The Euro-American Cinema最新文献

7. Blow-Up, Swinging London, and the Film Generation 7. 爆破，摇摆伦敦，和电影一代

The Euro-American Cinema Pub Date : 1993-12-31 DOI: 10.7560/746770-010

P. Lev

{"title":"7. Blow-Up, Swinging London, and the Film Generation","authors":"P. Lev","doi":"10.7560/746770-010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7560/746770-010","url":null,"abstract":"Blow-Up must be approached from the dual perspectives of art and commerce. It is certainly a key film in the distinguished artistic career of Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the world's great film directors. Blow-Up has excellent credentials as an art film: script and direction by Antonioni, based on a story by the Argentine modernist Julio Cortazar, and with an emphasis on theme and visual imagery rather than on genres or stars. Yet Blow-Up must also be considered an entry into the world of bigbudget commercial filmmaking: produced by Carlo Ponti for MGM, made in London at a time when that city was exporting popular culture (films, music, fashion) around the world. The artistic aspects of Blow-Up have monopolized critical discussion. Article after article has delved into the film's mysteries. The film seems to be particularly attractive to American critics, perhaps because it is one of the few widely admired art films to have achieved extensive distribution in this country. Without denying the interest of Blow-Up criticism, I would like to concentrate in this essay on the film's economic and cultural backdrop. I feel that economic and cultural factors can illuminate the film's distinctive look and feel, and can solve some, though not all , of its mysteries. The film Blow-Up was based not only on Cortazar' s short story \"Las babas del diablo\" (the English translation was titled \"Blow-Up\" after the success of the film), but also on the article \"The Modelmakers\" written by Francis Wyndham for the London Sunday Times Magazine. Wyndham's article is a long interview with three successful young photographers - Brian Duffy, Terence Donovan, and David Bailey - which describes the milieu of British fashion photography circa 1964. A handful of fashion photographers, with David Bailey perhaps the best known, were among the new celebrities of London in the 1960s. Young, wealthy, creative, impatient with tradition (most came from working class backgrounds), they cut dashing figures in the era of the Beatles. Their professional and personal innovations included a more directly sexual approach to fashion, photography and art photography, and a similar coming together of documentation of an event and creation of an event. The photographers observed the London scene but also helped to create it. As Alexander Walker notes, the idea of a feature film set in London on the life of a fashion photographer, and based in part on Wyndham's article, did not originate with Antonioni. The highly commercial Italian producer Carlo Ponti, working on a multi-picture production deal with MGM, began discussions on such a film in 1964. At one time David Bailey himself was scheduled to direct the film. However, Bailey turned to other projects, and the \"photographer film\" was stalled until Antonioni and Ponti came to an agreement on it. (Walker 316-317, 320-322) Although Antonioni was not involved in the earliest stages of the \"photographer film,\" he did have ample opportunity to shap","PeriodicalId":337115,"journal":{"name":"The Euro-American Cinema","volume":"69 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1993-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129328546","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}