Blow-Up

Blow-Up is a Film italo - British of Michelangelo Antonioni, left in 1966 and which obtained the Palme of gold to the Cannes festival in 1967.

Work of a great modernity, Blow-Up questions the reports/ratios which reality and the illusion maintain, through the initiatory course and décousu of a fashion photographer who redécouvre, while leaving its studio, the thickness of a reality which escapes its intentions.

It is also one of rare films of the realizer who gained a relative business success, in spite of his austerity.

Synopsis

With London, in the the Sixties. Thomas, a photographer connected, goes one morning in a park to take stereotypes. The place is almost deserted, except a couple which is embraced, and which Thomas photographs by far. The woman, Jane, realize finally her presence, and very disturbed, claims the negative ones to him; but Thomas dodges himself. Jane finds it in the afternoon, and goes until being offered to him: Thomas gives him a film, but which is not the good one. It develops the photographs of the park, and realizes by successive enlargings ( blow-up means “enlarging” in English) that it has in fact be the witness of a murder. It goes night on the spot and discovers the corpse which its photographs revealed to him. Of return to him, it finds its workshop empty: all its stereotypes and negative were stolen. Disabled, he seeks council near a friend, but in vain. In the small hour, it turns over to the park, to discover that the body has also disappeared him.

Data sheet

Distribution

Rewards

  • 1967 : Palm of Gold to the Cannes festival;

  • 1967: NFSC Award of the best realizer;
  • 1968 : Ribbon of money (National union of the Italian cinematographic Journalists) of the best foreign film realizer;
  • 1968: Price of criticism (French Trade union of the film critic) of best foreign film.

Anecdotes

  • the history of the turning of Blow-Up is particularly astonishing and remains little known. Indeed Antonioni, carrying out a film in London, had made a point of bringing a whole Italian engineering team over there, generating considerable expenses of production. At the end of the time of assigned turning, it discusses with its producer (and friend) Carlo Ponti, and makes the point to him that it needs a extension of credit to finish his film: it indeed did not turn the central scene yet in particular, that of the murder. But the practice of Antonioni (common to all the scenario writers “with going beyond”) never not to turn at the beginning the important scenes in order to at the proper time make pressure on the producer is well-known of Carlo Ponti, which this time does not yield. Antonioni must return to Italy, and to consider the assembly of film without some of the scenes essential with the comprehension of the spectateur.
    Blow-Up can thus also be looked like a brilliance exercise, carried out starting from an imposed constraint.

  • So that the lawn of the park where the character of David Hemmings walks arises well with the image, Antonioni did not hesitate to make pass a coat of green paint above.
  • the film made scandal at its exit in Great Britain: it was the first time that one showed in a British film an entirely stripped female body (in fact, that of Jane Birkin).
  • the musical group The Yardbirds (with in particular Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck) made an appearance in a scene at the end of film.
  • It is in homage to Blow-Up that Brian De Palma carried out Blow Out in 1981: John Travolta interprets there a taker of sound which records the scene of an car accident which will prove to be a murder…
  • the character of Thomas was inspired in Antonioni by the photographer David Bailey.

See too

  • '' Blow-Up '' on Internet Movie Database.
  • Analysis on the site of the film club of Caen

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