Blow-Up (1966)

"I am... in Paris."

‘A glamorous fantasy, a world of fashion photographers, antique dealers and the shallow Beau Monde, of Carnaby Street and The King’s Road.

What makes a cult film? Why are If…. (1968), Performance (1970), The Wicker Man (1973), and Withnail & I (1987) considered cult films, yet Gone with the Wind (1939), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and Jaws (1975)— despite their popularity— are not. That’s a difficult question. Some of the more highfalutin’ critics get a bit sniffy about the word ‘cult’, presumably seeing it as a sloppy, lazy or amateur definition. Personally, I don’t have a problem with it. Perhaps cult films need to have something flawed about them? Failed at the box office (think Heaven’s Gate), gathering momentum over time, or rediscovered— like missing chunks from The Wicker Man found beneath a concrete pylon on the Westway extension of the A40. Or they just need to be a little bit weird.

Which takes us to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), the second film in our London Sixties Double Bill. Friday’s film was The London Nobody Knows (1967). Both films are kinda strange- if seen from a different perspective. The London of both films is a bizarre place. Still, if the London of The London Nobody Knows is derelict, seedy and squalid, a city of the destitute and the dispossessed— the London of Blow-Up is a glamorous fantasy, a world of fashion photographers, antique dealers and the shallow Beau Monde, of Carnaby Street and The King’s Road. Yet both Londons are haunted. And Blow-Up is undoubtedly a cult classic— whatever that means. Put it this way, I know people who get the ‘bus to Maryon Park and reenact choice scenes from the film.

‘Wake Up!’

For those of you who have yet to see it, David Hemmings (then a relative unknown) stars as uber-fashionable photographer Thomas (an open Rolls-Royce, tight white jeans and a blue and white checked shirt)— presumably based on David Bailey— who comes to believe that he’s photographed a murder— by accident. It’s Sixties London and Chelsea’s happening. Swinging London is an attractive myth. Forget the dropped ‘aitches of Up the Junction (1968)— the reality centred upon a coterie of creatives clustered around The King’s Road. As Christopher Booker points out in his immensely readable The Neophiliacs: The Revolution in English Life in the Fifties and Sixties (1969), the movers and shakers, the ‘New Aristocracy’ as glamorised in the Sunday colour supplements, were primarily upper and upper-middle-class public school types: Mary Quant’s husband, the restaurateur Alexander Plunket-Greene (Eton), David Hicks (Charterhouse), Terence Conran (Bryanston), Mark Boxer (Berkhamstead). Steed is an Old Etonian. Forget the supposed ‘classless society’, outside the glittering environs of Chelsea, it’s more Woodbine, smelly tweed overcoat and holidays in Skegness.

‘After Dali’s elephant skull, the ultimate Surrealist prop…’

Anyway. Thomas is a cool (read bored), if not especially likeable character, not adverse to a bit of capitalistic property speculation. Whilst scouting a run-down part of South East London he discovers a propeller (after Dali’s elephant skull, the ultimate Surrealist prop) in an antique shop— in a building directly opposite the gates of Maryon Park, Greenwich.

‘Maryon Park: a strange, lonely setting: a terrific sense of place…’

The park’s still there, even if the corner shop is not— very similar to how it appears in the film— a strange, lonely setting with its own microclimate, designated a site of Special Scientific Interest, close to the Greenwich Meridian Line, and the psycho-geographer’s favourite. There’s a terrific sense of place: the rustle of trees in the wind, the luminous light— a sense of being watched. Voyeurism. Hanging around in the park, Thomas photographs an interesting couple: a good-looking woman (Vanessa Redgrave, checked shirt and man's Rolex wristwatch) and an older middle-aged boyfriend. There's some sort of tiff.

Blow-Up…

Back in his trendy white-painted studio (from the outside, John Cowan's studio in Holland Park), Thomas develops the morning's shoot— and that's where the fun begins. The development scene (the 'blow-up') goes on for yonks— it's marvellously slow, yet strangely hypnotic. I remember watching this for the first time— caught by accident on late-night television— and I couldn't tear myself away, although it took me at least five viewings before it all began to make sense. And having now seen the film numerous times, I can assure you that it does make sense— the plot fits together like a jigsaw puzzle. I promise. Although, admittedly, one might argue exactly the opposite: that Blow-Up is deliberately meaningless and ambiguous: a film about memory and the unreliability of memory.

‘Christopher Gibbs and Cheyne Walk: an atmospheric fug…’

But for the first time in his superficial career, Thomas has discovered something life-changing, something really big— yet nobody around him cares— especially his agent, played by a splendid, bearded Peter Bowles. Thomas is the only one who is awake. Everybody else is either too shallow or spaced out. The party scene at the end of the film was shot in antiques dealer Christopher Gibbs’ flat in Lindsey House, Cheyne Walk (also, I gather, used as a location for Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising) and features Gibbs’ fashionable friends lounging around on Moroccan cushions in an atmospheric fug, plus Verushka’s (aka the Countess Vera Gottliebe Anna Gräfin von Lehndorff-Steinort) immortal line: ‘I am… in Paris.’ And the audience in the Yardbird’s basement gig! In Heddon Street, just off Regent Street (Davie Bowie, gas lamp and Ziggy Stardust). They’re lobotomised.

Painted red in the Stockwell Road…

Blow-Up's an evocative snapshot of a grimy London in the late Sixties, of St James's Palace covered in soot, of the new tower blocks at London Wall (also featured in The London Nobody Knows). Antonioni’s a control freak, a master of detail; every shot worked out as an aesthetic vision- so that houses and shops in the Stockwell Road are painted red, and Maryon Park's pathways, fences and grass (apparently) painted black and a dark and luminous green.

The film ends with a Land Rover and a gang of mime artists, a bunch of hippies in striped black and white with painted faces. Very Sixties that. The whimsical, slapstick, clown thing. You see it in The Prisoner, in The Avengers and Les Bicyclettes de Belsize (1968). Thomas shrugs his shoulders and joins their make-believe game of tennis. Truth or illusion? What's the difference? But by the early-to-mid Seventies, the surreal, psychedelic whimsy of the late Sixties (Napoleon, brass tubas and Marcel Marceau) looked decidedly old-hat. Gritty, permissive realism was the thing: the end of the American Dream:  Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Frenzy (1972) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).

Blow-Up (1966) is available to watch on DVD, Blu-Ray and digital download. You've just been reading a newsletter for both free and 'paid-for' subscribers. I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you to all those of you who have signed up. Really appreciated. To view the other films we’ve covered so far, please go to the Luke Honey WEEKEND FLICKS. archive. ‘Paid for’ subscribers get two weekend film recommendations, access to the entire archive and, as from today, the right to comment.

I will be back next Friday. In the meantime, I hope you have a relaxing and cinematic Sunday. So why not settle down with a cocktail and a film recommendation this evening? I can’t think of anything more civilised.