Recommended Viewing: 'Blow-Up'

I recently watched Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film, which follows a day in the life of a London fashion photographer. While it is his first English-language film, Edward Bond's dialogue is characteristically sparse. No surprise here, though: Antonioni once declared to an interviewer: 'I don't believe in words.' And indeed, Blow-Up indulges the visual; the Italian director is a great choreographer of space.

Antonioni is said to have gone great lengths to enhance the vividness and boldness of color in the film, famously painting the grass of a London park in order to make it greener.

In Blow-Up, I combined colors to make them appear more real...I had to intervene directly on reality...I had to manipulate reality.

But the film is not as pretentious as all this. Antonioni has an engaging and sensual way of storytelling that satiates the audience while leaving the dots unconnected. Despite its day-in-the-life conceit, the film's narrative is not a linear progression. As David Hemmings, who plays the photographer, retrospectively noted,

The story for him [Antonioni] is the way it is told in visual terms. It is not the linear story that we all would expect of normal filmmaking. It is a series of pictures.

(Of course, all this had me thinking even more about storytelling and Taymor's Spider-Man -- the tension between a story that is overwhelmingly visual and expectations of linear storytelling. Blow-Up has many narrative gaps but I think we are more willing to forgive Antonioni because his concept is so grounded in questions surrounding photography and the extent to which the world around us can be accurately represented and interpreted -- they are ideas which feel organic to the film and its main character.)

Some Blow-Up highlights include a stunning 29-year-old Vanessa Redgrave and a famously sexy photoshoot scene with the Prussian model Veruschka.

[Blow-Up on iTunes]