Julio Cortázar and Michelangelo Antonioni::

‘Blow up and Other Stories’: Cortázar's influence on Cinema

'Blow-Up and Other Stories' is a collection of short stories, written by Argentinian author Julio Cortázar, who wrote 'Rayuela' (Hopscotch), reviewed last week. The title story of the collection served as inspiration for Michelangelo Antonioni's film title 'Blow-up'. Cortázar's 'Blow-up' is one of his best known short stories and in spite of the extraordinary amount of commentary dedicated to it, it still remains one of his most problematic.

There are many things that are confusing. The hesitancy around the person of the narrator, the grammatical permutations, the mixture of first and third person narration, the double time of the narrative (first the original scene at the parapet of the Quai de Bourbon and then the repetition of the scene in the fifth floor apartment of the writer/photographer Roberto-Michel).

There is also the rotation of the subject positions taken up by the boy, the blond woman, the man in the grey hat and Roberto-Michel himself. Finally the 'dead' (and alive) status of the narrator at the end of the story. It is true that many of these structural and narrative effects or devices are to be found in many of Cortázar's other short stories. Julio Cortázar's "Las Babas del Diablo" (the Devil's Drool) is the acknowledged precursor of Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup (1966), rather than his short story 'Blow-up' (which inspired the style and the title). This type of writing is typical of the Boom era, which I have been exploring for several weeks.

In the Antonioni film, a photographer, Thomas (David Hemmings), blows up a photograph and discovers a hidden gunman in the bushes. Thomas initially believes his photograph saved an old man from being murdered but discovers later that the murder happened anyway. In the Cortázar short story, a photographer thinks he has captured the bittersweet seduction of an adolescent by an older woman only to discover to his horror that she is "pimping" him for a dirty old man waiting in a nearby automobile.

Moving into the surreal, the photograph becomes a movie or rather a photomontage of moving figures. In a further transformation, the photographer is drawn into the slow motion of the photo montage. He becomes his camera, becomes the seduced boy and yet remains himself. It is while he is in this tripartite state that he is murdered by the old man and lies dead in the photograph staring at the sky as camera, boy and photographer are all rolled into one.

The film begins the day after Thomas spends the night at a doss house where he has taken pictures for a book of art photos he hopes to publish. He is late for a photo shoot at his studio with 60's supermodel Veruschka, which in turn makes him late for another photo shoot with many other models later in the morning. He grows bored and walks off the shoot (also leaving the models and production staff in the lurch).

Exiting the studio, two girls, aspiring teenage models (Jane Birkin and Gillian Hills), ask to speak with him butThomas drives off to look at an antiques shop which he might buy. He then wanders into nearby Maryon Park where he sees two lovers and takes photos of them. The woman (Redgrave) stalks Thomas back to his studio, asking for the film. This makes him want the film even more, so he misleads her into taking another roll instead. He makes many blowups (enlargements) of the black and white photos.

These blowups have very rough film grain but nonetheless seem to show a body lying in the grass and a killer lurking in the trees with a gun.

Thomas is frightened by a knock on the door but it is only the two girls again, with whom he has a romp in his studio and falls asleep. Awakening, although they hope he will photograph them then and there, he tells the girls to leave. Both film and story are meditations on aesthetics and morality. Although the Spanish title ("Las Babas del Diablo") is a colloquial phrase meaning to be in a dangerous situation. However, Cortázar enjoys wordplay, and seems to be suggesting with the title that the camera is a drooling devil - a lustful voyeur that is capable only of lifeless illusion and is ultimately impotent. In the story, Cortázar's narrator writes:

I think that I know how to look, if it's something I know, and also that every looking oozes with mendacity, because it's that which expels us furthest outside ourselves.

Later the photographe r/narrator expresses his rage:

It was horrible, their mocking me, deciding it before my impotent eye, mocking me and I couldn't yell for him to run.

It would appear that Cortázar and Antonioni are saying that our media is inherently alienating and dehumanizing. The camera has turned us into passive voyeurs, programmable for predictable responses, ultimately helpless and even inhumanly dead. These are dark thoughts indeed, but the work of Cortázar and Antonioni are not exactly known for their optimism.

As The Yardbirds perform in the nightclub, the eerily mute crowd is so still that some of the people may not be people at all, but department store mannequins or wax figures. If this is true, it fits well with the mannequins in the window just outside the club and with the plastic family enjoying their desert home in Antonioni's 'Zabriskie Point' (1970). Either way, with the odd stillness of the crowd, Antonioni is trying to get at the heart of the Cortázar story.

Rather than liberating us, our technologically driven art forms (cinema, photography, and rock and roll) are finally numbing and paralysing us because they seem to require passivity of their audiences. At the very least, passivity is encouraged. In an Antonioni film, Jeff Beck destroying his amp and guitar is not merely a realistic cultural detail, it is symbolic of the artist's rage against his tools, which are isolating, denaturing and incapable of conveying a clear vision, of changing or influencing the quotidian. Caught up with the media-controlled crowd, Thomas joins the scrambles for the guitar-neck totem but discards it as meaningless once he is alone. He works frantically to blow up photos and discover hidden truths. Once discovered he lets them drift away.

Thomas goes to a party to raise interest in his murder case but fails in an ending that is even darker than Cortázar's story. In the story, the narrator may be dead, but at least his art was able to discover the truth and the photographer was able to empathize and identify with the victim to the point of dying in his place, surely a positive outcome for a work of art. In Antonioni's film, nothing is done, nothing is learned and nobody cares. "A murder? So what!" his characters seem to say. In a dialogue of total emptiness, Thomas talks to his stoned editor, Ron (Peter Bowles):

Thomas: I want you to see the corpse. We've got to get a shot of it.

Ron: I'm not a photographer.

Thomas: I am.

Ron (muttering to himself as if Thomas has left the room, although he hasn't): What's the matter with him? What did you see in that park?

Thomas (sighing): Nothing.

Seeing justice done is never a goal. It becomes clear that Thomas' goals have always been completely aesthetic. When Thomas returns to the park for the shot he wants to finish out his book, he discovers the body gone. He smiles wryly. Art for him is an illusion, nothing more than a game of make-believe where we can dream away our lives in childish play. The real world is even less than that - it's not even amusing. At the end of Cortázar's story, we discover that the narrator is dead, immobilized, metamorphosed into the very lens of the camera as it views the world as a photograph. It appears that Antonioni reaches the same conclusion with his justly famous ending.

When Thomas stoops to retrieve and toss an imaginary tennis ball back into the mime game, he enters the frame of art, leaves reality and ceases to be himself in pursuit of pure æsthetics. The camera pulls back to show Thomas walking utterly alone across a vast green field. Using a dissolve, Antonioni causes him to suddenly disappear like the ghost he has become.

The two American versions of the story are a copy of a copy which all but obliterate the original Cortázar story. They switch from photography to sound, but the inability of technology to intelligently capture nature and the ontological merging of artist and medium are still the prevailing themes. In Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974), Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), becomes convinced that his surveillance tape will result in the deaths of the young couple he has recorded as they walk through San Francisco. The festival atmosphere, is clearly a subtle nod to Antonioni but the disturbing ending suggests the influence of Cortázar. Harry discovers that he has been completely wrong and has inadvertently helped the couple commit murder. Finally, they turn his technology on him as he is drawn into his own "aural photograph", and is left as paralysed and impotent as Michael in the Cortázar tale.

In Brian De Palma's 'Blow Out' (1981), Jack (John Travolta) captures a sound that equals the murder of a presidential hopeful. Unlike Antonioni's amoral protagonist, Jack is driven by a desire to do what is right, much like Harry in 'The Conversation' and Michael in 'Las Babas del Diablo'. However, also like them, he solves nothing and saves no one; he only discovers his own impotence.

Plus his defeat results in his own moral corruption, a conclusion suggested more by Cortázar than Antonioni. Jack works as a soundman for cheap horror movies and "Blow Out" opens with him criticising a "bad scream" used in a shower knifing sequence. When Manny (Dennis Franz) murders Jack's love interest, Sally (Nancy Allen), Jack is close enough to record her scream but not to save her life. In the closing scene of the film, we see the ruined hero listening to her scream which has been as the needed scream for the horror flick - a snippet of aural snuff. Jack has merged with his technology and has blurred reality and fiction so that the real no longer matters and the fiction is not even good art. All four tales make the same point - art is impotent to do anything but corrupt the artist.