Editorial Review:Description: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 deciet and trickery, the photographer must question the reality of what he has actually seen.
Amazon.com essential video:This 1966 masterpiece by Michelangelo Antonioni (
The Passenger) is set in the heady atmosphere of Swinging London, and stars David Hemmings as an unsmiling fashion photographer hooked on ephemeral meaning attached to anything: art, sex, work, relationships, drugs, events. When a real mystery falls into his lap, he probes the evidence for some reliable truth, but finds it hard to reckon with. Vanessa Redgrave plays an enigmatic woman whose desperation to cover something up only seems like one more phenomenon in Hemmings's disinterested purview. This is one of the key films of the decade, and still an unsettling and lasting experience.
--Tom Keogh
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Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
-
Save your time and money.
This movie, which was considered terribly trendy and profound when first released, doesn't date well at all. The story of a fashion photographer who thinks he's witnessed a murder in a park is much less than meets the eye.
There are holes in the plot as big as the Grand Canyon -- for example, when the photog returns to the park, thinking he may find a body there, he doesn't take a camera with him! And when he drops in on a rock concert, the audience is sitting absolutely still, like so many statues -- this is supposed to tell us something about alienation, or whatever.
The film seems interminable, but it finally does end --- with the famous tennis scene, which is played by mimes, without rackets or a ball (insert joke here). Like the rest of the movie, it's pretentious hooey.
The commentary track is almost as bad. There is a great deal of talk about illusion vs. reality, and Antonioni's use of color, and whether the script is politically correct, and the artist's function in society, and on, and on, and on.
The sequence that gives the film its name -- the blow up of pictures taken of what may have been a killing -- is skillfully done, but, like almost everything else in this movie, it goes on too long.
Viewed now, this film, which caused such a sensation in its day, is a huge disappointment.
Rating: 
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3 stars out of 4
The Bottom Line:
A film in which not much really happens, Blow-Up is sometimes slow and certainly not for everyone; that being said, however, it's an interesting look into the mind of a apathetic man who suddenly finds something worthy of his interest, and then is left to wonder if it was ever there at all.
Rating: -
Hitchcockian Visions on Acid
The first time I viewed Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup (1966), the movie was halfway through and I was utterly confused. Still, I was intrigued by the contrast between the flat black-and-white of the protagonist's photos and the bold colors of his wage-earning fashionista world. However, upon a second viewing of Blowup this past weekend -- thanks to the invaluable TCM cable channel -- I discovered something new: a wonderful, cruel irony in the action of the main character blowing up his b&ws. Enlarging his prints to the extent of producing disjointed moré patterns, he becomes ever more puzzled by a bizarre mystery that disturbs his jaded life. It's, like, a totally Hitchcockian experience.
In Blowup, it's as though the protagonist played by David Hemmings channels Jimmy Stewart's character, L.B. Jefferies, from Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. He carries out his photographic skills with more pizzazz than Jefferies -- OK, unfair comparison, as the latter was confined to a wheelchair and one window, creating a claustrophobic sensation. Hemmings' character (unnamed in Blowup) zips around in fresh, open air with and without his Rolls, but his mind is no less captive than Jefferies'. What the two voyeurs have in common, besides being photographers, is that they're prisoners of their anxiety and boredom. And their only relief from urban ennui is playing PI for the day.
Part of the thrill in viewing Blowup, as in Rear Window, is slipping into the uncomfortable position of voyeur and feeling one's accelerating heartbeat provide the score for the suspenseful scenes. Slightly sadistic, if not masochistic, the viewer partly wishes that these Peeping Toms would trip up and just call the police for goodness sake. Not only are both L.B. Jefferies and Hemmings' protagonist amateur sleuths, but they have reckless regard for risking their lives. As Jefferies, binoculars in hand, learned a decade earlier in Rear Window, the main character in Blowup finds his magnifying glass pointless as he's faced with the unknown -- that which cannot be seen but indeed can be intuited. Think of that classic image of the young/old lady: If you stare long and hard enough, you perceive what you want. Call it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As I watched Hemmings' photographer examining certain elements of his "blowups," immediately my mind turned to certain scenes in Rear Window where Stewart sees what *could be* evidence of a crime already committed. In both films, however, the viewer isn't privy to the facts of the case and, thus, doesn't know *if* a crime was committed. And in both films, the elements of time and lighting are other, uncredited characters.
During my recent viewing of Blowup, I relished in the realm of illusion symbolized by the film's vivid colors and the use of drugs (including nicotine) as props to reinforce the illusion. Not that I have ever taken an illegal drug in my life, but this second time around watching Blowup gave me the feeling that Antonioni was taking me on an acid-laced journey. The beautiful part, baby, is throughout the film I connected with the metaphysical crisis that Hemmings' antihero experiences as an artist in need of a self-assessment of his worth as an adult human being.
After vicariously suffering through his mental defrag while he deconstructs each chunk of a photographed mystery, I thirsted for visual relief. I welcomed Antonioni's mini-masterpieces of distraction, especially the well-edited, living-color orgy sequence that put me in a "Crystal Blue Persuasion" mood (un-huh). My pupils dilated from mobile colors in the forms of female models tumbling with the main character as he removes their costumes within the contours of purple paper. Then there's the iconic scene of the photographer trapping a writhing model beneath him while he captures her ecstatic expressions seconds of frame at a time. Progressive jazz courtesy of Herbie Hancock and his ensemble transform a curt and fleeting mystery lady (played by Vanessa Redgrave) into literally a smoking woman. Remarkably, Redgrave pulls off an optical illusion, recalling Anouk Aimee in her role as the widow, Anne, in another iconic film of 1966: Un Homme et Une Femme (A Man and A Woman). Of course, Redgrave's dramatic virtuosity is responsible for evoking the sultry, pouty mod-girl mannerisms that Mme. Aimee displayed so exquisitely in the aforementioned French New Wave film by Claude Lelouch.
The most delicious distraction for this voyeur, er, viewer, was one that provided insight into the Blowup protagonist's solitude. It's a moment that magnifies his alienation, his existence that's more stripped-down than mere loneliness. For him, it occurs outside of his fashion photography sphere. I'm referring, here, to the scene in which he encounters his painter friend, Ron (portrayed by John Castle), copulating with his girlfriend, Patricia (portrayed by Sarah Miles). The photographer's intense gaze locks onto Patricia's rapturous one while she squirms beneath a bright duvet. In a risqué scene -- by 1966 standards -- she moans through a climax that could be authentic or fake in keeping with the film's shifting, deceptive sensibilities. It's the one moment in the film where I come close to sympathizing with Hemmings' character because his puppy dog countenance captures the dumbfounded expression of unrequited love. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the absurd subtext of Ron's invisibility within the emotional space created by the photographer and Patricia's adulterous illusion.
Blowup is an addictive flick located at the intersection of minimalist thriller and surreal character study. That's this layperson's compliment to the late great Italian filmmaker Michaelangelo Antonioni. In future viewings I'll delight in the film's visual diversions from everyday, black-and-white existential angst. The virtual walk-through in the photographer's duplex alone is a hippie trip from a safe distance. After nearly a half-century since Blowup's release, it's still not every artist who can afford an interior designer to infuse his or her vain existence with a groovy dose of mad, mod colors.
Should Blowup not appear on your cable lineup for months or years to come, you might want to satisfy your desire for a vicarious metaphysical trip -- one with a psychedelic detour -- and get the DVD here on Amazon.com. Advice from the cool at heart: Don't dwell on whether there's a theme. Just dig it, man.
Rating: 
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Very painful
Wow....I don't know what to say. I read about this moving in a photography magazine as I am an amateur photographer so I thought I would check it out. After seeing 4 star ratings at Amazon and reading good reviews I purchased the video.
The movie was quickly boring but I kept waiting for something to happen, it had to since it was rated pretty good. I next found myself wanting to just turn it off and do something useful but again since the rating was good I had to continue to see the end.
If you want to watch a guy run around just taking pictures all of the time then this is for you. This had to have been the worst 2 hours and $15 I have ever spent in my life......do not buy or watch this movie.
Rating: -
Soundtrack Ruins Great Film
I saw this film when it was released in theaters and its power has stuck with me for over 40 years. I was thrilled when it found out it had been released on DVD. Unfortunately, the soundtrack is so awful that it ruines an otherwise brilliant piece of film making. It is center speaker only and is of very low quality. Perhaps someday it will be re-released with the original soundtrack - in the meantime, save your money.