1001 Club - Blow-Up (1966)

#467. Blow-Up (1966)

Why It's In The Book: "Michelangelo Antonioni became an international filmmaker with this 1966 picture… Turning his outsider’s eye on a London that was just beginning to swing, Antonioni captures precisely a time and a place that seemed culturally significant. As with Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, a film intended as a satirical attack on a certain type of modern sophistication and emptiness emerges almost as a celebration of the fashions, mores, music, sexuality, and strangeness of a world it would like to disapprove of…
Despite its thriller-style hook (often hommaged in straighter suspense films like Coppola’s The Conversation or De Palma’s Blow Out), this is less a mystery than a portrait of swinging alienation… this is a film about an alien world…" -1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

Member Ratings

Adolytsi - 9/10
" This is a film that has a lot to say, and that viewers and critics alike can have a lot to say about it. It ignites and enlivens discussions, especially about the film’s enigmatic ending."
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marie_dressler - 9/10
"While Blow-Up can hardly be called entertaining, it is a sometimes frustrating but intellectually stimulating and visually exciting examination of an artist’s unsuccessful struggle to bring order out of chaos and the emptiness of the materialism at the heart of swinging London."
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Movie Guy Steve - 8/10
"Ultimately, I think I’d like a little less artistic oomph and a little more story earlier on."
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Nicolas Krizan - 8/10
"Clever, camp, and irritating depiction of the life of a cynical bastard"
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Squish - 8/10
"It's in our nature [to ask] "What's this about?" ... but in the case of Blow-Up, asking that question is missing the point. "
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Siochembio - 7.5/10
"Of all the Antonioni films I've seen, Blow-Up is the most accessible, but that's not saying much."
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Kim Wilson - 4/10
"Somehow this 1966 film from famed Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni earned two Academy Award nominations: Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. Obviously drug abuse was a huge problem for Academy voters in the mid-60s, because Blow-Up is a really bad art film gone horribly wrong."
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Overall Rating: 7.6/10