Word: antonioni
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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BLOWUP. Italy's anatomist of melancholy, Michelangelo Antonioni (L'Avventura), moves his cameras to London, where he commences by filming the mod scene with abandon and then, in midflight, abruptly transforms an ingenious thriller into an opaque parable. The result is one of the most talked about and popular films around...
BLOWUP. A photographer escapes his mod models for an afternoon and wanders after a pair of bucolic lovers, whom he snaps on the sly. In a brilliant episode back in the darkroom, he develops his film and his dilemma. Italian Director Michelangelo Antonioni records the London scene-and some things that are not seen -in his first English film...
...case, Blow-Up is really fun to watch. The color is vivid and striking, Antonioni having fully indulged his penchant for painting the grass greener, the streets blacker, and everything else off-white or firehouse red. The pretty, self-conscious photography works to dazzling effect, particularly in some exterior long takes of the photographer driving through London in his Rolls...
Blow-Up's editing is weakest when the script allows Antonioni to be self-indulgent, the scenes in which he passes judgment on mod society. The cutting in the first photography session with Verushka, the mini-orgy, the rock and roll sequence seems purposeless and overly self-conscious. Antonioni's best editing is found in the sequences with dramatic purpose and direction: the blow-up sequence and the discovery of the corpse. Both deal with extended action--a lengthy process of printing and examining photo enlargements, and a long walk through a park--and Antonioni must use editing...
Although Blow-Up reveals a maturity of Antonioni's style, its simplistic vision of social decay shows him taking a sharp turn in the wrong direction. Blow-Up's surface brilliance tends to camoflage the intellectual excesses of a director in danger of running out of things to say. But Blow-Up is undeniably one of the most interesting films released in 1966, a striking presentation of a personal viewpoint with some pretty good film-making in the bargain...