Word: mod
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Henry Livings' farce, a mod menace (Dustin Hoffman) creates his own universe, where what goes up does not necessarily fall down, where illogic is logical and nonsense makes sense...
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...
...Downing Street with Prime Minister Wilson, who welcomed him as "an old friend, a statesman I personally know to be cool and wise in his judgment, warm in his heart." He met with Britain's top capitalists at the Hyde Park Hotel, mingled with the likes of Mod Designer Mary Quant, Actress Mary Ure and the dip set at Lancaster House, and addressed scarlet robed sheriffs and aldermen, ecclesiastics and industrialists at the Guildhall. Ahead in Fashion. Kosygin dined on pheasant laid out on Sèvres china at dinner for 56 in Buckingham Palace, where everyone, including Queen...
Continually fascinating when chronicling the unpredictable behavior of its photographer-hero, Blow-Up tends to wax ponderous and heavy-handed when characterizing his social environment. Antonioni sketches his mod London in black-and-white values, as entirely worthless. He depicts the young people at the rock-and-roll club and the pot party as incapable of individual emotional reaction, responding only in groups to escapist stimuli and the newest hip symbols (the electric guitar handle). This damning of a culture en masse is suspect; in setting his hero against a background of complete sterility, Antonioni has taken the easy...
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...