Blow-Up

BLOW-UP (1966)
50th Anniversary Screening
Tuesday, September 13, at 7:00 PM at the Monica

One of the most influential, mind-bending movies of the Swinging Sixties, Blow-Up was nominated for two top Oscars in 1966: Best Director for Michelangelo Antonioni and Best Original Screenplay. The daring movie ran afoul of Hollywood’s notorious Production Code and had to be released without a Code seal by a subsidiary of MGM. Yet its box office success helped to dismantle the censorious Code. The movie cost $1.8 million and grossed $20 million in the U.S. Critical response was ecstatic. Andrew Sarris called it “a mod masterpiece,” and Arthur Knight, writing in Playboy magazine, declared that it was “as important and germinal a film as Citizen Kane, Open City and Hiroshima Mon Amour—perhaps even more so.”

David Hemmings plays a libidinous fashion photographer who gets in over his head when he photographs what appears to be a murder in a London park. As he develops and enlarges the photographs, he fears that his own life may be in danger. Vanessa Redgrave had one of her first major screen roles as a woman who may be implicated in the murder. Sarah Miles, Verushka, and Jane Birkin co-star. The film had a major influence on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, among many other films.

Continue the celebration of Antonioni when La Notte, starring Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, and Monica Vitti, opens on September 16 for the film’s 55th anniversary.