Blow Up by Julio Cortázar

 


Blow Up - a curious, quizzical tale that has been both fascinating and baffling readers for more than five decades. Michelangelo Antonioni took this Julio Cortázar short-story as the inspiration for his 1966 film starring David Hemmings playing a fashion photographer based in London.

Antonioni's film is a recognized classic but the director radically veered off from Julio's story beginning...well, at the beginning. In order to better appreciate this tale translated expertly into English by Paul Blackburn, take a look at the following highlights as if a series of enlarged photos in an artist's studio:

BEGUILING BEGINNING
Here is the opening line: “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.”

The narrator, Roberto Michel, is a French-Chilean translator living in Paris who takes his camera down to the Seine one afternoon and has an encounter that will, once he's back home and enlarges the film, shock him out of his bourgeois preconceptions, so shocking he's initially at a loss as to which voice he should use to tell his tale.

TELL THE STORY
“So I have to write. One of us has to write, if this is going to get told.” Roberto admits the photos are one thing but he's quite another since, after all, he''s a man with a creative imagination. As we're reading, it's well to keep in mind the tension between “truth” portrayed by the lens of a camera and the full range of the narrator's experience. Julio Cortázar was forever attuned to the various ways modern technologies shape our human consciousness, both individually and collectively.

MAGIC MOMENTS
“We're going to tell it slowly, what happens in the middle of what I'm writing is coming already.” The narrator gives us the impression his words, his past lived experience is somehow lacking. What does he need to tell the complete story, detail by detail, so as not to omit anything critically important to the telling? Why, of course, he will need his enlarged photos since, as Walter Benjamin (a great influence on Julio) stated, “photographic reproduction, with the aid of certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, can capture images which escape natural vision.”

PHOTOGRAPHY AND PHOTOGRAPHERS
Narrator Roberto recognizes an excellent way to expand children's horizons is to teach them photography “since it requires discipline, aesthetic education, a good eye and steady fingers.” At this point Roberto is thinking only in terms of aesthetic appreciation but what of photography capturing unfolding historical events and political developments (no to mention the tale's drama Roberto captures on film)?

As with photography so also with words. Recall Julio Cortazar himself spoke of his own development as a writer moving from the aesthetic to the historic and political. And all we need do is think of writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Luisa Valenzuela, Ricardo Piglia and Mario Vargas Llosa to understand just how deep the connection between Latin American literature and politics.

CAPTURED ON FILM
Roberto spots an unfolding drama between a thin, willowy woman wearing an almost-black fur coat and a young boy of about fourteen. Roberto raises his camera – snap, snap, snap, snap. But then his subjects catch him taking pictures, the boy surprised, the woman irritated.

In Roberto's own words, “The woman said that no one had the right to take a picture without permission, and demanded that I hand her over the film....For my part, it hardly mattered whether she got the roll of film or not, but anyone who knows me will tell you, if you want anything from me, ask nicely.”

Ah, the human touch. As much as the camera might have captured those telling secret details, so many times what really and truly counts is people being nice, being kind, being courteous to one another.

SINISTER PRESENCE
In fact, the above drama includes another - “a man in a grey hat sitting at the wheel of a car parked on the dock which led up to the footbridge, and whether he was reading the paper or asleep, I had just discovered him because people inside a parked car have a tendency to disappear, they got lost in that wretched, private cage stripped of the beauty of motion and danger give it.”

Oh, Julio! So much packed into so few words (wretched, private cage). The camera is one form of technology containing power and exerting influence over humans but the automobile is something else again. Stretching from when Julio wrote this tale right up to our current day, there's one undeniable fact: the automobile has come to dominate. How far can it go? Julio devoted an entire tale to this modern phenomenon: The Southern Thruway.

When I labeled this section “Sinister Presence” perhaps you can think in terms of the man or the car, or both.

CAMERA ON WORLD EVENTS
As you watch the evening news tonight reflect on the ways Blow Up can call into question our standardized, passive viewing. More generally, recall Julio challenging us to drastically break out of the prison-house of consciousness and history in which we are ensnared. We need, as Julio informs us, to throw reality out the window and then throw out the window as well.