Blowup

Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 feature, created by the Italian filmmaker born on 29 September 1912 in Ferrara, Emilia-Romagna, Italy, and who died on 30 July 2007, offered a wry tribute to the city’s “swinging London” moment. David Hemmings played a fashionable photographer whose persona drew loose inspiration from David Bailey and Terence Donovan. Initially aloof, the character grows fixated on photographs taken in Maryion Park, Woolwich, south London—an area long mistaken for Hampstead Heath—capturing a couple whose image seems ordinary at first glance. Vanessa Redgrave, portraying one of the pair, pursues the negatives with urgency, prompting Hemmings to enlarge a single frame until he discerns what appears to be a lifeless body. Returning to the location yields no corpse, and every trace of proof later vanishes from his workspace. Aimless, he drifts into a London venue where mime performers stage an imaginary tennis match and solicit his help in retrieving their invisible ball, whose sound suddenly registers as he departs. While the narrative probes the nature of perception with sharp impact, music historians prize the picture for the Yardbirds’ brief appearance. During that sequence the rare Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page configuration enacts a guitar-smashing routine originally declined by the Who; the band delivers “Stroll On” before a seemingly indifferent crowd that erupts once Beck hurls the shattered instrument among them. Hemmings seizes the relic, discards it moments later, and onlookers inspect the remnant only to dismiss it as valueless. The track appears on the film’s soundtrack album, supplemented by pieces from jazz musician Herbie Hancock that lend atmospheric depth to what remains among the era’s most compelling cinematic achievements.