Blow up

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Movie
German title Blow up
Original title Blowup
Country of production Great Britain
original language English
Publishing year 1966
length 111 minutes
Age rating FSK from 16 (previously from 18)
Rod
Director Michelangelo Antonioni
script Julio Cortázar
Michelangelo Antonioni
Tonino Guerra
production Carlo Ponti
Pierre Rouve
music Herbie Hancock
camera Carlo Di Palma
cut Frank Clarke
occupation
synchronization

German dubbing files

Blow Up is a British feature film by Michelangelo Antonioni from the year 1966 . The film was awarded the main prize at the Cannes Film Festival .

action

London in the 1960s , the swinging sixties . The successful photographer Thomas is working on an illustrated book with street photographs, for which he also spends a night in a homeless shelter. In search of further motifs, he takes photos of a couple in a park that he has not asked for permission. The woman visits him the same day and asks for the photos. She says that the man she was with in the park is her lover and that the pictures should therefore be destroyed. To please her, the photographer gives her a film cartridge, but from a different film.

As you zoom in, the blowup of photos of the couple, Thomas discovered in the bushes off a man with a pistol with a silencer. On prints of later photos, the woman's lover can be seen lying motionless under a tree. The photographer is insecure. Did he photograph a murder?

In the middle of the night he returns to the park and actually finds a male corpse that is still lying on the lawn behind the bushes. When he returned to his studio a short time later, he noticed a break-in; the prints and negatives documenting the alleged murder have been stolen. The only thing left, because it slipped between two pieces of furniture, is the blow-up of the image of the corpse in the grass. However, the magnification is so strong that a person who is not familiar with the process can hardly see anything on the print, because the blurred image of the corpse dissolves into the grain of the photo.

The photographer would like to inaugurate his publisher Ron in order to photograph the corpse with him. On the way to a party that Ron is attending, he drives through London at night and for a brief moment sees the woman from the park in front of a shop window. He runs after her, but doesn't find her again. Instead, he gets into a club concert by the Yardbirds , with Keith Relf on vocals and Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck on guitar. While the band plays the track "Stroll On", he walks through the ranks of the audience standing and seated in their places. When guitarist Jeff Beck maltreats the amplifier towards the end of the piece because of background noises, as is usual with The Who , then smashes his guitar and throws it into the audience, the crowd moves violently. The photographer gets hold of the guitar neck and struggles to get outside, where he throws the fragment onto the sidewalk. A short time later he finally finds Ron at the drug party, but cannot convince him to come to the park with him to photograph the body. He stays at the party for the night.

Crime scene: Maryon Park in London

The next morning the photographer returns to the park alone, but the body has disappeared. The photographer makes his way home and passes a tennis court in the park where a group of young people is pantomiming a bizarre tennis game in which neither ball nor tennis racket are used. When the imaginary ball lands near it, it throws it back towards the end of the game.

background

Blow Up is based on the short story Las Babas del Diablo (Eng. Teufelsgeifer, published in the volume of short stories The Secret Weapons ) by Julio Cortázar , in which a supposed rendezvous of lovers turns out to be kidnapping.

Antonioni actually wanted to cast the male lead with the Austrian actor Oskar Werner . However, he did not agree with the script and canceled. The director finally resorted to David Hemmings because he reminded him of Werner.

An essential component of the film is its time reference. The rock group The Yardbirds with guitarists Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page can be seen performing in a club. In the process, Beck smashes his equipment. Antonioni actually wanted to hire The Who , known for such stage excesses, for the scene , but this failed because of their fee demand. Is also cited a woman Catch scene from the recently published spaghetti western Django by Sergio Corbucci . Herbie Hancock wrote the score and played it himself with a renowned cast (including Freddie Hubbard , Joe Henderson , Jim Hall , Ron Carter and Jack DeJohnette ). David Bailey is widely regarded as the inspiration for the figure of the photographer Thomas . But it is also speculated that the photographer Michael Cooper served as a model for the protagonist. Playboy Gunter Sachs was the fashion model .

In addition, during the photographer's extensive convertible trips through London, many streets of the city can be seen, both from the centers, with skyscrapers under construction, and from less urban areas with small shops and dark brick buildings that seem to have stood still in time .

“If Blow Up nevertheless became Antonioni's only commercial success - the successor work Zabriskie Point (1970), shot in the USA , got merciless reviews - this is not only due to some scenes that were considered risky at the time, but above all to a picture of London that is shaped by pop, fashion and the creative arts. Entire house facades were painted brightly for the film, Thomas transforms a photo session with Veruschka von Lehndorff into a quasi-sexual act, and art takes on the character of free availability in a world in which reality and illusion, original and reproduction are less and less separated from each other . "

- Johann N. Schmidt

Reviews

  • Die Zeit : “Antonioni's film ends like other thrillers start, because he wants to convey this disquiet, because behind the question of whether the photos showed a murder or whether Thomas was just dreaming, the more important question is whether this is not maybe is indifferent. Antonioni answered this question, because the subject of his film is not a mysterious murder story, but Thomas and his work. "
  • Evangelical film observer : “The critical moment of the action, which is already difficult to understand, fluctuates between reality and unreality, is additionally blurred by lavish accessories. A more interesting film by Antonionis in terms of visual art for open-minded and judgmental adults. "
  • Ernst Wendt in Film 1967 , Friedrich Verlag , pp. 4–12: ​​Blow up is "the first film that consciously shows the dawn of a new narcissistic age - one must say:> mirrors <". A "film that illustrates Marcuse's dream of a society freed from repression, a domineering and emancipated society that exploits the existing, long-developed productive forces." (P. 12)

Awards

Michelangelo Antonioni was nominated for an Oscar as a director and as a screenwriter . He has won the Grand Prix in Cannes , the Prix ​​Léon Moussinac of the French Film Critics Association ( Association Française de la Critique de Cinéma ) and the Prize of the Italian Association of Film Journalists ( Sindacato Nazionale Giornalisti Cinematografici Italiani ). The film itself was also nominated for a Golden Globe .

The British Film Institute voted Blow Up 60th in its list of the best British films of the 20th century , published in 1999 .

reception

In 1981 Brian De Palma quoted Antonioni's work, which has meanwhile become a cult film , in Blow Out - Death Erases All Traces . In his version, the main character (played by John Travolta ) is a sound engineer who accidentally records a car accident and gets on the track of a possible murder.

The Hindi film Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro from 1983 also refers to Blow Up , in which two photographers, while developing images from “Antonioni Park”, discover that they accidentally photographed a murder which they then investigate.

The Federal Agency for Civic Education included the film Blow up in its film canon in 2003.

literature

  • Philippe Garner, David Alan Mellor: Antonioni's Blow Up . Steidl, Göttingen 2010. ISBN 978-3-86930-023-8 . (English)
  • Florian Lehmann: Reality and Imagination. Photography in shared flat Sebalds Austerlitz and Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up. University of Bamberg Press, Bamberg 2013, ISBN 978-3-86309-140-8 .
  • Kim Newman: Blowup (1966). In: Steven Jay Schneider (Ed.): 1001 films. Edition Olms, Zurich 2004, ISBN 3-283-00497-8 , p. 456 f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kim Newman: Blowup (1966). In: Steven Jay Schneider (Ed.): 1001 films. Edition Olms, Zurich 2004, p. 456 f.
  2. ^ Antonioni's Blow-Up, Yardbirds scene. Retrieved May 29, 2020 .
  3. ↑ on the cast cf. Jazz podium . No. 1, 1988, p. 53; the soundtrack was released in 1966 on MGM Records and was re-released in 1986 in the Hollywood Collection of CBS Records (CBS 70285). A version of the Theme from "Blow-Up" with Herbie Hancock as a pianist can be found on at Blue Note released album Oblique by Bobby Hutcherson .
  4. ↑ Josef Schnelle: The "Swinging London" of the 1960s - The film "Blow Up" hit the zeitgeist . In: Deutschlandfunk . December 18, 2006
  5. ↑ https://www.morrisonhotelgallery.com/photographer/default.aspx?photographerID=142
  6. ↑ http://theredlist.com/wiki-2-16-601-788-view-portrait-1-profile-cooper-michael.html
  7. ^ Johann N. Schmidt : Great Britain 1945-2010. Culture, politics, society (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 305). Kröner, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-520-30501-5 , p. 196.
  8. ↑ Blow Up. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed January 3, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  9. ↑ Uwe Nettelbeck : Murder when enlarged. Michelangelo Antonioni's film "Blow Up". In: Die Zeit , May 12, 1967, accessed on August 20, 2014.
  10. ↑ Review No. 136/1967
  11. ^ Rainer Rother : Blow Up. In: Der Filmkanon , April 16, 2010, accessed on August 20, 2014.