A fashion photographer unknowingly captures a death on film after following two lovers in a park.
A successful mod photographer in London whose world is bounded by fashion, pop music, marijuana, and easy sex, feels his life is boring and despairing. Then he meets a mysterious beauty, and also notices something frightfully suspicious on one of his photographs of her taken in a park. The fact that he may have photographed a murder does not occur to him until he studies and then blows up his negatives, uncovering details, blowing up smaller and smaller elements, and finally putting the puzzle together.—Anonymous
Thomas is a London-based photographer who leads the life of excess typical of late 1960s mod London. He is primarily a highly sought-after studio fashion photographer, although he is somewhat tiring of the vacuousness associated with it. He is also working on a book, a photographic collection of primarily darker images of human life, which is why he spent a night in a flophouse where he secretly took some photos. While he is out one day, Thomas spies a May-September female-male couple being affectionate with each other in a park. From a distance, he clandestinely starts to photograph them, hoping to use the photographs as the final ones for his book. The female eventually sees what he is doing and rushes over wanting him to stop and to give her the roll of film. She states that the photographs will make her already complicated life more complicated. Following him back to his studio, she does whatever she needs to to get the film. He eventually complies, however in reality he has provided her with a different roll. After he develops the photographs, he notices something further in the background of the shots. Blowing them up, he believes he either photographed an attempted murder or an actual murder. The photos begin a quest for Thomas to match his perception to reality.—Huggo
In the 60's, in London, Thomas is a successful, dedicated and arrogant photographer. He has just left a homeless shelter, since he is preparing photos about violence, and drives his Rolls-Royce to his studio, where he is taking pictures of top-models. He goes to a park and starts randomly shooting pictures. He takes some pictures of a young woman and an old man together, and the woman tries to retrieve the negative. The woman follows him to his studio, trying to get the negative and offering even sex with him for the negative, but he gives another one to her. He becomes obsessed, trying to understand the interest of the woman in the pictures. Then he reveals the negative and blows-up some details, discovering what might be a dead body in the park.—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
During the swinging 1960s, a London photographer believes he inadvertently photographed evidence of a murder only to have the evidence mysteriously disappear. Professional photographer Thomas saw nothing. And he saw everything. Enlargements of pictures he secretly took of a romantic couple in the park reveal a murder in progress. Or do they? Winner of 1966 Best Picture and Best Director Awards from the then-new National Society of Film Critics (as well as Oscar-nominated for Best Director and Best Screenplay), director Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up is an influential, stylish study of paranoid intrigue and disorientation. It is also a time capsule of mod London, a mindscape of the era's fashions, free love, parties, music (Herbie Hancock wrote the score and The Yardbirds riff at a club) and hip languor. David Hemmings plays the jaded photographer enlivened by the mystery in his photos. Vanessa Redgrave is the elusive woman pictured in them. And the enigma of what you see, what you don't see and what the camera sees is yours to solve.
A day in the life of a glamorous fashion photographer, Thomas (David Hemmings), inspired by the life of an actual "Swinging London" photographer, David Bailey. Thomas tries to disguise himself as an everyday working man. He wants to capture the human life and emotions in its raw form by experiencing it up close.
After spending the night at a doss house (a cheap lodging for the homeless and tramps) where he has taken pictures for a book of art photos, Thomas is late for a photo shoot with Veruschka at his studio, which in turn makes him late for a shoot with other models later in the morning. Veruschka is angry at Thomas for keeping her waiting for over an hour. Veruschka says that she has a plane to catch for Paris at 11 AM and now she is likely to be late.Thomas shoots several reels of photos with Veruschka in various poses. Thomas is great at working with models to get the emotions and poses he wants. Reg (Reg Wilkins) is Thomas's assistant.Thomas does another photo shoot with a group of 6 models. He treats the models very badly when he doesn't get what he wants on the sets.
He grows bored and walks off, leaving the models and production staff in the lurch. As he leaves the studio, two teenage girls who are aspiring models (Jane Birkin and Gillian Hills) ask to speak with him, but the photographer drives off to look at an antiques shop. Antique shop owner (Susan Brodrick) and the shopkeeper (Harry Hutchinson) tell Thomas that they have no cheap bargains in their shop. Thomas is looking for landscapes, but the shopkeeper says that they are all sold.The owner wants to go to Nepal. Thomas buys a propeller from her for 8 pounds and loads the propeller into his car. But the owner offers to get it delivered to him later.
Wandering into Maryon Park, he takes photos of two lovers. The woman Jane (Vanessa Redgrave) is furious at being photographed. Jane demands the film and offers to pay for it. Thomas agrees to part with the film, but not right then and there. Jane runs away and Thomas takes a few more pictures of the park, but Jane's lover is nowhere to be seen.The photographer then meets his agent Ron (Peter Bowles) for lunch and notices a man following him and looking into his car.
Back at his studio, the woman Jane arrives asking for the film (but doesn't say how she found Thomas). Thomas wants to know why Jane wants the roll back, but Jane says that her private life is already a mess. Jane is desperate and Thomas tries to engage her in idle chit-chat. Jane even offers sex to him in exchange for the roll.Thomas deliberately hands her a different roll. She in turn writes down a false telephone number to give to him.After Jane leaves, Thomas goes to his dark room to develop the film. The initial photos of the park look a bit odd to Thomas. His many enlargements of the black and white film are grainy but seem to show a dead body in the grass and a killer lurking in the trees with a gun. Thomas tries to call Jane, but she had given him a wrong number. It also looked like Jane knew that there was a shooter hiding in the bushes and she was looking in his direction. In the later photos, he finds a dead body lying the grass, with Jane running away from the camera.He is disturbed by a knock on the door, but it is the two girls again, with whom he has a romp in his studio and falls asleep. Awakening, he finds they hope he will photograph them, but he tells them to leave, saying, "Tomorrow! Tomorrow!"
As evening falls, the photographer goes back to the park and finds the body of a man (it is the same man that Jane was shown to be having a romp with earlier in the day), but he has not brought his camera and is scared off by a twig breaking, as if being stepped on. The photographer returns to his studio to find that all the negatives and prints are gone except for one very grainy blowup showing the body. His dark room has been vandalized and his equipment damaged.
After driving into town, he sees the woman Jane and follows her into a club where The Yardbirds, featuring both Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck on guitar and Keith Relf on vocals, are seen performing the song "Stroll On." A buzz in Beck's amplifier angers him so much he smashes his guitar on stage, then throws its neck into the crowd, the photographer makes a grab for it as a souvenir. The photographer grabs the neck and runs out of the club before anyone can snatch it from him. Then he has second thoughts about it, throws it on the pavement and walks away. A passer-by picks up the neck and throws it back down, not realizing it's from Beck's guitar.
At a drug-drenched party in a house on the Thames near central London, the photographer finds both Veruschka, who had told him that she was going to Paris - when confronted, she says she is in Paris - and his agent Ron, whom he wants to bring to the park as a witness. However, the photographer cannot put across what he has photographed. Waking up in the house at sunrise, he goes back to the park alone and finds that the body is gone.
Befuddled, he watches a mimed tennis match, is drawn into it, picks up the imaginary ball and throws it back to the two players. While he watches the mime, the sound of the ball being played is heard. As the photographer watches this mimed match alone on the lawn, his image fades away, leaving only the grass.
