A hip young photographer discovers hidden clues in some innocuous pictures he snapped. Perhaps there has been a murder! Yet Blowup isn't a crime drama or a mystery thriller. It's actually a portrait of youthful dissatisfaction, and a snapshot of London in the 1960s. Why has it endured? Why do we still care? Let's go into the darkroom and find out.

The praise: Blowup was nominated for Academy Awards in the categories of Best Director and Original Screenplay. It won neither of them, but a few months later took the Grand Prix at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival. Meanwhile, Time, Newsweek, Life, and The New Yorker all named it the best film of the year.

The context: In the 1960s, as the first generation of people too young to recall World War II came of age, London became a hub of hedonism. "Swinging London," as it was called, was a high-spirited mix of fashion, jazz, sex, drugs, and general youthful merriment. Modern audiences may know this world best from the Austin Powers movies, but the most famous contemporary account is Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup.

Antonioni, an Italian who was in his 50s during the 1960s, had had success on the international art-house circuit with L'avventura (1960) and La notte (1961). Blowup was his first English-language film, produced by MGM and shot in London with some fairly recognizable stars. Much of Antonioni's previous work had dealt with alienation in the modern world; Blowup was to be no different, though the world was mid-'60s London instead of Italy, and Antonioni's main character -- for the first time in one of his major works -- was male.

In America, the art-house scene was growing rapidly. There was now a significant market for foreign films, and the English-language debut of an acclaimed European director was bound to attract attention. But the film's greatest notoriety in the States stemmed from something else: Due to its racy content, it was being denied an approval certificate from the Motion Picture Association of America. This was before the ratings system -- indeed, it was things like this that led to the ratings system -- and a film in those days was either "approved" or not. Blowup has several topless ladies cavorting (and, it was rumored, even a glimpse of pubic hair, though you'd have to do some freeze-framing to find it), in addition to a cavalier attitude toward sex and several scenes in which people smoked marijuana. (We're used to it now, but people smoking pot in a movie in 1966 was HUGE.) The MPAA wouldn't approve it.

That didn't mean the film couldn't play in theaters, though it did mean that some theater owners wouldn't show it and some newspapers wouldn't print ads for it. It also meant that MGM, as one of the MPAA's member studios, couldn't distribute the film without rocking the boat. The solution: MGM invented a subsidiary, Premier Productions, to act as U.S. distributor. The film, which cost less than $2 million to make, grossed $20 million in America alone, which would be about $135 million at today's ticket prices. In 1968, thanks to films like Blowup and Bonnie and Clyde, the MPAA had adopted a ratings system like the one we're familiar with now, finally allowing for the idea that a movie could be inappropriate for general audiences but OK for adults.

The movie: A freelance magazine photographer (David Hemmings) is bored with London, bored with his job, bored with everything -- until he happens to snap photos of a woman (Vanessa Redgrave) in a public park, and his curiosity is piqued when she demands the negatives.

The film is one of the most evocative portraits of Swinging London, and as such has influenced other depictions of that era. When Antonioni died, in 2007, the U.K.'s Telegraph newspaper noted that Blowup "became a fashionable enigma, a cultural icon to which people would point whenever called upon to explain what the 1960s were all about." One writer says that "any TV documentary on music, cinema or Britain in the '60s either uses clips from the film, or archive footage that’s almost interchangeable." The way the photographer behaves with his beautiful female subjects -- that whole "make love to the camera" thing -- has been emulated and parodied numerous times. Mike Myers' Austin Powers character is based as much on the photographer in this film as he is on James Bond.

What to look for: The leading cause of viewers watching Blowup and coming away thinking "What's the big deal?" is that they are expecting the film to have more plot than it has. This is understandable. The story involves a photographer who believes he has accidentally captured footage of a murder. Surely this could be the basis of a thrilling mystery!

And indeed it could be. But Blowup is not that film, nor does it intend to be. Antonioni wasn't trying to make an exciting whodunit. In fact, his purpose is almost the opposite: to show that in this modern, fashionable world, even a supposedly serious thing like murder doesn't matter if the observer has no connection to it. Without some context to give it meaning, the incident is meaningless.

The photographer -- not named in the film, but apparently called Thomas -- seems to represent Antonioni, or filmmakers in general. The director wanted to document mid-'60s London, but he was also interested in the way we're obsessed with documenting everything. The photographer sees the world only through his camera, and we only see the photographer through Antonioni's movie camera. Without the filmmaker creating him for us, the photographer doesn't exist. Likewise, if the photographer can't document the murder he thinks he saw, maybe it doesn't exist, either. Maybe it didn't happen. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, etc.

The "reality" of life, then, is only what the consensus tells us it is. It's based on what we, as a society, decide. In that sense, our photographer does not appear to be alive at all, because he doesn't buy into any group's reality. He's young, stylish, and handsome, yet has no interest in the other people his age who are making merry and/or protesting war in the streets. He is avowedly heterosexual and seems to enjoy the company of young ladies, yet is just as often disinterested in or annoyed by them. He's driven by his desire to observe the world around him, yet he has no connection to that world.

At the end of the film, the photographer is given the opportunity to join a reality. A bunch of mimes are pretending to play tennis, hitting an imaginary ball back and forth with imaginary rackets. When the "ball" rolls away, the photographer is asked to retrieve it. Note how Antonioni makes his presence known: by having the camera follow the arc of the imaginary tennis ball. The filmmaker has chosen to go along with the mimes' definition of reality. For him, as for them, the tennis game is now real. Will the photographer also play along and accept their reality?

The photographer has a friend, Bill, who does abstract paintings. Bill tells us something crucial about his work: "They don't mean anything when I do them -- just a mess. Afterward, I find something to hang on to." Later, the photographer's images of the supposed murder scene -- enlarged to such a degree that it's hard to tell what they depict -- are described as resembling Bill's paintings. Whatever it is that the photographer captured on film, it only means what we decide it means.

At a rock concert (featuring Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page!), the crowd of hip young folks is dead-eyed and silent. Until the guitarist smashes his instrument and throws part of it into the audience, that is -- then, suddenly, there's a melee. They've created a "reality" -- that the musicians and their music are vitally important to their lives -- and now they have a chance to be part of that reality by getting a piece of the guitar. Outside the concert, though, that guitar chunk is just debris. Without giving it context, it means nothing.

One of the film's most famous moments arrives 90 minutes and 30 seconds into it. The photographer is out driving when he sees the woman from his pictures looking into a store window. A small crowd of people walk past her on the sidewalk ... and now she is gone. Vanished. Antonioni is playing a trick here. We know we saw her, just as the photographer knows he saw her. And yet she has disappeared without any apparent explanation of where she could have gone. (Go ahead and watch that shot over and over again, to see if you can figure out how Antonioni did it.) Even photographic evidence -- i.e., what was captured by Antonioni's movie camera -- can't be trusted to tell us the truth.

What's the big deal: Blowup lives on primarily for two reasons. One is that it captures the spirit of Swinging London better than just about any other film, helping that influential era to remain in the public consciousness. The other is that it reflects the spirit of experimentation that arose in 1960s cinema. Antonioni made a film whose objectives were not obvious, one that could be discussed and interpreted. What's more, Blowup's examination of young people's alienation from society still rings true today.

Further reading: There's a lot of really good stuff about this movie -- not just the usual prattling on, but actual interpretation and commentary. It would be especially useful to someone who has just seen the movie for the first time.

Here is Time magazine's original review; and here is a 2007 piece, by Richard Corliss, about the film's lasting impact.

In this 1993 piece from The Independent of London, a couple dozen photographers, models, and fashion designers talk about the influence Blowup has had on their work.

Bosley Crowther's 1966 review in The New York Times is largely positive, with some reservations. Note that even in 1966 people were noticing that the film wasn't nearly as "dirty" as the MPAA's objections would lead you to believe.

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Eric D. Snider (website) disapproves of mimes whatever sport they're pretending to play.