For my 100th post: another BLOW-UP poster! There are so many variations of this BLOW-UP poster - in different colours and sizes and various other graphics all using the same iconic image of Hemmings and Verushka. I like this one.Its still my top film ... seeing it when I was 21 in 1967 was like seeing myself up there on the screen as Hemmings' image then was just how we looked and dressed ourselves and I lived in those locations. Its quintessenially '60s but also somehow timesless. As ever, Antonioni's mix of architecture, places, people, spaces (and Herbie Hancock's score) is something I respond to and never get tired of. The very green park is a timeless place (it still looks much the same now), ditto that studio, and I love the sense of London evolving and changing as it was in the mid-60s with those scenes driving around the city and in Chelsea.
For the next 100: Delon and PLEIN SOLEIL; Francoise Hardy, Marie Laforet (from PLEIN SOLEIL) and those Ye-Ye girls; Great Nights in the Theatre (FUNNY GIRL in London 1966, THREE SISTERS 1968, 6 HAMLETs, Maggie & Ingmar's HEDDA 1970, HOME 1970, Miss Peggy Lee 1971, Carol Channing 1968, The Doors at the Roundhouse 1968, Lauren Bacall in APPLAUSE, A CHORUS LINE on my 30th birthday, 3 A LITTLE NIGHT MUSICs etc); more '50s movies; '60s movies continued - the schlock choices; back to art house; THE BEST OF EVERYTHING; Cukor's LES GIRLS -v- Minnelli's DESIGNING WOMAN; Silvana Mangano, Ingrid Thulin, Lee Remick, Claire Bloom, Sarah Miles, Anne Baxter, Anita Ekberg, Jeffrey Hunter, Clifton Webb, George Sanders, London in the movies, Sword and Sandals, Hammer Films, Belinda Lee, those interesting actors: Stephen Boyd, Laurence Harvey, Peter Finch, Alan Bates and more ...plus those stars at the National Film Theatre in the 70s: Bette Davis, Olivia DeHavilland, Lee Remick, Dirk Bogarde, Charlton Heston, James Mason, John Huston, Steven Spielberg, Terence Rattigan, Rex Harrison, Angela Lansbury,etc.
I was 18 here in the States when Blow-Up came out. It was an instant hit in a changing time. You can't imagine the impact it had and the controversy it caused in a world where everything had been the same for so many decades. I had a high school French teacher at that time who saw it and was asking many questions about the story as did everybody. What did it mean? . It was all so-oo different. There was always the question of the Yardbirds breaking up their guitars. What was the mime players scene all about? Everything seemed to be a puzzle. This was the time when just about everything hip and stylish came from England. It had all started with the Beatles. We have seen so much since those years that when I just saw Blow-Up recently [ after so many decades ] that I had no questions to ask. It seemed sparse and minimal, with obvious metaphor. Yet, there will always be that magical time when something as simple and new as a hip hugging miniskirt with a belt said something enormous. I love your poster.
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