Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

The first English language movie by Michelangelo Antonioni, who wrote the story with Tonino Guerra and Edward Bond, this was based on Julio Cortázar’s 1959 short story “Las babas del diablo.” It would go on to inspire The Conversation and Blow Out.

Thomas (David Hemmings) is bored with shooting models — Veruschka von Lehndorff appears as herself — and has been taking photos in hostels and parks — one of the people whose photos he takes is author Cortázar — trying to capture humanity. One of the people whose photos he has taken is Jane (Vanessa Redgrave), who demands that he stop shooting her. He feels like he’s being followed afterward and she asks that he give her the film. He gives her the wrong roll; she gives him a fake phone number.  That’s when he blows up the film and discovers a dead body. He begins to have his life turned upside down, but this isn’t a film about the mystery of who is killed and why. As Antonioni said, Blow-Up isn’t about “man’s relationship with man, it is about man’s relationship with reality.”

That all sounds quite intelligent and raises the idea that this movie is about Thomas’ feelings that he is out of step with life and he’s given up on art for material gain, which causes him to fade away from the world, as even the tools he knows so well fail to ground him and prove the truth of whether or not he saw a murder. Even his mastery of the camera is now in question.

Or maybe the truth is they ran out of money.

Director Ronan O’Casey wrote to Roger Ebert and informed him that scenes that would have shown “the planning of the murder and its aftermath – scenes with Vanessa, Sarah Miles, and Jeremy Glover, Vanessa’s new young lover who plots with her to murder me – were never shot because the film went seriously over budget.”

This had to be incendiary when it was made — it still feels that way — with scenes of the Yardbirds performing live and Jeff Beck destroying an amp and a guitar and an open depiction of sexuality, including a threeway between Hemmings, Jane Birkin (who recorded the duet “Je t’aime… moi non plus” with Serge Gainsbourg) and Gillian Hills.

Antonioni didn’t want to explain the movie to anyone. He did say, “By developing with enlargers…things emerge that we probably don’t see with the naked eye. The photographer in Blow-Up, who is not a philosopher, wants to see things closer up. But it so happens that, by enlarging too far, the object itself decomposes and disappears. Hence there’s a moment in which we grasp reality, but then the moment passes. This was in part the meaning of Blow-Up.”

I love this thought that Hemmings had of the director, who was twice his age when this movie was made. “For a man of his age, he was impressively eager for new experiences. I think perhaps he was a little in thrall to the idea of swinging London and even once shooting had started, he spent a great deal of time hanging around in search of oscillation, often with photographers and models. Perhaps he considered it all research, but in his quest he raved ceaselessly, night after night in clubs and discotheques, in the company of the new goddesses of the fashion world, with his fierce eyes shining intensely in the dark, grave face as he drank grappa till his ears bubbled and tried to extract every last ounce from the swinging city – a man from Rome, a modern Bellini, determined to leave his mark in the middle of the liberated new world.”

You can watch this on Tubi.