"Blow Up" Screening

This Monday and Wednesday we will watch Michelangelo Antonioni's film, "Blow Up". It was made in 1966 and was quite influential at the time. The story is about a photographer who may or may not have witnessed a murder. More to the point, it is his camera that has done any witnessing and he is the discoverer, at a later time, of this possible scenario. It is about how we see and how we interpret that which we view. Can our eyes deceive us? Is the photographic image objective? Antonioni was a director who used detailed composition to tell his stories. The studies we have engaged in on the textual analysis of images will prove valuable here. I ask you to pay special attention to the design of this movie; the framing of the action, the objects within the shots (mis en scene), the spatial relationships between characters and their settings and thematic contrasts involving the real action and the "reel" (photographic) action.

If "Blow Up" seems a bit dated today, it is probably because most depictions of "trendy" times almost always seem to suffer from the silliness that attends much of faddish behavior when viewed with the distance of years. In spite of that, this movie is a fairly accurate portrayal of "swinging London" in the "mod 60s". That this film was a major studio release and that it played in mainstream theaters, says something about the viewing habits of the 1960s audience and, perhaps sadly, about today's.

I have added an article by Roger Ebert on the "Links of Interest". Please contribute any other articles or reviews that you think will help our understanding. Be ready to discuss this film and how it relates to what we have studied to this point on Monday, Feb. 22. On Wednesday, Feb. 24, your 2-3 page review of the film will be due.