Electric Theatre: Blow Up (1966)

Nick Stewart navigates the dreamscape of swinging London with Michelangelo Antonioni

Electric Theatre is a new, rotating column where we invite some of our favourite people to write about London on film. It’s an opportunity to look at how the city has been represented on the big screen over the years, how its landmarks and structures have been used (and abused) and how various genres and directors extract wildly different performances from its streets.

For this instalment of Electric Theatre we’ve invited artist, writer and filmmaker, Nick Stewart to write about Michelangelo Antonioni’s first entirely English-language film, Blow-Up, a film that manages to be about existential angst, murder, sex and fashion all at once. When it was released in 1966, Playboy’s review hailed Blow-Up as “as important and seminal a film as Citizen Kane”.

Welcome to the Electric Theatre. Please turn off your phones and refrain from talking for the duration of the entertainment.