Blow-up - Pre-Order

 Blow-Up is a 1966 psychological mystery[film directed and co-written by Michelangelo Antonioni. It is Antonioni's first entirely English-language film and stars David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave and Sarah Miles. Model Veruschka von Lehndorff is featured as herself, and Jane Birkin makes her first film appearance.



Set within the contemporary mod subculture of Swinging London, the film follows a fashion photographer (Hemmings) who believes he has unwittingly captured a murder on film.



Thomas examines a blurred figure on the ground under a bush in the background of a blow-up, which he suspects is the dead body of a man shot by a gunman. As evening falls, he goes back to the park without his camera and finds the body, but is scared off by the sound of a twig breaking. He returns to his studio to find it ransacked, with all of the negatives and prints gone except for one very grainy blow-up of what is possibly the body, but is never clear if there ever was a murder.




Amused by the pictures providing the requisite "color" for interiors in soap operas, situation comedies, and the like, artist Allan McCollum captured them by photographing his television screen. A few years later, influenced by Antonioni’s film he enlarged fragments of the pictures that had decorated the "rooms." In the unique pictures that resulted, the subjects are often indecipherable, but the dreamy floating forms are far more powerful, mysterious, and timeless than their more legible antecedents. As the artist provided the negative with each unique print, the work of art can be reproduced if lost or damaged in the future, thus underlining its permanence and the relative vapidity and evanescence of its origins.