Blow-Up (1966) - Quotes

The Unflinching Lens of Modern Existence

Taglines: Antonioni's camera never flinches. At love without meaning. At murder without guilt. At the dazzle and madness of youth today.

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Reality as the Strangest Fantasy

Taglines: Sometimes reality is the strangest fantasy of all.

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Reflections on Perception and Reality in Blow-Up

Quotes about Blowup: [[w:Andrew Sarris|Andrew Sarris] * ], in New York Observer (7 June 2006)

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Contrast Between Nature and Artifice in Blow-Up

Quotes about Blowup: The natural world is arrayed against the artificial scene; conscience is deployed against convention. If you've never seen Blow-Up, see it now, if only to see what part of the world was like 40 years ago.

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Exploring Perception and Reality in Blow-Up

Quotes about Blowup: [[Roger Ebert] * ] in a review of Blow-Up (8 November 1998)

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Reassessing Blow-Up's Cultural Impact Over Time

Quotes about Blowup: [[w:John Cassavetes|Cassavetes; [South Park] I revisited Blow-Up in a shot-by-shot analysis. Freed from the hype and fashion, it emerges as a great film, if not the one we thought we were seeing at the time. This was at the 1998 Virginia Festival of American Film in Charlottesville, which had "Cool" as its theme. The festival began with the emergence of the Beat Generation and advanced through ] to Blow-Up — after which the virus of Cool leaped from its nurturing subculture into millions of willing new hosts, and has colored our society ever since, right down to and manifestly including ].

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The Lasting Impact of Blow-Up on Cinema

Quotes about Blowup: [[Michelangelo Antonioni] ]'s Blow-Up opened in America two months before I became a film critic, and colored my first years on the job with its lingering influence. It was the opening salvo of the emerging "film generation," … the highest-grossing art film to date, was picked as the best film of 1967 by the National Society of Film Critics, and got Oscar nominations for screenplay and direction. Today, you rarely hear it mentioned. Young audiences aren't interested any more in a movie about a "trendy" London photographer who may or may not have witnessed a murder, who lives a life of cynicism and ennui, and who ends up in a park at dawn, watching college kids play tennis with an imaginary ball. The twentysomethings who bought tickets for Blow-Up are now focused on ironic, self-referential slasher movies.

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Exploring Authenticity in a Media-Saturated World

Quotes about Blowup: This is a fascinating picture, which has something real to say about the matter of personal involvement and emotional commitment in a jazzed-up, media-hooked-in world so cluttered with synthetic stimulations that natural feelings are overwhelmed.

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Perception and Reality in Blow-Up

Quotes about Blowup: [[Michelangelo Antonioni] * ], as quoted in Michelangelo Antonioni : The Complete Films (2004) edited by Seymour Chatman and Paul Duncan, p. 113

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The Limits of Perception and Reality

Quotes about Blowup: The photographer in Blow-Up, who is not a philosopher, wants to see things closer up. But it so happens that, by enlarging too far, the object itself decomposes and disappears. Hence there's a moment in which we grasp reality, but then the moment passes. This was in part the meaning of Blow-Up.

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Perception and Reality in a Park Encounter

Ron: What did you see in that park?

Thomas: Nothing.

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Unexpected Revelations at a London Party

Thomas: [seeing [[w:Veruschka von Lehndorff|Verushka] ] at a London party] I thought you were supposed to be in Paris.

Verushka: I am in Paris.

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The Meaning of Names and Intimacy

Thomas: What's your name? Oh, forget it — what's the use of a name? What do you they call you in bed?

Brunette woman: I only go to bed to sleep.

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Complicated Relationships and Perceptions of Beauty

Jane: [handing him back the phone] Why should I speak to her?

Thomas: [hangs up the phone, and walks around the room] Sorry love, the bird I'm with won't talk to you. … She isn't my wife, really. We just have some kids. … No, no kids, not even kids. Sometimes, though, it feels as if we had kids. … She isn't beautiful, she's... easy to live with. … No, she isn't. … That's why I don't live with her. … But even with beautiful girls, you look at them and that's that.

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