Blow-Up

Michelangelo Antonioni's first English-language film, Blow-Up (1966), won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and brought the Italian master's cool modernism to the very heart of swinging London. Loosely drawn from a short story by Julio Cortázar and produced by Carlo Ponti for MGM, it became both a defining document of its moment and an enduring philosophical puzzle about perception.

David Hemmings plays the fashionable, jaded photographer whose darkroom enlargements may — or may not — reveal a crime committed in a park; Vanessa Redgrave is the woman desperate to recover the film, with Sarah Miles and the model Veruschka among the faces of the period. Antonioni shoots a London of parks, studios, antique shops and pop clubs with detached fascination, and turns the very act of looking into the film's true subject: the closer the photographer peers at his grainy blow-ups, the less he can be certain of anything at all.

The film's ambiguity and its then-startling frankness about sex made it a worldwide sensation, and it left a deep mark on cinema, from Coppola's The Conversation to De Palma's Blow Out. A meditation on image, evidence and the instability of reality disguised as a mystery, it remains one of the most analysed films of the 1960s — and ends on a wordless gesture, played out on a tennis court, that viewers have argued over ever since.