Blow-Up
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Blow-Up, Being There and The Last Tycoon: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
Two very different but equally essential classics find their way to Blu-ray and DVD this week courtesy of the Criterion Collection, which has issued exemplary special editions of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) and Hal Ashby’s Being There (1979). The Antonioni film, in which a fashion photographer finds evidence of a murder in one of his stills, heavily influenced later American political thrillers like The Conversation and Blow Out in spite of the fact that Blow-Up itself is less a mystery than an anthropological document of swinging ’60s London. It was Antonioni’s first film outside his home country after L’avventura, La Notte, […]
by Jim Hemphill on Mar 24, 2017 -
No Mimes, Please! Soderbergh Recuts Antonioni’s Blow-Up
“For legal reasons, all of the footage with the mime troupe will have to be excised,” writes MGM “executive receptionist Tureen Patarga” to one Michelangelo Antonioni about his movie, Blow-Up. “Apparently one of the striped shirts worn by a cast member was originally created by the noted designer Hermoine Girth-Schnitt and was not cleared for use by the costume department.” Any on-set producer, particularly on a low-budget picture with lightly-staffed departments, has experienced that morning-of irritation: “Hey, is this okay to use? Can we clear this?” Usually it’s a rock-star poster, a t-shirt, or some ambiguous knick-knack foregrounded in the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 29, 2015 -
Michelangelo Antonioni on the Utility of Mystery
Michelangelo Antonioni’s work is known for, in addition to many other things, a certain open-endedness in its exploration of theme and narrative. But, you may be surprised to learn that the writer/director could be a bit more on-the-nose in his scripts. At Dangerous Minds, Paul Gallagher references a 2005 interview in The Guardian with Peter Bowles, who plays a drunk partygoer in Antonioni’s Blow-Up. In the original script, he had a monologue that nailed the themes of the movie. However, before shooting, Antonioni decided to cut it. The actor, feeling the speech was “essential to the film,” confronted Antonioni, pleading […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 5, 2014
