Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow-Up) Blow-Up (1966)
Michelangelo Antonioni (1912–2007) directed Blow-Up (1966), his first English-language film and the picture that made him an international name in the United States. He was fifty-three when production began, fifteen years into one of the most distinctive careers in postwar European cinema, and Blow-Up was both his most commercially successful film and his loudest argument with the New Hollywood that was about to absorb his stylistic vocabulary.
A film critic before he was a filmmaker
Antonioni was born in Ferrara in 1912. He studied economics at the University of Bologna and started writing film criticism in the late 1930s for Cinema, the journal Mussolini's son edited. He worked as a screenwriter through the 1940s — including on Roberto Rossellini's A Pilot Returns (1942) — and made his first feature, Cronaca di un amore, in 1950. Through the 1950s he developed the style he is now associated with: long takes, architectural framing, faces held until they begin to dissolve, narrative withholding.
The Trilogy of Alienation made him an international name
His breakthrough was the L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), L'Eclisse (1962) trilogy. These films were a deliberate rejection of plot-based storytelling — L'Avventura famously starts as a missing-person mystery and abandons the search without resolution. The trilogy made his reputation in Europe and on the American art-house circuit but did not produce the kind of commercial success that would underwrite an English-language production. Red Desert (1964) — his first color film — was the bridge to Blow-Up. See Antonioni and the Trilogy of Alienation.
"Antonioni's L'Avventura was booed at Cannes in 1960. Six years later, Blow-Up won the Palme d'Or. The art-house audience had caught up to him." — Senses of Cinema, Blow-Up review (2017)
How Blow-Up came to him
Carlo Ponti — Sophia Loren's husband and one of Italy's most powerful producers — had a three-picture deal with MGM that required English-language productions. He brought Antonioni in for the first picture. Antonioni had read Julio Cortázar's "Las babas del diablo" (1959), about a translator who photographs a woman seducing a teenage boy in a Paris park, and proposed an adaptation. The story was relocated to London, the seduction became a possible murder, and the photographer was promoted from amateur to fashion-industry professional. See Cortázar's Las babas del diablo and Production History (Blow-Up).
"I have always been more interested in what the photograph does not show than in what it shows. The story by Cortázar gave me a structure for that interest." — Michelangelo Antonioni, The New York Times (1966 interview, archive 2007)
The London choice was deliberate
Antonioni did not speak English well and worked in London with a translator. He chose London, by his own account, because it was the city where photography had become the dominant cultural medium — Bailey, Donovan, Duffy, Avedon. He spent six months in the city before the shoot, watching photographers work and absorbing the studios at Cheyne Walk and the King's Road. See Antonioni's London.
Antonioni's English-language films after Blow-Up
Antonioni's MGM deal produced two more English-language films: Zabriskie Point (1970), a US-set counterculture picture with non-professional leads that became a famous commercial flop, and The Passenger (1975) with Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider, which is now regarded as one of his finest films. He returned to Italian-language production for Identification of a Woman (1982), then suffered a stroke in 1985 that left him largely unable to speak. He continued directing, with collaborators, into the 1990s. He died in Rome on July 30, 2007 — the same day as Ingmar Bergman.
"Antonioni's films are about the moment a person realizes they cannot get back to the life they were living thirty seconds ago. Blow-Up is the cleanest example of this in his filmography." — Geoff Andrew, Sight & Sound (2017)
What Blow-Up changed for him and for everyone else
The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1967 and was nominated for two Academy Awards (Director, Original Screenplay). It was MGM's most profitable art film of the decade and demonstrated to the studio that European art directors could deliver commercial English-language pictures. The film's direct influence on the New Hollywood of the early 1970s is hard to overstate — Coppola's The Conversation (1974) and De Palma's Blow Out (1981) both descend from it, as do films as varied as Schrader's Hardcore (1979) and Caro's Memories of Murder (2003). See The Blow-Up, Conversation, Blow Out Trilogy.