Blow-Up (1966) is Antonioni’s first film in English and has become one of the most important films of its decade. It is a seminal encapsulation of the vibrant and bohemian London scene in the mid-1960s. Even today, on its fortieth anniversary, it continues to influence many contemporary artists and film-makers.

At the heart of Blow-Up is photography itself. A fashion photographer, played by David Hemmings, takes a sequence of photographs in a London park apparently of a young woman, played by Vanessa Redgrave, in a tryst with her older lover. However, he realises on examining the film that their furtive behaviour perhaps hides a secret when he spots what appears to be a body in one of the photographs. The more he enlarges the image the more blurred and indecipherable it becomes. The film is a voyage in which the protagonist starts to doubt both what he actually saw, and his photographic record of it, as fact and fiction are ever more ambiguously intertwined.