Word: blowup
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...lassoed bigger stars, when he wanted them; he knew that marquee names would help raise financing and lure audiences. He would go for the hot new actor: Delon after Rocco and His Brothers, Richard Harris after This Sporting Life, David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave in their first bloom for Blowup and later, in 1975, Jack Nicholson for The Passenger...
...Antonioni might be an art-film director, but he was no fool. He knew that making films in English would help him reach a wider audience; hence Blowup, Zabriskie Point (1970) and The Passenger (1975). He spoke Hollywood's language without ever going Hollywood. Death Valley, the location for Zabriskie Point, was as close as he got to La-la Land...
...good showmanship: give 'em something to talk about on the way out of the theater. Antonioni's films soon became famous for their endings. The last 7-1/2 mins. of Eclipse comprises a series of static, underpopulated street scenes in which none of the major characters appear. Blowup we'll get to in a moment, and Zabriskie Point ends with the shot of a house ... that blows up. The next-to-last scene of The Passenger is one continuous, wildly elaborate tracking shot that lasts for 7 mins...
...gentleman from Ferrara wouldn't consider it among his signal accomplishments, but with a couple of seconds in Blowup, he changed Hollywood history. The movie was produced by Carlo Ponti and was to be distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the stately old lion of American film studios. But the industry ratings board wouldn't give the picture a seal because, during a photo-shoot romp, the model Jane Birkin allowed the briefest display of pubic hair. Instead of trimming the scene to the board's specifications, MGM honored Antonioni's version of the film, invented a subsidiary, Premier Productions...
...that revolution was ancillary. (So was the Blowup rave-up performed by the Yardbirds, including the young Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck.) Artistically, Antonioni was after bigger game, and bagged it. As critic Adriano Apra says on the Criterion edition of Eclipse: "In film each auteur gives us his distinctive perception of the world. Antonioni goes beyond that. He always invents a world of his own." Apra means that literally, especially regarding the director's first two color features...