Blow UP 1966

Action minded Architectural Association Types, such as Koolhaas and Tschumi hoped to deliver architecture as a tool for radical social and political reinvention by using it to nourish unexpected events, with film providing an alluring model. Passolini shooting hand held on the streets. Nemec documenting the Russian invasion of  Czechoslovakia, Godard and Marker, Russ Myers, montage, jump cuts, sex, violence, real life, stars-film was cool as shit. It is no coincidence that Michelangelo Antonioni opened Blow Up with a car full of Architectural Association students/hippies carousing through London on their way to Alison and Peter Smithson’s radical new building for The Economist. 

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The main plot is about Thomas (David Hemmings), a professional photographer of great popularity, progressive and Apollonian, who lives immersed in his chores as an artist on top of his game, he ends up being in a strange way involved in a murder. On the other hand, the fact that it is an enlargement of a photograph that he discovers is perhaps the most interesting part of the whole plot. We see a Thomas who, after having photographed a couple in Maryon Park on a seemingly calm morning, he is fascinated by the curiosity that lovers produce him. A restlessness that, like Thomas it will also be awaken in the viewer. We do not know what there is in the environment that smells rotten, but we know that there is something that unbalances reality, and as Thomas goes undressing the this mess, it is when we realize that there is some mastery in the film particularly in this part of the story.

What is it that our eye sees or actually invents, what is the reality that the retina stores? How many filters are needed before reality is finally observed by the human eye? What possibilities does a fragmented image of reality provide in support of the memory of a particular fact, as an affirmation that the objective is the extension of an eye? as if it were a store of memories in which the lack of vivid continuity, characteristic of a frozen image is not enough but it is capable of spraying some type of reality, helping to create optical deceptions that support universal theories about human psychology and their interpersonal ways of communicating, capable of being grasped even by a small focus of an open diaphragm. Because, no matter how deeply hidden something is, in order to give meaning to any search, we have to rely on something.

What we know for sure is that, although Blow Up begins taking imprecise steps, showing off in order to show, wandering without an apparent sense, it is at that moment when it seems that it ends up becoming aware of itself and its objective, suddenly equipping itself of an interest that, although it arrives late, it stays for a while, giving us, among others, the scene of the park, in which the photography is so majestic that it reinforces the mystery to the plot.

Thomas may be a hero, maybe a villain or maybe it's simply a matter of finding a reward for the emptiness surrounding his hedonistic life, but the point is that this mysterious aura seems to be a product of himself, as Julio Cortázar said in the story Las Babas del Diablo (belonging to the book Las Armas Secretas):  “It is curious that the scene had a disturbing aura. I thought that I had to do that myself, and that my picture, if I took it out, that would restore things to its foolish truth.“ ---The story that Blow up is based on, in any case doesn’t obscure the film, because the master of timing, as how Cortázar is sometimes referred to, knows how to measure the words, balancing it drop by drop to stimulate the reader’s expectation without slowing down the story leading to the reader’s yawning.

That is why Antonioni uses ornaments that contextualize the main plot, make it credible and, incidentally, illustrate what came to be called the “swinging” London, a term coined by Time magazine in 1966 that was taken as reference by the popular pirate radio station Swinging Radio England. It is therefore, because of this context, on which of the sidewalks of London flourished in culture, fashion and 'intellectuality' in equal parts, without all this our photographer would have no reason to be.

It was a very fertile time for hedonism, experimentation, psychedelia, drugs, the avant-garde in all areas of art, where music groups such as The Beatles, The Who, The Kinks and many other groups that were part of the so-called British Invasion in 1963 after the release by Capitol Records of the single “I want to hold your hand” by The Beatles, which made possible their entry into the charts of the American music scene, where the new trends were called out by Queen Magazine, as well as the pop-art of Richard Hamilton, famous for the use of discarded photographs of Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol. Fashion photographers like Richard Avedon, not to mention the revolution that marked the entry to the fashion market, Mary Quant's invention, the miniskirt. A success that turned King Cross neighborhood into Chelsea (which was where the Quant boutique called 'Bazaar' was founded) at the core of London fashion.

The dominant aesthetic, as the character of Thomas shows, was the mod image, fitted jackets with three buttons, striking colors, fashion designers such as John Stephen or Ossie Clarck. We only need to observe how every one of the models that Thomas, with that arrogant air of a professional photographer, directs with superiority, forces to straighten their posture to highlight the fabrics, the body of the garments and the importance they had in the 'hipness' of the moment, how to show it, how to wear it and, above all, how to create fascination and beauty. Some models will have to succumb to the charms of the protagonist in favor of fame on the catwalks.

Interesting and unprecedented is the fact that the Yardbirds - later Led Zeppelin with Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton at the front - will star in the film with their song Stroll On, a rewrite of Train Kept on Rollin’ to which they changed the title and lyrics and featuring a young Jeff Beck who ends up smashing his guitar in a psychedelic distortion attack. The same distortion, although closer to American rhythm & blues of the time, by which Herbert Hancock, greatly influenced by his close collaboration with Miles Davis, composes a great soundtrack, he called the music score diegetic (about presenting an interior view of the world.  Thanks to the sensuality of the Austrian model/actress Verushka, the film immerses us in the first minutes in a photo shoot that could well be a sexual act, with its resulting visual zenith.

A show for the senses in which Antonioni's taste for the sensuality of his characters is revealed, as shown in other more successful titles such as his trilogy L'avventura (1960), La note ( 1961) and The Eclipse (L'eclisse 1962) or The Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso, 1964), where his fetish actress Monica Vitti reappears making a brutal speech about fear. A round film that shelters in itself, like Blow up, the visual concupiscence of Carlo di Palma as director of photography.

Although the film contains great scenes to remember, like the tennis game of the 'clowns'. Antonioni himself confessed, after the premiere, that he would need to make another film to be able to explain with precision the meaning of Blow Up. It is not enough to suggest analysis, it is necessary to suggest stimulating the spectator to introduce himself, to be hooked by the plot so that the audience ends up being interested in this game of self-knowledge about the gaze and the target of the gaze, about the emptiness and the human uprooting, about the incapacity of people to deal with an environment that they distrust and that, above all, they do not understand. The director already explains it in an interview: “Our drama is the growing lack of communication and the inability to conceive authentic feelings; this particular problem dominates all my characters.”

Nevertheless, this film had a great repercussion, filmmakers like Francis F. Coppola confessed to having been inspired by it. In his case to write the script of his film The Conversation (1974), in the case of Mel Brooks in High Anxiety (1977), a driver makes so many enlargements of a photograph in which the killer appears until he has one the size of a wall. In others, as in the Indian film Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983), its director Kundan Shah, making identical use of the plot of Blow Up, conveniently decides to call the park where the murder occurs “Antonioni Park”.

In the main competition section of the Cannes Film Festival, Blowup won the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film, the festival's highest honor.

Direction: Michelangelo Antonioni.

Country: United Kingdom and Italy.

Year: 1966.

Duration: 108 min.

Cast: David Hemmings, Vanesa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, Peter Bowles, Jane Birkin, Gillian Hills, John Castle, Verushka.

Script: Tonino Guerra & Michelangelo Antonioni, based on the story by Julio Cortázar “Las Babas del Diablo”, from the book Las Armas Secretas, 1959.

Production: Carlo Ponti.

Executive production: Pierre Rouve

Artistic direction: Saetón Gorton.

Photography: Carlo di Palma.

Assembly: Frank Clarke.

Sound: Robin Gregory.

Costumes: Jocelyn Rickards.

Makeup and hairdressing: Paul Rabiger and Stephanie Kaye.

Music: Herbert Hancock.

 Producer: Bridge Films.

Distributor: MGM.

Locations: Maryon Park, Plaza of the Economist Building, Stockwell Road, Regent Street, Heddon street.