Blow-Up (sometimes styled as Blowup or Blow Up) is a 1966 mystery thriller film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and produced by Carlo Ponti. It was Antonioni's first entirely English-language film and starred David Hemmings alongside Vanessa Redgrave and Sarah Miles. Also featured was 1960s model Veruschka. The film plot was inspired by Julio Cortázar's short story "Las babas del diablo" (1959).
The story is set within the mod subculture of 1960s Swinging London, and follows a fashion photographer (Hemmings) who believes he has unwittingly captured a murder on film. The screenplay was by Antonioni and Tonino Guerra, with English dialogue by British playwright Edward Bond. The cinematographer was Carlo di Palma. The film's non-diegetic music was scored by jazz pianist Herbie Hancock, while rock group the Yardbirds also is featured.
In the main competition section of the Cannes Film Festival, Blow-Up won the Palme d'Or, the festival's highest honour. The American release of the counterculture-era film with its explicit sexual content was in direct defiance of Hollywood's Production Code. Its subsequent critical and box-office success influenced the abandonment of the code in 1968 in favour of the MPAA film rating system.
Blow-Up would inspire subsequent films, including Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974) and Brian De Palma's Blow Out (1981). In 2012, Blow-Up was ranked No. 144 in the Sight & Sound critics' poll of the world's greatest films.
Plot
After spending the night at a doss house, where he has taken pictures for a book of art photographs, photographer Thomas is late for a photo shoot with model Veruschka at his studio, which in turn makes him late for a shoot with other models later in the morning. He grows bored and walks off, leaving the models and production staff in the lurch. As he leaves the studio two teenage girls, who are aspiring models, ask to speak to him but Thomas drives off to visit an antique shop.
Wandering into Maryon Park, Thomas takes photographs of two lovers. The woman, Jane, is furious at being photographed and pursues Thomas, demanding his film and ultimately tries to snatch his camera. He refuses and photographs her as she runs away through the park. Thomas then meets his agent Ron for lunch and notices a man following him and looking into his car. Back at his studio, Jane arrives, asking desperately for the film. She and Thomas have a conversation and flirt, but he deliberately hands her a different film roll. She, in turn, writes down a false telephone number and gives it to him.
Thomas, curious, makes several zooms of the black-and-white film of Jane and her lover. They reveal Jane worriedly looking at a third person lurking in the trees with a pistol. Thomas excitedly calls Ron, claiming his impromptu photo session may have saved a man's life. Thomas is disturbed by a knock on the door. It is the two girls again, with whom he has a romp in his studio and falls asleep. Awakening, he finds they hope he will photograph them but he realizes there may be more to the photographs in the park. He tells them to leave, saying, "Tomorrow! Tomorrow!"
Further examination of a blurred figure on the ground under a bush makes Thomas suspect the man in the park may have been murdered after all during the time Thomas was arguing with the woman.
As evening falls the photographer goes back to the park and finds the body of the man, but he has not brought his camera and is scared off by the sound of a twig breaking, as if being stepped on. Thomas returns to find his studio ransacked. All the negatives and prints are gone except for one very grainy blow-up of what is possibly the body.
After driving into town he sees the woman and follows her into a club where The Yardbirds, featuring both Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck on guitar, Keith Relf on vocals, Chris Dreja on bass, and Jim McCarty on drums, are performing the song Stroll On. A buzz in Beck's amplifier angers him so much that he smashes his guitar on stage then throws its neck into the crowd. A riot ensues. The photographer grabs the neck and runs out of the club before anyone can snatch it from him. Then he has second thoughts about it, throws it onto the pavement and walks away. A passer-by picks up the neck and throws it back down, not realizing it is from Beck's guitar. Thomas never locates the elusive woman.