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Someone changed the title music, to begin with. If you leave the menu on your screen and listen, you will hear the original title music, a brief rock interlude followed by a wistful jazz piano. The strident, cacaphonous trumpet you hear under the titles is the wrong music.
If Blowup looks and feels different from the four Antonioni films that preceded it, one reason may be that Antonioni used an English editor, Frank Clarke (uncredited). The pace of the movie is far faster than what a viewer of L'Eclisse or La Notte would expect.
In many scenes there are sudden, apparently pointless cuts. These are inserted to give the movie a more nervous look than we expect from Antonioni. Perhaps, knowing he was making his first mystery, Antonioni planned this new style with his editor.
There are other mannerisms, not unique to this film, that are always interesting. The camera follows a receding car for some distance, then slows down and lets the car get further away.
A burst of music will suddenly be heard, and just as suddenly fade away. In the studio this seems to signify the photographer's preoccupation with the photos, causing him to forget the music.
-- Critics and the public are correct in viewing Antonioni as a dark pessimist about human nature. He sees us as sadly unequipped for the challenges of reality, relationships, moral judgment, etc. The theme of the movie is how easily the photographer is distracted from the serious business at hand, i.e. the apparent murder captured by his camera. He is no match for the reality before him, and drifts from one diversion to the next. The wonderful scene of the Yardbirds playing to a catatonic audience, and our hero coming away with the worthless trophy, sums up the director's view of him.
But the key scene of the movie is when the photographer, suspecting the murder, leaves his studio without his camera, finds the body in the park, can't photograph it, and returns to the studio to find that all the prints and negatives of the event have been stolen in his absence. One false step and everything is lost. The record of the reality, and perhaps the reality itself.
Antonioni invited the debate about whether anything at all happened -- the murder, the photographs, the scene in the park, etc. -- by having the imaginary tennis ball at the end of the film begin to make plocking noises, and by having the photographer disappear. Why Antonioni called this moment his "signature" is a mystery to me. Possibly to bring more people into the theaters.
The scene in the park is a classic of form and color and movement. Nothing like it has been done before or since. If you turn the volume up on your TV during this scene, you will realize that the trees and bushes, being blown by the wind, are definite conspirators in what is happening to the man and woman. Similarly, in the final scene, the sky has turned grey and the trees and bushes seem to mock the photographer who has returned to the scene of his greatest failure.
I had to watch the movie 50 times before I realized that the killer behind the fence is the grassy knoll assassin in Dallas. The movie was made three years after the Kennedy assassination.
The scenes in the studio, discovering the truth hidden in the photos, have been much imitated. They are wonderful, breathless, dramatic.
Today the question of reality seems far less pertinent than the shallowness of the photographer [who may also be the artist, according to some] and his inability to confront the real in an adult, responsible way. But it can be argued that if human perception is so skewed by selfish concerns and shallow desires, the human race never really perceives a real world at all. Only the next pleasure, the next gratification, the next need or project. The human world we see around us, colored by war, famine, violence, and the colossal indifference of man to his fellow man, may be a world built by creatures who do not have a reality. Only a stubborn need to be safe, to be blind. Possibly this is the sense of those last troubling images.
Incidentally, I saw the movie four or five times in the theater, and I saw no scenes that have been deleted, as the reviewer above claims. As far as I can remember, the movie is completely intact in this DVD.
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niels
The item is very good. the sound and the pictures is very good
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 17, 2016Tindaro
BLOW-UP di Michelangelo Antonioni
Reviewed in Italy 🇮🇹 on September 13, 2022
BLOW-UP di Michelangelo Antonioni
Reviewed in Italy 🇮🇹 on September 13, 2022
L'immagine che appare sulla copertina di questa stupenda edizione del capolavoro di Antonioni e`quella della versione principale del poster cinematografico. Ottima la qualita`video della pellicola; traccia audio disponibile in Inglese, Italiano e Francese (quella inglese e`la piu`affidabile, con una gamma maggiore di lingue accesibili nei sottotitoli). I contenuti extra del menu`sono due fantastici trailers del film, un commento audio del critico Peter Brunette e una versione del film accompagnata ad intermittenza da alcuni temi musicali Lounge tratti dalla colonna sonora di BLOW-UP.Reviewed in Italy 🇮🇹 on September 13, 2022
Inserita all'interno di una cornice estetica immersa nel mondo della moda della swinging London della seconda meta` degli anni 60, la storia del film ha per protagoniste le avventure di un talentuoso fotografo (David Hemmings) alle prese con un inatteso rebus da risolvere.....
Attraverso uno stile narrativo personalissimo e una composizione del suono e delle immagini che non lascia nulla al caso, il genio artistico di Michelangelo Antonioni rende BLOW-UP una delle creazioni piu`belle, affascinanti e misteriose della storia del Cinema (la scena in cui Mark scansiona gli ingrandimenti delle fotografie ha una forza evocativa devastante..)...Grazie alla sua capacita`di sapere bucare lo schermo e stimolare la mente di chi guarda come solo poche pellicole sono in grado di fare, BLOW-UP e`molto piu`di un film....UNA VERA E PROPRIA OPERA D'ARTE.
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Helga Lesselt
Lieferung in ein Gefängnis nicht möglich! Eigentlich diskriminierend!
Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on June 20, 2020
