In reply to replicant:

i like this film for its colour...with whole streets painted to make it colour co-ordinated..i like the women,birkin.redgrave,verussskkka...("you mean this is not paris?)the famous quote.
i like the non-linnear narritive,tarkovski,terence davies do that better..but the mirror/magic realism of it is good....the tennis match with painted white faces reminds me of neue sachlichkeit painting and anton radersheidt in particular...
that yardbirds mod concert finds its echo years later in wings of desire..nick cave and the bad seeds..but its the colour...london sixties-colour that and the image of david hemmings doing a real estate deal on the phone in his rolls...."geta move on theres...poofs with poodles walkin round ere already"!

In reply to shaw:

A classic, loosely based around Bailey and the sixties scene.

In reply to Chris Summerfield:

I think the director was mocking the cool swinging 60's crowd, how remote and cold and emotionally deteched they were, and once cool is out of its context, it's meaningless. Like in the concert when the photographer got the arm of the guitar after it's been trashed by the guitarist, he ran out of the place into the street, and away from the cool swinging crowd who all wanted the piece, but once he was on the street with other types of people, the piece became meaningless and worthless, he threw it away and some bystander picked it up, took one look, then threw it away also. I think the director was making a specific statment about how he felt all the coolness surrounding the culture and fashion, altimately were all meaningless, like the tennis match in the end. The party scene reminded me of La Dolce Vita, which was the same thing about the cold, detechness of modern culture, and the emptiness of the cool people. I got all these new meaning the second time watching it, the first time I was too young to see the underlining metaphors.

In reply to shaw:

His first colored movie was "Red Desert", which was also about industrialized Italy and how it's damaging to the human spirits, and how unnatural that is and the woman was going mad because she couldn't deal with the moderness, the isolation. Blow Up is like a continuation of that theme, at least to me, the seemingly swinging London cool people to Antonioni, were all detached and existential and mannered. The DVD of it had good commentary on this film. It's more than just surface stuff, I think, that's why it's borderline between art film and commercially successful film.

In reply to KaWai:

i think its the surface thats so attractive,so compelling,yet also disturbing when we find nothing more.
antonioni...." i dyed the grass around the shed on the edge of the marsh in order to reinforce the sense of desolation of death.the landscape had to be rendered truthfully.when the trees are dead they have that colour"
goddard..."the drama is no longer psycolgical but ..plastic."
antonioni.."its the same thing"
an excert from antonioni and goddard on the use of colour in the red dessert,cahiers du cinema in english jun 1966.

In reply to KaWai:

The commentary on Blow-Up was too reductive. It was just some film professor (who had nothing to do with the making of the film) going: 'this shot is a comment on the vapidity of models...' , 'this shot is a comment on the emptiness of fashion..' etc etc. It was really weak.

The movie is too rich to ONLY be some disguised criticisms.