A work of lasting importance and enduring enigma, BLOW-UP was Antonioni’s first film in English, set in “swinging” mid-Sixties London and starring David Hemmings as a disaffected fashion photographer who stumbles upon a murder while taking pictures of a couple making love in a park. Or so his blown-up photographs of the tryst seem to suggest. In its time, Antonioni’s narrative ambiguities and irresolutions turned the question of whether the murder had really taken place into the trendiest debate since the mystery of whether A really met X last year at Marienbad. As the callow shutterbug, Hemmings is a whiter shade of pale, his pallid ennui masterfully deployed by Antonioni. As Jane, the woman who may or may not have been used as a lure to kill her suitor, Vanessa Redgrave is incandescent, her erotic anxiety palpable as she tries to wrest from the photographer an image that has both literally and metaphorically captured her. Four decades after its making, BLOW-UP continues to elicit intense critical scrutiny, and even if part of its kick is of the time capsule sort (Veruschka, Jane Birkin, The Yardbirds make appearances), its abiding fascination is primarily aesthetic. “BLOW-UP is the movie of the year. It is to Antonioni what LOLA MONTÈS was to Ophuls, UGETSU to Mizoguchi, CONTEMPT to Godard, FRENCH CANCAN to Renoir, LIMELIGHT to Chaplin, REAR WINDOW to Hitchcock, 8 ½ to Fellini – a statement of the artist, not on life but on art itself as the consuming passion of an artist’s life” (Andrew Sarris).