"Blow-up": Cortázar's and Antonioni's

"Blow-up": Cortázar's and Antonioni'sAuthor(s): Gary KesterSource: Latin American Literary Review, Vol. 4, No. 9 (Fall - Winter, 1976), pp. 7-13Published by: Latin American Literary ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20119031 .

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"Blow-up": Cort?zar's and Antonioni's

GARY KESTER

Among the large number of Latin-American writers who have

lately gained increasing recognition in the English-speaking world,

perhaps none is more unusual or illusive than the Argentine expatriate Julio Cort?zar, who has been living in Paris since 1951 and little by little winning a reputation as the author of uniquely inventive short stories and, more recently, experimental novels (Rayuela, published in

English as Hopscotch).

The example of Cort?zar's work which has become best known in the English-speaking world is his short story, "Las babas del

diablo," used by Michelangelo Antonioni as the basis of his con troversial 1966 film "Blow-Up" and translated into English under this title by Paul Blackburn (End of the Game and Other Stories, New

York, 1963). This film, Antonioni's first in English, has provoked much discussion and controversy, most of which totally misunderstands the film and ignores the original story. By far the most thorough and

comprehending study of the subject is Charles Thomas Samuels' article "The Blow-Up: Sorting Things Out,1'(American ScholarfVoL 37 (1967 68) 120. This article offers an excellent analysis of the film and laments the lack of intelligent criticism of Antonioni's work.

A systematic study of the story in comparison with the film

might serve a double purpose: to arrive at a better understanding of a

still little understood film, and of a writer of growing importance. The

purpose of this article is, then, to study the English language version of the story with comparison to the film, with the hope of better un

derstanding the film and increasing awareness of the value of Cor t?zar's work in itself.

Cort?zar's point of view is one of self-examination and

questioning which is common to many Latin-American intellectuals, produced in part by cultural eclecticism:

Eclecticism and rootlessness, however, though they



8 LATIN AMERICAN LITERARY REVIEW

seem a dubious starting point, have in fact produced some remarkable work in recent years: work which largely ignores national reality and yet also turns a sceptical eye on Western culture. Within Western culture an yet apart, a group of

writers has emerged for whom art represents the laughter of the Gods.1

Thus an attitude of scepticism, an analytical frame of mind, and a fine sense of irony underlie much of Cort?zar's writing, traits similar to the point of view of Antonioni's films. In this particular story the fundamental theme is the tension between the intellectual's need to

know, to analyze the world around him, and the essentially deceptive quality of the senses which make this impulse impossible to fulfill.

In order to see this general theme as used in the story, it would be best to begin with a brief plot summary. The protagonist is Roberto Michel, a Franco-Chilean living in Paris who earns his living as a translator and is an amateur photographer as well. One afternoon

Michel leaves his apartment on a photography expedition and spends some time leisurely strolling and observing the city and the weather,

typically late-autumn in its mutability, fluctuating constantly between clouds and sun. All the while he is continually making informal shots of scenes that catch his attention, observing the constantly-changing clouds, birds, and wind until he ends up in a secluded spot on the isolated island in the Seine. Here he observes what appears to be the seduction of an adolescent boy by an older woman, He takes a picture, the boy flees and the woman, annoyed, tries to take the film from

Michel. An older man, who had been parked in a car on the edge of the

scene, approaches, and interrupts. Michel returns to his apartment and, fascinated by the scene, begins the familiar process of making

blow-ups and reliving the scene in detail, realizing in the process that

what he had witnessed was the opposite of what he had supposed: the

beginning of a homosexual seduction rather than a heterosexual one.

He immediately begins the attempt to reconstruct the scene and

remake it according to his own view, or as Samuels says, "the

photographer now imaginatively relives the experience, trying to

release the boy from the imagined horror just as he had released him

from the actual scene. "2

From this summary, it can be seen that the only real action of the story is the actual taking of the picture and the subsequent blow

ups made by the photographer. The real substance of the story emerges from the mind of the photographer-narrator as we enter his field of

perception and share his concerns, and from the imagery incorporated into the story: the camera and photo and the constant references to clouds and birds.

The story begins with a paragraph meditating on the dif



"Blow-up" 9

ficulty of communication and the inadequacy of language to express human perceptions:

It'll never be known how this has to be told, in the first person or in the second, using the third person plural or

continually inventing modes that will serve for nothing. If one

might say: I will see the moon rose, or: we hurt me at the back of my eyes, and especially: yon *he blond woman was the clouds that race before my your his our yours their faces. What the hell.3

Thus we feel the need for some mode of expression more

dependable than language. The image of "clouds that race" also enters the picture, an image that is expanded into a central symbol of the

story as a recurring image of illusive and deceptive visual reality. The Paris setting is used in numerous Cort?zar stories, generally as a

metaphor for rationalist Western civilization, being the capitol of a nation which prides itself on logic and reason.

At any rate the setting in this city accentuates the narrator's need to impose reason and order on existence. The narrator, being an outsider professionally skilled at language, can be taken as an alter-ego for the author:

In one of his best-known short stories,"Las babas del

diablo," ["Blow-Up"] which first appeared in Las armas secretas [Secret Weapons] (1959), the story takes the form of an 'agony.' The writer/photographer, Cort?zar/Michel,

writes/records what seems to be 'reality,' though the recording is hedged in questions...

4

Another image of fluctuating reality is the unreliable weather, with its constantly changing panorama alternating between clouds and sun, and sudden wind. The weather thus heightens the ambiance of

mutability, the feeling of being surrounded by an ephemeral and illusive reality which human perception can only partially comprehend.

It is in this ambiance that the episode of the photo takes

place, on an island separate from the rest of the city. The island serves the same purpose as the London park in the film: to set the

photographer and his subject apart almost on a separate dimension of

reality. Thus the encounter becomes even less real and takes on a removed and symbolic quality. Throughout the episode the emphasis is on the deceptiveness of the human senses.

At the conclusion of the story, when Michel begins the process of developing the film and reliving the experience, a process familiar to viewers of the film in a slightly different context, photography begins to take on its most abstract and philosophical quality as a moment of frozen time which lends itself to human examination and manipulation,




both physical and intellectual, but which is beyond human power to

change. Michel contemplates the scene, detail by detail until he finally realizes the truth of what he had seen. He feels immense frustration at not being able to influence the figures in the photo.

The story reaches its climax when Michel tries to bring the scene to life in his own mind and once again frees the boy, in effect

purging himself of his involvement and freeing himself, if not the boy, from any further implication: "For the second time he'd escaped them, for the second time I was helping him to escape, returning him to his

precarious paradise. ..the game was played out." 5

Michel, purged of his emotion and involvement, breaks into

tears; a most compassionate and human, if futile, resolution. The story closes with an intricate final paragraph which links the blow-up on the

wall with the sky as seen from his studio window:

Now there's a big white cloud, as on all these days, all

this untellable time. What remains to be said is always a cloud, .two clouds, or long hours of a sky perfectly clear, a very clean, clear rectangle tacked up with pins on the wall of my room.

That was what I saw when I opened my eyes and dried them

with my fingers: the clear sky, and then a cloud that drifted in from the lefand for a change sometimes, everything gets grey, all one enormous cloud, and suddenly the splotches of rain

cracking down, for a long spell you can see it raining over the

picture, like a spell of weeping reversed, and little by little, the frame becomes clear, perhaps the sun comes out, and again the clouds begin to come, two at a time, three at a time. And the

pigeons once in a while, and a sparrow or two.6

The sky seen through the window, with its ceaseless panorama of clouds and birds, acts as a metaphor for the world viewed through a camera lens and closes the story with the imagery employed throughout; images of clouds and birds are interspersed through the

story as images of transitoriness and the impermanence of our visual

perceptions and physical world. The window, like the camera lens, is a

metaphor for reality as we perceive it: limited and distant. The

photographer, or by extension the artist or intellectual, observes reality at a distance and must decide for himself his degree of involvement and action. One may say that this preoccupation with involvement, both intellectual and emotional, is the basis of the story. This general theme is also linked to the idea of "figures" which is a basic theme in Cort?zar.

That is, the idea that an individual's life is connected in ways which he can't understand and which are outside our understanding of space and

time, to other lives in groups or what he calls "constellations" of

beings. For more on this aspect of Cort?zar, see the interview with



"Blow-up" 11

Cort?zar in Harss and Dohmann, Into the Mainstream, Conversations

with Latin-American Writers, Harper and Row, 1967.

The aspect of the story which is most closely related to the

film, and which serves to illuminate its meaning, is the theme of in

volvement. There are two basic changes which Antonioni makes in his

film which are immediately apparent: the change in setting from Paris

to the swinging London of the 1960's, and the change from seduction to

murder in the photo itself. These changes serve to underline the fun

damental difference in emphasis on the theme of involvement in the

story and in the film (and this difference seems to be the significant difference in the two interpretations of the story): the story is con

cerned with personal involvement in an intellectual, abstract sense.

Cort?zar's story is a metaphysical meditation on the relationship of a

man to his fellows and of the artist to his subject matter. On the other

hand, as Samuels points out, Antonioni "...focuses on the social context that he invents for the episode. I can think of no better way to

illustrate the profoundly social orientation of Antonioni." 7 Antonioni

is concerned with the moral aspect of the situation invented by Cor

t?zar and treated by him from a more purely philosophical perspective. Thus the London setting during that contentious decade and the

question of murder bring to the film an air of mystery and a moral sense

not present in the story.

In spite of the similarities in point of view and theme, viewing Antonioni's film is of course a much different experience from reading Cort?zar's story. Antonioni brings to the film his unique genius for

creating mood through the use of visual effects: images, color, personal relationships as revealed by placement of the actors in relation to one

another and to the setting. The film is, in typically Antonioni fashion, more a study of mood and feeling than a concrete study of a specific theme. The mood is one of vague unease, of a world not quite real or

stable, similar to the story yet communicated through different

techniques, e.g. the mummers who open and close the film, subtle use

of color and sound, the brooding quality of the lead actor (David

Hemmings), the human relationships which remain at a stand-off without ever quite reaching communication, as in the depersonalized relationship of Hemmings to his photographic models or in the scenes

of desperate but low-keyed conflict between Hemmings and Vanessa

Redgrave as the woman involved in the murder who visits the

photographer to get the film.

The parade of mummers is a striking and disturbing image of

partial communication, of humans rendered artificial and impersonal by make-up. Color is important to the effect in the whitened, unnatural

faces; they seem to be clowns mocking a circus-like world. Thus the tone of the film is immediately more emotional and bitter than the




deliberately cool, academic tone in Cort?zar. Even the houses and street scenes used as a backdrop have an unsettling feeling because of the colors used, principally the disturbing off-shade of purple which becomes a dominant color of the film. There is an eerie contrast between the empty streets and the careening group of mummers.

In the night scene in the park the same eerie feeling is com

municated by the rustling of the leaves in an otherwise soundless scene.

The film is notable for its absence of dialogue. The visual placement of the actors is a more important guide to these relationships, as for

example in the first park scene in which Hemmings, like Michel, remains involved yet at a distance.

The scenes in the photography studio are once again free of

any really revealing dialogue; the emphasis is on cameras, film, paper, and photos which both reveal the reality of what happened and inhibit full communication between the characters. The much discussed sex

and nudity of these scenes are in reality desperate attempts to

humanize a world dominated by apparatus and paper. Sex is further

depersonalized by Vanessa Redgrave in her attempt to bribe the

photographer into returning the film.

Much discussed also are the scenes of "swinging London," the

drug and rock culture of the 60's which forms the backdrop for the film. This setting is, in the context of Antonioni's use of Cort?zar's theme, a

metaphor for an amoral attitude toward life which could not care less about the moral questions raised by the photographer's experience. These images are linked to the opening and closing scenes of the mummers as images of humans become less than human. Seen in this

context, the 1960's setting does not date the film, as it otherwise

might. An interesting detail invented by Antonioni is the scene in

which the photographer buys an antique wooden propeller in an antique

shop. The propeller is perhaps an image of burned-out energy become useless (as has his search for moral involvement) or for archaic ways of

life rejected by the shallow modern world. This image is also linked to

other Antonioni films?Eclipse and Zabriski Point?in which airplane

flight is a metaphor for escape from a stagnant and stale world.

The closing of the film recapitulates the opening parade ot

mummers but with a twist: the imaginary ball game in which they invite the photographer to participate, which he does and then

disappears from view. The final image is one of life as an absurd game in which the artist is invited to participate up to a point. The ball game is a metaphoric restatement of the whole game played by the

photographer with an absurd society and the ironic, sad smile with

which he participates sums up the point of view of the film, at once

involved and detached.



"Blow-up" 13

Thus "Blow-Up" is a superior example of literature translated into film. Two artists, each working in his respective medium, treat the same central theme of involvement using the same basic characters and

plot. Photography in both is a way of seeing, not only physically but

intellectually and morally. Cort?zar stresses the theme of intellectual involvement reflected in the Parisian setting, and Antonioni the theme of moral involvement reflected in the "swinging London" setting.

Another variation is imagery. Each artist uses different

images aside from the central metaphor of photography to com municate his particular view of the theme. Cort?zar employs the visual

images of changeability and flow?clouds, wind, etc. Antonioni uses

images with a moral application?murder, clowns, drug parties. The end result is two variations on a common view of modern human

relationships, a view which is ironic, sceptical, and fundamentally pessimistic.

Lafayette College

NOTES

1 Franco, Jean, The Modem Culture of Latin America, Praeger, New York,

1967, p.180. 2

Samuels, Charles Thomas, op. cit., p. 124.

3 Cort?zar, op. cit., p. 114.

Franco, Jean, A Literary History of Spain, Spanish-American Literature

Since Independence, New York, 1973, p. 265.

Cort?zar, op. cit., p. 130. 6

Cort?zar, op. cit., p. 131. 7

Samuels, Charles Thomas, op. cit., p. 124.



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"Blow-up": Cortázar's and Antonioni's