OverviewReviewCastProduction CreditsAwards
   
Watch the trailer
Blow-Up
Plot Synopsis by Karl Williams

Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni's first English-language production was also his only box office hit, widely considered one of the seminal films of the 1960s. Thomas (David Hemmings) is a nihilistic, wealthy fashion photographer in mod "Swinging London." Filled with ennui, bored with his "fab" but oddly-lifeless existence of casual sex and drug use, Thomas comes alive when he wanders through a park, stops to take pictures of a couple embracing, and upon developing the images, believes that he has photographed a murder. Pursued by Jane (Vanessa Redgrave), the woman who is in the photos, Thomas pretends to give her the pictures, but in reality, he passes off a different roll of film to her. Thomas returns to the park and discovers that there is, indeed, a dead body lying in the shrubbery: the gray-haired man who was embracing Jane. Has she murdered him, or does Thomas' photo reveal a man with a gun hiding nearby? Antonioni's thriller is a puzzling, existential, adroitly-assembled masterpiece.

» View DVD Releases
Similar Works
Blow Out  (1981, Brian De Palma)
L'Avventura  (1960, Michelangelo Antonioni)
Performance  (1970, Donald Cammell, Nicolas Roeg)
Red Desert  (1964, Michelangelo Antonioni)
The Man Who Left His Will on Film  (1970, Nagisa Oshima)
Irreversible  (2002, Gaspar NoĆ©)
The Swap  (1969, John C. Broderick, John Shade)
The Conversation  (1974, Francis Ford Coppola)
Don't Look Now  (1973, Nicolas Roeg)
Eyes Wide Shut  (1999, Stanley Kubrick)
Other Related Works
 Has been re-edited into:    Up and Out  (1998, Christian Marclay)
 Is related to:    November  (2003, Greg Harrison)