Word: mod
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...mod, where-the-action-is London, the ultimate cool is to be a fashion photographer. Fashion photographers, after all, live in converted carriage houses, make love to the world's most exotic miniskirted women, and play with cameras, fabulous toys of the jet-set generation...
This generation--call it mod, pop, turned-on, hip, or any of the other catch phrases of this label-happy era--asserted itself by establishing a new standard of moral behavior. The process obviously involved redefinition: in the '30's, photographer meant Stieglitz, Steichen, Dorothea Lange; now photographer means cool. But Michaelangelo Antonioni has other ideas...
...intensely serious about life and about art. His new film, Blow-Up, deals with the difficulty of commitment to a worthwhile life through art. Antonioni's fashion photographer hero, a 25-year-old dissipated cherub brilliantly played by David Hemmings, has learned how to ride the crest of the mod culture wave; he got rich quick, drives a Rolls, and takes sex and marijuana with the casual detachment that marks him and his kind. He seems, as Time describes, "a little fungus that is apt to grow in a decaying society...
...development or change. Instead, Antonioni fully reveals the nature of his character's dilemma, and then brings that character to a kind of stasis. In Blow-Up, the photographer may never fully resist the temptations of pop culture, but his commitment to watching will always prevent total immersion in mod sterility. The last shot of the film shows him with his camera, very much alone, sadly watching revellers representative of the behavior Antonioni condemns...
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...