Word: antonioni
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BLOWUP. For his first English-language film, Italian Director Michelangelo Antonioni develops a closeup of a young, successful pop photographer who accidentally records a murder while snapping candids around London. Though all the elements for an ingenious thriller are at hand, Antonioni underplays the whodunit and focuses instead on his characteristic concern: the gap between seeing and feeling...
What it sees becomes a far-out, uptight and vibrantly exciting picture. Blow-Up is the first movie made in English by Italy's Michelangelo Antonioni, the most sensitive and profound of cinema's anatomists of melancholy (L'Avventura, La None, Eclipse), and in the film he risks a screeching change of creative direction. His earlier films inhabited languid interior landscapes and unfolded with the large, slow motions of the soul; his new movie makes the London scene with a Big Beat abandon that almost shakes the film off its sprockets. But the change of means does...
...this point, Antonioni has made fascinating scenes but very little sense. Then all at once, in a brilliant episode of cinematic exposition, the photographer simultaneously develops his film and his dilemma. As shot after shot is blown up, both the photographer and the audience perceive without a word of explanation what the camera had accidentally recorded and the girl has desperately tried to conceal: the murder of her companion in the park...
...obscurity, remembered only by the next generation of Late Show addicts and ex-Julie Andrews fans. For the present, the best advice I can give you is to pretend it's not there, and certainly to forget that its stars worked with some distinction for Hitch-cock, Bergman, and Antonioni...
...Oskar Werner. Roman Polanski is making a horror satire called The Vampire Killers. Robert Aldrich is starting up a war film called The Dirty Dozen, and Sidney Lumet is working with Maximilian Schell, James Mason and Simone Signoret in The Deadly Affair. For the past several weeks, Michelangelo Antonioni has been prowling the streets of London, looking toward making a film on-of all things-the swinging London scene. His cryptic testimonial to what he has seen: "London offers the best and the worst in the world...