For 15 years now, Blow up, Arte’s web magazine, has been offering a weekly programme devoted to film with images, among other images and in the midst of even more images. There are no interviews with filmmakers, actors or producers in Blow Up, no reporting from the major festivals or film schools, but there are voiceover montages on film extracts, exploring the widest possible range of thematic areas: filmmaking techniques such as cross-dissolves or splitscreen; locations from supermarkets to forests; sports like tennis or basketball; characters such as Father Christmas or US presidents; animals from sharks to cats; colours like blue, red or purple and cities like Venice or Tokyo; not forgetting the cinematic influence of such musical icons as David Bowie or Janis Joplin, painters like Van Gogh or Picasso and writers like Franz Kafka or Edgar Allan Poe. To date, more than 1,800 topics have featured. Blow up has built up a subjective and playful History of Cinema in which Robert Bresson rubs shoulders with members of the Splendid troupe, Nanni Moretti hands over the baton to Justine Triet, and Timothée Chalamet converses with Delphine Seyrig. In short, Blow up is today made up of over four hundred hours that enable us to discover and rediscover films, scenes and faces from all periods and nationalities, over and over again.

Luc Lagier