AEIVA Presents Film Screening at AEIVA: The Responsive Eye and Blow Up

Join us at AEIVA on Friday, November 8th for a screening of Brian De Palma’s short film The Responsive Eye (1966) and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) at 5pm followed by a post-screening discussion led by UAB film professor, Gareth Jones. This event is free and open to the public. Pizza and beverages will be provided.

About Blow-Up:

“In 1966, Michelangelo Antonioni transplanted his existentialist ennui to the streets of swinging London for this international sensation, the Italian filmmaker’s first English-language feature. A countercultural masterpiece about the act of seeing and the art of image making, Blow-Up takes the form of a psychological mystery, starring David Hemmings as a fashion photographer who unknowingly captures a death on film after following two lovers in a park. Antonioni’s meticulous aesthetic control and intoxicating color palette breathe life into every frame, and the jazzy sounds of Herbie Hancock, a beautifully evasive performance by Vanessa Redgrave, and a cameo by the Yardbirds make the film a transporting time capsule from a bygone era. Blow-Up is a seductive immersion into creative passion, and a brilliant film by one of cinema’s greatest artists.”

Themes of reality and artifice resonate with AEIVA’s current exhibitions by Odili Donald Odita, whose work addresses authenticity and the role mass media plays in constructing identity, and by Manjari Sharma in the imagined worlds of her exhibition, The Universe is a Mirror. Shot in a high-key color palette, the film reflects the changing visual and material culture of post war society, a theme also explored in AEIVA’s collection show, Outside Lines.

Image © 1966 Warner Bros