Blow-Up

Frost's Descent fell two days ago and the Beginning of Winter is under a fortnight away — the stretch of the year when the light goes fastest. Two black-and-white films, both landing at the hour when light stops being reliable.

The pairing is not arbitrary. In 1980 Martin Scorsese put Antonioni's Blow-Up on his own list of 39 essential foreign films for a young filmmaker. Fourteen years later he made Raging Bull. An ocean and fourteen years apart, the two films do the same thing: they let a man fix on something he cannot possibly prove, until the looking consumes him.

Even the endings interlock. Thomas throws back an imaginary tennis ball for a troupe of mimes and then, for the first time, hears the sound of the ball being hit. Jake recites On the Waterfront to himself in a dressing-room mirror, performing for someone who is not there.

伦敦，1960 年代中期。一个时尚摄影师刚拍完一屋子模特，累了，把整个摄影棚扔在那里，自己开车出门。

他路过一个公园，停下来，看见一对情人，年纪差得很明显。他躲进树丛，举起相机，把他们拍了下来。女人追上来要底片，他不给，还一边后退一边继续拍她。

回到暗房，他把底片冲出来，一次一次放大。相纸上的颗粒越来越粗，粗到某个程度，他看见了拍摄当时没看见的东西。

Antonioni's first entirely English-language film marks the point where he moved from the Italian films' failure of communication to something harder: the unverifiability of reality itself. He said as much on release — the film is not about man's relationship with man, it is about man's relationship with reality.

At Cannes in 1967 it took the festival's highest prize, then formally called the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film. That same year the National Society of Film Critics gave it both Best Film and Best Director. It was nominated for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay at the 39th Academy Awards, and for three BAFTAs in 1968.

In the United States it was denied approval under the Production Code and condemned by the National Legion of Decency; MGM released it through a subsidiary, Premier Productions. It returned roughly $20 million on a $1.8 million budget and is widely credited with hastening the Code's abolition two years later.

The reviews were never unanimous. Andrew Sarris called it a mod masterpiece; Bosley Crowther found it fascinating but the wanderings redundant; Pauline Kael thought it vague and vacuously symbolic, and argued that audiences took it for art precisely because they could not explain it. Ingmar Bergman, who generally disliked Antonioni, called it a masterpiece. Rotten Tomatoes: 87% from 54 reviews, 8.3/10. Metacritic: 82 from 15 critics.