Blow-Up (1966)

Leading Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni attempted to capture London during the swinging sixties in his first British film, Blow-Up, and set the benchmark for sixties British grooviness.

With a life divided between hanging with the In-Crowd, driving his Rolls Royce, shagging in his studio and straddling voluptuous models with a Pentax, saying, “Give it to me . . . give it to me”, David Hemmings was himself very much a symbol of the period – the man who has it all.

So to even out the odds, Antonioni sends him on a dark journey into his own powers of perception. While photographing in a London park, he sees a man and a woman embracing.

The woman runs over to stop him from taking pictures, but he returns to his studio. The woman appears, demanding the negatives, and he gives her a substitute roll.

On developing his pictures, he is startled to find what appears to be a man with a gun in the bushes and, in a later shot, a body.

Rushing back to the park in the middle of the night, he finds the body, but on his return to the studio, all his pictures have disappeared.

When he returns to the park in the morning, the body has gone, too. It all might never have happened. And to emphasise the thinness of the gulf between illusion and reality, the photographer, leaving the park, takes part in an imaginary tennis match with some students, without a ball or racquet, yet with the sounds of a game heard on the soundtrack.

As an attempt at a thriller style, the film was less successful than it might have been, lacking the precise cutting of a Hitchcock or the unambiguous symbolism of a Lang.

But Antonioni attempted merely to work within the genre, finding it a convenient means of establishing his point.

The bulk of the soundtrack is timelessly cool, dark and melancholic jazz from keyboardist Herbie Hancock, best known then as a Miles Davis sideman. The spark of genius was including one performance by The Yardbirds, during the fleeting period when their line-up boasted both Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page.

Antonioni originally wanted The Who, so in a meticulous Elstree Studios recreation of Windsor’s famous Ricky Ticky Club. The Yardbirds obligingly executed a dramatic guitar-smashing routine, a la Townshend’s mob.

Thomas
David Hemmings
Jane
Vanessa Redgrave
Patricia
Sarah Miles
The Blonde
Jane Birkin
Bill
John Castle
Ron
Peter Bowles
The Brunette
Gillian Hills
Verushka
Verushka von Lehndorff
Mime
Julian Chagrin
Mime
Claude Chagrin
Jeff Beck
Himself
Jimmy Page
Himself

Director
Michelangelo Antonioni

Video