work, but in the end, the story has direct meaning and still makes perfectly clear sense- a true rarity. "Blow-Up's" value as a literary adaptation is only one virtue the film possesses, but this virtue includes several positive aspects. "Blow-Up" centers around a photographer named Robert, who, while walkng through the park one afternoon, photographs two lovers from a distance. The woman furiously demands that Robert hand over the negatives. Instead, he returns to hs studio to develop them. After studyng the photographs carefully, Robert discovers that the woman, working with a third firgure situated behind the hedge, is murdering the young man. As he studies the photos, Robert is watching an actual murder take place, but he is powerless to stop it, because it is only taking place in the photographs. Here, the line separating reality and imagination has become completely blurred. As events unfold, the photographer comes to realize that the entire sequence may have only taken place in his head. The recurring theme of both the short story and the film is that people ultimately construct their own reality. Cortazar helped establsh this theme from the beginning by writing his story alternately in first person and in third person, sometimes in singular, sometimes in plural, the implication being that the narrator himself isn't even certain whether or not any of this actually took place. In his film adaptation, Antonioni took what was represented as a few short scenes in the short story, and integrated his own material, bringing the film to a reasonable running time. The impressive part of this is that the integrated material, while completely fabricated by the filmmaker, still manages to make itself relevant by being in compliance with the story's main theme. The mime troupe is the most interesting of these additions. They appear in the beginning, their only apparent purpose to create havoc in the city. Though in the end, it is the mime troupe who make the film's theme most apparent. While playing a mock game of tennis, the mimes knock the "ball" out of the court. Robert goes to retrieve it for them. He bends over, picks up an imaginary ball, and throws it back on the court. The camera stays on Robert as he watches them play, and slowly, we begin to hear the sound of a tennis ball being bounced back and forth. Once again, Robert has immersed himself in the reality of his imagination, so to speak. Antonioni, an absolute master of sound control, pulls this effect off as no other director could have. The short story's theme of imagination and reality could so easily have been lost on film, since film is by its nature a third person limited storytelling medium. Antonioni's uses of sound, as in all of his movies, is truly astounding, and he uses this medium very effectively to enter Robert's personal reality. This is perhaps the greatest genius of the film adaptation."
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder...
Samuel Chell | 03/06/2002
(5 out of 5 stars)

"Ever since I first saw this movie in the late 60's, it seemed clear to me that the whole picture was not really about the veracity of the crime that the photographer supposedly shot, but rather about the unreality of the life of the mod world, and by extension of the pop world as a whole. The two different chromatic tones used by Antonioni to depict the real life, as represented by the flop house, and the illusory pop world, the main theme of the movie, are indicative of the contrasting realities portrayed in the film. Hunger, poverty, old age, diseases, and dead are painted in subdued mate tones. On the other hand, the harlequins, mimes, drugs parties, rock concerts and other happenings populated by those zombies that represent the pop culture, their unreality notwithstanding, are filmed with bright fluorescent colors. These specimens of what now is considered the "beautiful people", are empty of true emotions. And just by chance, to one of its members, the photographer, the opportunity to escape from that unreal world is offered in the form of the photographing of a murder, without meaning to. Confronted with the absolute truth, death, this superficial human being does not know how to behave. That surreal world to which he belongs has ingrained so deeply into his soul, that instead of behaving like a normal person would do by going to the police, he instead unconsciously invents as many circuitous, roundabouts ways as possible to avoid the confrontation of that most real of truths: death. So that is why, after realizing that the corpse has disappeared, he circumambulates aimlessly by the park. And when asked by the mime to return the illusory tennis ball (that is, to reinsert himself anew in the illusory mod or fashion world) he decides to comply, having lost for ever the opportunity to be a true human being. And that is why the unreal tennis ball starts to sound in the final seconds of the movie.
What makes this film a classical masterpiece, besides the formal and structural techniques employed by "el maestro" Antonioni, is his depiction of the banal, sophomoric reality of the mod and pop world. And all banality of that world depicted in the film is as true today as in the 60's (just take a look at the frantic and pathetic lives of all those soulless Hollywood stars).
To say that the film has not aged well just because the white jeans that Hemmings wears are today demodé, is like saying that Battleship Potemkin is an anachronism because the Odessa steps scene sequence has been surpassed by Brian De Palma in The Untouchables. Simply put, classics by definition can not be dated. By the way, Blow-Up is based in a short history by Julio Cortazar("Las babas del diablo"), and has nothing to do with the Zapruder film, whatsoever.
As to some resemblance to the Austin Power movies I can not attest one way or the other, because life is too short to spend two hours seeing such stupid, silly movies (or Titanic, or Gladiator, or Shakespeare In Love, or Pearl Harbor, for that matter).
The jazz score throughout the most appealing scenes and the ominous wind in the park are employed in a masterly way. If any film deserves to be edited in DVD, this is it."