Critical Reception and Legacy (Blow-Up) Blow-Up (1966)
A divisive opening that quickly tilted toward consensus
Blow-Up opened in New York in December 1966 and in Cannes in May 1967. The first reviews were sharply divided — Bosley Crowther in the New York Times gave it a guarded notice; Pauline Kael's review for The New Republic was openly hostile; Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice defended it without reservation. Within eighteen months the film had won the Palme d'Or, secured two Academy Award nominations, and grossed over $20 million on a $1.8 million budget — the most profitable art film of the decade. By 1970 the consensus had shifted: Blow-Up was the picture that had made European art cinema commercially viable in the United States.
"Blow-Up is one of the most stunningly beautiful color films I have ever seen." — Andrew Sarris, The Village Voice (1967, paraphrased from archive)
Pauline Kael was the prominent dissenter
Kael's review in The New Republic (and later in Going Steady) argued that the film was a piece of art-cinema posturing dressed up as serious cinema — that Antonioni was indulging a generation of viewers eager to be told their own confusion was profound.
"I am not in the mood at the moment for that kind of seriousness which sees in a tennis match without a ball the meaning of life." — Pauline Kael, Going Steady (1968) (book; not freely linkable)
Kael never fully reversed the position, though her own writing on later De Palma — including her famous Blow Out review — implicitly acknowledged Antonioni's influence on the films she did embrace. See The Blow-Up, Conversation, Blow Out Trilogy.
Roger Ebert canonized it as a Great Movie
Ebert wrote about Blow-Up multiple times across his career. His 1998 Great Movies essay treats the film as a masterpiece of perception and ambiguity:
"Blow-Up is one of the great films of the 1960s, but it is more than a great film: it is the picture that taught American audiences how to watch a European film, by training them not to ask what was happening but to attend to what was on the screen." — Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com (1998)
Ebert's reading emphasizes the ending's ambiguity — that the question of whether the murder happened is the wrong question to ask, and that Antonioni's real subject is the photographer's relation to the world the camera produces.
The film as a hinge in American film culture
Blow-Up's commercial success persuaded American studios to put real money behind European directors and into films that did not conform to the Production Code's narrative or sexual conventions. The Code itself collapsed within eighteen months of the film's release; the MPAA's ratings system was introduced in November 1968, and Blow-Up is one of the films most often cited as a direct trigger.
"What Blow-Up did to American cinema was administrative as much as artistic. It made the Code unsustainable." — Vincent Canby, The New York Times (1969 retrospective, archive paywalled)
The film's long influence
The lineage from Blow-Up runs through Coppola's The Conversation (1974) and De Palma's Blow Out (1981) — see The Blow-Up, Conversation, Blow Out Trilogy — but also through Wim Wenders, Wong Kar-wai, Atom Egoyan, David Fincher, and Michael Haneke. Dario Argento's Profondo Rosso (1975) is partly a giallo restaging of Blow-Up's photographic-evidence plot, and casts David Hemmings in a knowing nod. Brian De Palma has cited the film as one of two structural sources for Blow Out. Francis Ford Coppola has discussed it in the context of The Conversation.
"Blow-Up did to photography what Citizen Kane did to flashbacks — it made every subsequent treatment of the same material an inevitable comparison." — Brian Eggert, Deep Focus Review (2011)
Where the film sits now
Blow-Up appears regularly on critics' polls of the great films. It was ranked among the top 100 films in the Sight & Sound critics' poll for several decades and continues to feature on the BFI and Criterion lists. The Criterion Collection released a Blu-ray edition in 2017 and a 4K UHD upgrade is listed in the line; see Physical Media Releases (Blow-Up). It is taught in nearly every survey course on European art cinema, on adaptation, and on photography in cinema.
"It is the film that asks the question every modern person has to answer: how do you act on what you have seen, when the seeing was done by a machine and the world is no longer interested?" — Senses of Cinema, Blow-Up review (2017)