Title of film : Blowup
Director Name : Michelangelo Antonioni
Cast & crew :
Producer : Carlo Ponti
Editor : Frank Clarke
Cast :
Synopsis : Thomas is a photographer who after a night spent taking pictures in a doss house proceeds to shoot fashion models. During an idle moment he goes to an empty park, with his ubiquitous camera, and shoots a scene in which “nothing happens.” Only after having developed his photos does Thomas start to pay attention to its details. He may have photographed a murder. There is something objectionable about everything Thomas does. Poverty for him is merely a spectacle. A fashion shoot with the gorgeous Veruschka is a simulated act of intercourse, mechanical, yet perhaps it contributes to bringing into focus a secret truth of photography. Its peculiar emotion belongs, as perhaps all emotions do, to a fragile meta-reality. Even the murder is just routine for other people. The editor examining the photos absent-mindedly comments that the body in the enlargement looks just like one of Thomas's abstract paintings. The mystery of life and cinema is heightened in the enlargement sequence. To what degree has Thomas himself renounced the most important thing, life itself? The woman of the park scene comes to meet him but in the flesh she is somehow less real than in the dense time fragments that emerge on the developed photographs. The blow-ups grow into ever more extreme close-ups of a moment that has disappeared but occupies Thomas's interest completely. Soon the “only” truth of the woman is in these images. The man – “the murderer” – is never concretized to this extent. Only a couple of photographs of him exist. Soon he moves beyond recollection into the realm of images, the “zone” of Jean Cocteau's Orpheus. The series of images, close-ups and long shots are an adventure in time. A photograph is always an enigma, an astonishing relationship between precise definition and imagination. The camera reaches the zenith of objectivity: it is the sole witness to a crime and thus the only link to the world as it really exists. At the same time, photography offers an ironic miniature of a world governed by ambivalence, precariousness and an almost derisory sense of alienation. This is the paradox and the “narrative” into which the photographer himself, played by David Hemmings, enters.
Director Bio : Michelangelo Antonioni, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (29 September 1912 – 30 July 2007), was an Italian film director, screenwriter, editor, and short story author. Best known for his "trilogy on modernity and its discontents"[1] — L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L'Eclisse (1962), as well as the English-language Blowup (1966), Antonioni "redefined the concept of narrative cinema" and challenged traditional approaches to storytelling, realism, drama, and the world at large.[2] He produced "enigmatic and intricate mood pieces" and rejected action in favor of contemplation, focusing on image and design over character and story. His films defined a "cinema of possibilities".[2] Antonioni received numerous awards and nominations throughout his career, including the Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize (1960, 1962), Palme d'Or (1966), and 35th Anniversary Prize (1982); the Venice Film Festival Silver Lion (1955), Golden Lion (1964), FIPRESCI Prize (1964, 1995), and Pietro Bianchi Award (1998); the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists Silver Ribbon eight times; and an honorary Academy Award in 1995. He is one of three directors to have won the Palme d'Or, the Golden Lion and the Golden Bear, and the only director to have won these three and the Golden Leopard.
Filmography :
