Blow-Up DVD

 Controversial For Its Day
I remember when this film was first run in the theatres. I was too young to be admitted at that time, but I recall that it was controversial for its day. Now, the storyline is tame to most of us. This is an art film. The meaning of the story is not obvious, the cinematography is very well done; there is a lot of deep focus technique in this film. Many film critics have claimed to understand what Blowup is about, but I do not believe there is a single correct view. For me, the film examines the inner desire of a successful fashion photographer who is fed up with the plastic nature of his genre, and longs for recognition as a social commentary photographic artist. This film shows the struggle of the main character dealing with his missed opportunity to change his path and to gain recognition outside the realm of the fashion world. His character has been jaded down to a self-serving manipulator, and it is this character trait that is examined throughout the film. Some silly characters at the beginning and end of the story represent the main character’s soul, which is finally acknowledged by him. At the end, he picks up his camera, anew, hopefully wiser and more caring. Those interested in photography, filmmaking, and Psychology will find this movie intriguing.
Submitted by moses.lehman (California, USA) 
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 HATED this one
Too boring for me. Wish I hadn't gotten it. Thought it was going to be suspenseful. Thought it would have a good plot. Very disappointed in it! I hope I don't make that mistake again!
Submitted by Amanda (Humbolt, CA, USA)
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 A brilliantly composed puzzle of fact and fantasy.
With 1966's "Blowup", Michelangelo Antonioni created a genuine hit. The sort of picture that would normally have been seen only on the art-house circuit a few years before, it was widely played, even in small towns, and became a compulsory conversation piece in its year of release. The public was finally ready for Antonioni; his particular brand of avant-gardism had finally become fashionable. Perhaps it was the picture's milieu--"swinging" London, youth pop culture, a few then-daring scenes of erotic sex--but Antonioni had at last surmounted the barrier that had always lain in the personal filmmaker's path: He became a commercial success. "Blowup" concerns a successful mod photographer (David Hemmings) in London whose world is bounded by fashion, pop music, marijuana, and easy sex. His inner life is as bored and despairing as that of any classic Antonioni hero, but in the course of a single day he stumbles upon an event that challenges his ennui, evokes for a few moments the possibility that he may overcome it, but leaves him in the end much as he was before. On the surface, "Blowup" is an old-fashioned thriller done with a new style of the Sixties. But there is more to it than that. This is, essentially, a parable about human perception. The young photographer cannot discern the truth with his eyes, but only with his camera. The initial conflict of the film--and the necessity for making the blow-ups in the first place--is the distinction between what his eyes see and what the camera sees; he assumes that he can perceive reality well enough, but his pictures, examined in detail, suggest there is a reality going on around us that our eyes cannot understand. All truth, finally, is subjective, as we cannot know what is "out there," only what we see of it and this notion is made clear by the film's maddeningly symbolic ending with the mimed tennis match. "Blowup" came at the end of a series of movies that had made everyone over-familiar with even the phrase 'Swinging London' ("Darling", "The Knack", "Alfie", "Morgan", "Georgy Girl") and heartily sick of it. "Blow-up" was about the surrender to fantasy which in the mid-1960s cinema, and an influential sector of metropolitan life, had made. It abstracted what it wanted from it, and framed it in a separate reality. It wasn't easy for anyone whose eye was jaded, as if from a hangover, to experience the freshness of the scene when an artist's eye viewed it. Antonioni may be left, like Bergman, Bresson, and Bunuel, with a small, devoted audience. This is the dilemma of the personal filmmaker. This is the main reason that a personal film like "Blowup" is a great luxury, almost unknown in Sixties America except, perhaps immediately after a director had made an enormous commercial hit. Film was just too expensive to be a fine art. The personal film was one of the side shows of cinema. The mainstream lies elsewhere, in the popular genres. [filmfactsman]
Submitted by filmfactsman (Beverly Hills, CA, USA)
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