Blow-Up

"What's so important about my bloody pictures?"

"You ever do any modeling? Fashion stuff, I mean. You've got it."

"You'll get your pictures. I promise. I always keep my word."

"Give me your money. Do it."

"The photographer in Blow-Up, who is not a philosopher, wants to see things closer up. But it so happens that, by enlarging too far, the object itself decomposes and disappears. Hence there's a moment in which we grasp reality, but then the moment passes. This was in part the meaning of Blow-Up."

"This is a fascinating picture, which has something real to say about the matter of personal involvement and emotional commitment in a jazzed-up, media-hooked-in world so cluttered with synthetic stimulations that natural feelings are overwhelmed."

"Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up opened in America two months before I became a film critic, and colored my first years on the job with its lingering influence. It was the opening salvo of the emerging "film generation," … the highest-grossing art film to date, was picked as the best film of 1967 by the National Society of Film Critics, and got Oscar nominations for screenplay and direction. Today, you rarely hear it mentioned. Young audiences aren't interested any more in a movie about a "trendy" London photographer who may or may not have witnessed a murder, who lives a life of cynicism and ennui, and who ends up in a park at dawn, watching college kids play tennis with an imaginary ball. The twentysomethings who bought tickets for Blow-Up are now focused on ironic, self-referential slasher movies."

"I revisited Blow-Up in a shot-by-shot analysis. Freed from the hype and fashion, it emerges as a great film, if not the one we thought we were seeing at the time. This was at the 1998 Virginia Festival of American Film in Charlottesville, which had "Cool" as its theme. The festival began with the emergence of the Beat Generation and advanced through Cassavetes to Blow-Up — after which the virus of Cool leaped from its nurturing subculture into millions of willing new hosts, and has colored our society ever since, right down to and manifestly including South Park."

"The natural world is arrayed against the artificial scene; conscience is deployed against convention. If you've never seen Blow-Up, see it now, if only to see what part of the world was like 40 years ago."

"Vanessa Redgrave - Jane"

"Sarah Miles - Patricia"

"David Hemmings - Thomas"

"John Castle - Bill"

"Jane Birkin - The Brunette"

"Gillian Hills - The Blonde"

"Peter Bowles - Ron"

"Veruschka von Lehndorff - Herself"

"Tsai Chin - Thomas's receptionist"

"Jeff Beck - Himself"

"Sometimes reality is the strangest fantasy of all."

"Antonioni's camera never flinches. At love without meaning. At murder without guilt. At the dazzle and madness of youth today."