Blow Up (1966)

“Inspiring everyone from Francis Ford Coppola to Mike Myers, Michelangelo Antonioni’s arty thriller remains an absorbing, eerie enigma.” – Total Film

In 1966, Michelangelo Antonioni transplanted his existentialist ennui to the streets of swinging London for this international sensation, the Italian filmmaker’s first English-language feature. A countercultural masterpiece about the act of seeing and the art of image making, Blow-Up takes the form of a psychological mystery, starring David Hemmings as a fashion photographer who unknowingly captures a death on film after following two lovers in a park. Antonioni’s meticulous aesthetic control and intoxicating color palette breathe life into every frame, and the jazzy sounds of Herbie Hancock, a beautifully evasive performance by Vanessa Redgrave, and a cameo by the Yardbirds make the film a transporting time capsule from a bygone era. Blow-Up is a seductive immersion into creative passion, and a brilliant film by one of cinema’s greatest artists.

” Never before Blow-Up has Michelangelo Antonioni, the cinema’s bravest spelunker of the soul, come up from the depths with such a marvelous story and such gorgeous pictures of the cavernous emptiness inside modern man.” – Joe Morgenstern, Newsweek

“A work of wit and caustic intelligence, superbly disciplined, elegantly styled, visually astonishing and, for all that, turned out with the deceptive simplicity of perfect craftsmanship.” – Robert Hatch, The Nation