Antonioni’s Blow-up, Cortázar’s “Devil’s Drool”, a photo by Larrain Grist for the rabbit hole!
Some of you with odd preferences in movies will remember the highly touted and somewhat incomprehensible film by Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, “Blow-up”, which was released in 1966. The film won the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film at Cannes in 1967 and is somewhat improbably available for rental in the Lennoxville Public Library.
Antonioni’s “Blow-up” depicts a day and night in the life of a 1960’s fashion photographer, Thomas, who is constantly on the hop between various fashion/photo shoots in London. All of his activities are centered on his craft as he obsesses over the subtlest variations in his visual field. He is somewhat temperamental, and after he storms out of a shoot finds himself idly strolling through Maryon Park. He takes some chance photos of a young woman and older man involved in an apparent tryst. His presence is noted, and he is pursued by the young woman (played by Vanessa Redgrave) who angrily demands that he turn over the film. He refuses but, spurred on by her curiosity, starts to look more closely at the film. All is not well. During the day he gets the impression that he is being followed. Then, somewhere in between a sexual encounter with two aspiring models, the ransacking of his studio, and a drug-fuelled rock concert riot (featuring the Yardbirds), he blows up the photographic image, larger and larger, until he becomes convinced that it reveals evidence of some crime—perhaps murder. I will leave you to watch to the end, but be warned! The film has always proven very resistant to understanding.
The film relates to Argentine writer Julio Cortázar inasmuch as Antonioni based “Blow-up” on a 1959 short story by Cortázar entitled “Devil’s Drool” (“Las Babas del Diablo”—later renamed “Blowup” in a case of art imitating art.) The connection is, in itself, fascinating. Cortázar in turn had based his story on a photograph by Chilean Sergio Larrain, which involved (again) the inadvertent capturing of an image of a couple at Notre Dame Cathedral. Larrain discovered their likenesses only after he had developed and enlarged a photo. Both Cortázar and Antonioni expand this incident or moment or idea into a profound questioning of the way our reality is constituted.
Most of us have a fairly well-defined notion of our place in the cosmos. We, as distinct individuals, go through life witnessing events, learning and assimilating based on the facts that surround us and on interactions with similarly equipped and –minded individuals. However, this quaint and comfy notion of self and history has been challenged over the past century. Linguists, psychologists, philosophers, and physicists have raised questions about objective reality, our ability to perceive it, remember it, retell it and assemble its components into an objective, coherent history. It often seems that the closer we get to pinning something down, the more it seems to elude us.
In Cortázar’s story the narrator/main character is Roberto Michel, a Frenchchilean translator and amateur photographer. The reader is immediately drawn into, thrown off-balance, and perplexed by his way of seeing and telling things: “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: you the blond woman was the clouds that race before my your his our yours their faces. What the hell.”
This introduction kicks off an unsettling sequence of events. Taking a break from his translation one Sunday, November 7th, Roberto Michel wanders along the Seine at 11:00 in the morning—(“the light would be good, the best you can get in the fall”—and ends up at Quai de Bourbon. There he sees an unusual couple, a young boy and an older woman. At first he thinks it is a boy and his mother; then he realizes that the older woman (TRIGGER WARNING) is trying to seduce the boy. His mind constructs speculative but precise backgrounds for each character. Michel then snaps their photo, which brings a hasty end to the moment. The woman protests, accuses him of meddling, demands that he return the film (he declines); the boy sidles away and then breaks into a run; and a hitherto unnoticed man gets out of a dark car and approaches, showing that he is very much a participant in the drama.
Michel returns to his apartment and some time later develops the negative and pastes an enlargement on the wall. As he continues to work on his translation, he glances at the image occasionally. The more he looks at the blow-up the more it seems to assume a life of its own. He sees events unfolding in different ways, the light playing on different scenarios, and he is drawn into a new awareness of that moment.
So, this is the world of Julio Cortázar. In “Blow-up” and Other Stories, and, for that matter, in his entire oeuvre, he uses dreamlike language to challenge our common illusion of the stable, fixed ego moving methodically through a sequence of clearly defined events. In his short stories (Cortázar is mainly known for his short stories) he seems to combine the grounded, pithy description of James Joyce with the quirkiness of Roald Dahl. For example, in one story, a character keeps switching from a sane to an insane alter-ego; in another, a gentleman is asked to house-sit but cannot control an unfortunate habit of vomiting live bunnies; in another a victim of a motorcycle accident becomes a victim of an Incan sacrifice—and vice versa.
Many of Cortázar’s works are available via inter-library loan, but when you start to read hold on to your ego. It’s a helluva ride!