Classic DVD: Blow-Up (1966)

January 4, 2011 in Film | Permalink

David Hemmings photographs Veruschka, who is now 71 and still models occasionally.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s drama about a fashion photographer who may or may not have accidentally recorded a murder being committed uses the alluring backdrop of Swinging ’60s London to meditate on the frustrating elusiveness of truth. Blow-Up became an art-house smash in the U.S. in 1966, which shouldn’t have been a surprise, perfectly attuned as it was to the Kennedy assassination paranoia that the Warren Commission was never able to quell.

David Hemmings plays an obnoxious, nameless photographer, who berates his female models and fancies himself something of an unappreciated artist. While in the park one day, he stealthily snaps a man and woman in the distance, but she eventually spies him and pursues him vigorously. The woman (Vanessa Redgrave) desperately wants him to turn over the film.

The photographer realizes why she’s so panicked when he later blows up the image and notices what might be a man in a bush pointing a pistol. Did the gunman commit a murder after the photo was taken? Or is he seeing something in the photo that isn’t really there? A friend peers at the enlarged picture and remarks to the photographer that it looks like one of “those paintings,” meaning an Op Art piece, whose meaning shifts depending on the perspective from which it’s viewed.

Early in the film, another of the photographer’s friends, an artist, opines about his Abstract paintings: “They don’t do anything at first…just a mess…afterwards I find something to hang onto…it adds up.” But what if life, more fleeting than art and too restless to truly study, does not? (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)

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