Blow-Up

Michelangelo Antonioni's first English-language film, Blow-Up (1966), won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and carried his cool modernism into the middle of swinging London. Loosely drawn from a short story by Julio Cortázar and produced by Carlo Ponti for MGM, it became a defining document of its moment, and a philosophical puzzle about perception that people have never finished solving.

David Hemmings plays the fashionable, jaded photographer whose darkroom enlargements may reveal a crime committed in a park, or may not; 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 the real subject is the act of looking: the closer the photographer peers at his grainy blow-ups, the less sure he can be of anything at all.

Its ambiguity, and a frankness about sex that startled audiences at the time, made it a worldwide sensation, and its influence runs from Coppola's The Conversation to De Palma's Blow Out. On the surface it is a mystery; underneath it is an inquiry into images, evidence and how little either can be trusted. It is still one of the most analysed films of the 1960s, and viewers have argued over its meaning since the year it came out.