While I, like everyone, like to think of myself as quirky and special and with tastes singular only to my own, over-the-years-well-honed-culture-palate, there is one thing that makes me exactly the same as every art/film student/graduate in the last two decades:
I own a Blow-Up poster.
Yes, this one:
It hangs above my bed (tacked, not framed, as I am not fully grown up yet), and elicits either no reaction or “Oh, I have the same poster in my room” from whomever is passing through my humble accommodations. If the latter happens, knowing glances are exchanged, bonds formed and so on and so forth. Its like a secret handshake, that poster. And that movie too.
It is also the first DVD I netflixed once I became a member, and for a brief period of time while I was 22, the movie that impressed me the most if a person of opposite sex owned it.
I’ve grown wiser since but I still love the movie.
It is not Antonioni’s finest (cue the discussion about merits of “L’Avventura” and “L’Eclipse”), it is really not all that sexy, if you think about it objectively, and the story (while probably thrilling in concept: A fashion photographer tires of working with “pretty dolls” and heads out at night in the hope of finding gripping scenes. His life becomes an adventure when he accidentally takes a gripping photo of a murder.) really fades away in the light of hyper-stylization.
But what hyper-stylization it is: all the women (Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, Veruschka, even Jane Birkin’s sprite) can serve as inspirations for decades past and decades to come, and the way 60s London (and David Hemmings as its reigning photographer star) are shown has been a source of both endless interpretations AND parodies.
Anyhoo, it is playing tonight at The Goethe Institut and considering that you get to see it on the big screen for the bargain price of 6 bucks (4 if (you lie) you’re a student) you’d be a fool to miss it.
Even better, take a 22 year old art student to see it with you.
You can thank me later.
