Blow-Up — Index

The wiki for Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966). Hub: Blow-Up (1966).

Plot

• Plot Summary (Blow-Up) — full narrative with backbeat citations
• Plot Structure (Blow-Up) — the film mapped through the Two Approaches framework
• Backbeats (Blow-Up) — the film in 45 numbered beats with structural rivets

Cast

• Cast and Characters (Blow-Up) — full cast table and character notes
• David Hemmings — Thomas, the photographer
• Vanessa Redgrave — Jane, the woman in the park
• Sarah Miles — Patricia, the painter's partner
• John Castle — Bill, the painter
• Jane Birkin — the Blonde

Production & Crew

• Production History (Blow-Up) — development, casting, shoot, post, release
• Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow-Up) — career arc and what he brought to the film
• Carlo Di Palma — cinematographer
• Herbie Hancock — composer
• Antonioni's London — location-by-location reading
• Carlo Di Palma's Color Palette — the painted-grass aesthetic and the four color schemes

Analysis & Reception

• Themes and Analysis (Blow-Up) — short navigator to the deeper readings below
• Critical Reception and Legacy (Blow-Up) — initial split, canonical consensus, lasting influence
• Physical Media Releases (Blow-Up) — VHS through current Criterion 4K UHD

Signature Scenes

• The Maryon Park Photographs — the inciting incident shot in near-silence
• The Darkroom Sequence — the eleven-minute enlargement marathon
• The Yardbirds Club Scene — Beck and Page on stage together, briefly
• The Mime Tennis Match — the climax with no rackets and no ball
• The Mime Tennis Climax (Blow-Up) — climax-skill page: the thock as audience-certainty moment
• The Body in the Park (and the Body Gone) — the murder staged three times

Tech / Craft

• Antonioni's Long Takes and Empty Frames — the Antonioni vocabulary applied to genre
• The Photograph as Plot Engine — the procedural mechanism that drives the second act

Source Material

• Cortázar's Las babas del diablo — the 1959 source story and what Antonioni changed

Lineage

• The Blow-Up, Conversation, Blow Out Trilogy — Antonioni / Coppola / De Palma; counterpart to the Blow Out wiki's lineage page
• Antonioni and the Trilogy of Alienation — L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse and what Blow-Up extends

Era / Cultural Moment

• Swinging London 1966 — the cultural moment the film documents
• The Verushka Cameo and Mod Fashion — the era's fashion vocabulary inside the diegesis
• The Yardbirds' Final Configuration — Beck and Page in the Yardbirds for four months in 1966

Subplot / Motif

• The Mime Troupe Frame Story — the bracket that opens and closes the film
• Vision and Evidence as the Film's Central Question — what the photograph warrants

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The wiki covers Antonioni's first English-language film as both a singular picture and the head of a lineage. The arguments threaded through the pages are: that Blow-Up's central question is what social act a recording medium can underwrite (the photograph never gets the world to acknowledge the body); that the picture's vocabulary — long takes, empty frames, painted grass, the figure leaving the frame — is the Antonioni style applied to a genre-legible plot; and that the film is the source for the Conversation / Blow Out lineage that runs through the next fifteen years of paranoid-thriller cinema. The Blow Out wiki's The Blow-Up and Conversation Connection page is the reciprocal reading from the De Palma side.