Nothing’s more iconic than the Swingin’ London of the Sixties: Blow-Up is a 1966 movie directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, awarded with the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival the year after. Featuring actors and models like Jane Birkin, David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave and Verushka, the story is about a fashion photographer who thinks he had seen –and photographed- accidentally a murder in the park. The plot comes from a short story by Julio Cortázar, and the character of Thomas is directly inspired by the life of London photographer David Bailey.
It’s a really cutting edge movie for that period, maybe it was hard to get what Antonioni meant, that “sometimes reality is the strangest fantasy of all”; a very cryptical message about the meaning of the camera as a medium, and its role as a witness of what’s real (because it appears in a photo) and what’s not.
And in the background the fashion world, with its fabulous models, dresses and that optical effect. A very masterpiece, for those of you that haven’t seen it yet, a great film that marked a precise period, with a special tribute to the role of the image, much like today.
