Preceded by short: Preface (Prefazione: Il Provino) (Antonioni, Italy, 1965): A preface to Dino De Laurentiis's now-lost I Tre Volti (The Three Faces), this is a screen test of Soraya, one-time empress of Iran whom the film was to make into a star. Preface "approaches the no-man's-land between cinema and metacinema" (S. Chatman). "A bridge between the gorgeous industrial wasteland of Red Desert and the hypnotically vacuous scene-mongering of Blow-Up" (J. Hoberman, Village Voice). All were photographed by Carlo di Palma. (25 mins, Color, 35mm, Permission Gemini and Parafrance Communications) In Blow-Up, Antonioni manages to translate his particular vision into an English-language film and finds in swinging London of the sixties a local habitation for his metaphysics. David Hemmings's Thomas doubts his way into a mystery, and, in so doing, skeptically tests the ability of photography to represent reality. The seeming imperatives of au courant fashion dissolve in confrontations with the timeless, on the one hand, and the evanescent and transitory on the other. Tempo has everything to do with the film; this is perhaps best exemplified in the scene when Hemmings directs Vanessa Redgrave into beating time against a rhythm. Antonioni throws into question the objective, permanent, and fixed qualities of film as he alternates between realism and formalism, between art as an instrument of social reinforcement or of social change. Blow-Up is Antonioni's variation on the thematics of film from its beginnings. In the final moments, he gives a new reading to the special relation of artist to audience, to control, liberation, and make-believe.-William Nestrick, "Apparatus Exposed," PFA