Carlo Di Palma Blow-Up (1966)
Carlo Di Palma (1925–2004) shot Blow-Up (1966), his second Antonioni feature after Red Desert (1964) and the picture that established him as one of the great color cinematographers in postwar European film. He went on to be Woody Allen's preferred cameraman for twelve films from Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) through Deconstructing Harry (1997).
A boy on the streets of Rome with a clapperboard
Di Palma was born in Rome in 1925 to a working-class family. His father was a propman at the Cines studios and Carlo started carrying equipment for camera departments in his teens. He worked as a clapper-loader on Visconti's Ossessione (1943) and as a focus puller on Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945) — putting him at the literal genesis of Italian neorealism. He moved up through the camera department through the late 1940s and 1950s, shooting mostly comedies and second-tier productions.
Red Desert was the audition
His first major collaboration with Antonioni was Red Desert (1964), Antonioni's first color feature. Di Palma's work there — desaturated industrial palettes, painted grass, the famous yellow steam — was the film's defining visual quality. The two men understood each other.
"Antonioni and I share an idea — that color is a character in the film, not a decoration. We paint the world to make the world feel like the people in it feel." — Carlo Di Palma, American Cinematographer (interview reprinted 2004)
What Di Palma did for Blow-Up
The film's color is more deceptive than Red Desert's — at first glance Blow-Up reads as documentary, with the saturated greens and blues of London 1966 captured almost neutrally. But Di Palma and Antonioni famously had Maryon Park's grass painted greener for the long-lens couple sequence, and they had houses on Foscari Road repainted before the climax to set off the mime tennis whites. The scheme is not painterly in the surrealist sense; it is the world made very slightly more itself. See Carlo Di Palma's Color Palette.
"Carlo and Antonioni made the world look more real than real. The grass was greener, the bricks were redder, the sky was whiter. You did not notice what they had done. You only noticed that the film looked like memory." — Vittorio Storaro, Camerimage (2004 tribute, paraphrased)
The studio scenes are shot mostly with available light through the big skylight at Cheyne Walk. The Maryon Park scenes are shot in a tight register of greens, browns, and the grey-and-white of Jane's outfit — the visual idiom that the film returns to at the climax. The Ricky-Tick concert is in the colored gels of stage light, the pot party is in the ambers of late-1960s interior film stock. Each setting has its own scheme.
"Di Palma's frame in Blow-Up is the most quietly radical work in 1960s color cinematography. The picture looks like the eye remembers, not like the eye sees." — American Cinematographer, obituary feature (2004)
Antonioni again, then Allen
Di Palma shot Antonioni's The Mystery of Oberwald (1980, the first major film shot on video and transferred to film) and Identification of a Woman (1982). His career took its second turn in the 1980s when Mia Farrow recommended him to Woody Allen. Allen and Di Palma made twelve films together over a decade, including Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Radio Days (1987), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Husbands and Wives (1992), and Bullets Over Broadway (1994). The Allen partnership was the longest of either man's career.
"Carlo could light a face in three minutes. He had been doing it since he was sixteen years old in Rome." — Woody Allen, The New York Times (2004 obituary)
He died in Rome in July 2004, age seventy-nine.
What Blow-Up keeps doing
The film is one of the most-cited references in academic and trade literature on color cinematography. The painted-grass story in Maryon Park is the textbook anecdote. But the deeper influence is the framing: the wide static compositions in the studio, the long telephoto pulls in the park, the use of out-of-focus foreground foliage to obscure the wire fence in the inciting incident. American cinematographers from Gordon Willis to Roger Deakins have cited it. (wikipedia)