John Podhoretz writes:

Only hours after Ingmar Bergman's death was announced, his fellow existentialist filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni died. Kind of like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson dying on the same day, if you think bummer movie directors are analogous to the Founding Fathers.

Antonioni's Blowup was one of the touchstone films of the 1960s zeitgeist (Andrew Sarris dubbed it 1966's "movie of the year"). Its proto-postmodern ending paved the way for the "what is reality" movies of the late 1990s (The Matrix, Dark City, and eXistenZ). The film boosted the career of the Yardbirds during the brief period when both Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck were in the band, and made David Hemmings, cast as the film's photographer protagonist, a sixties superstar--not to mention inspiring Austin Powers' civilian identity.