Blowup

Blowup (sometimes incorrectly stylized as Blow-up or Blow Up) is a 1966 mystery thriller film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. It was Antonioni's first entirely English-language film, and follows a fashion photographer, played by David Hemmings, who believes he has unwittingly captured a murder on film. The film also stars Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, John Castle, Jane Birkin, Tsai Chin, Peter Bowles, and Gillian Hills, as well as 1960s model Veruschka. The screenplay was by Antonioni and Tonino Guerra, with English dialogue by British playwright Edward Bond. The film was produced by Carlo Ponti. The plot was inspired by Julio Cortázar's short story, "Las babas del diablo" or "The Devil's Drool" (1959), translated also as "Blow Up" in Blow-up and Other Stories, in turn based on a story told to Cortázar by photographer Sergio Larraín, and by the life of Swinging London photographer David Bailey. The film's diegetic music was scored by jazz pianist Herbie Hancock. In the main competition section of the Cannes Film Festival, Blowup won the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film, the festival's highest honour. The American release of the counterculture-era film with its explicit sexual content (by contemporary standards) by a major Hollywood studio was in direct defiance of the Production Code. Its subsequent critical and box-office success influenced the abandonment of the code in 1968 in favour of the MPAA film rating system. In 2012, Blowup was ranked No. 144 in the Sight & Sound critics' poll of the world's greatest films.