By GEORGE PORCARI "What I am is a photographer", he explains. "To have a 1. Getting to 1966 job like mine means that I don't belong to the great In 1959 the brilliant and enigmatic writer Julio Cortazar wrote a short story called The Devil's Drool that would be community of the mugs: the vast majority of squares adapted by Michelangelo Antonioni, Tonino Guerra and who are exploited." Edward Bond in 1966 into Blow-Up. Cortazar, raised in Absolute Beginners—Colin Maclnness Argentina, had been in exile in Paris since 1951 when he was 37 due to his leftist politics. He along with other Latin In the 50's we became aware of the possibility of seeing American authors in this highly fertile period ushered in a the whole world at once, through the great visual new sort of novel that would no longer be tied to the matrix that surrounds us; a synthetic, 'instant' view. slow, rural realism that had become a trademark style of Latin American writers. With a daring borrowed from Cinema, television, magazines, newspapers immersed Faulkner, Celine, Woolf and Joyce, they would tackle con­ the artist in a total environment and this new visual temporary life in a manner that was consciously urban ambience was photographic. and modern. The resulting stories and novels were para­ Collected Words—Richard Hamilton doxical and matter-of-fact, darkly serious and comical. 32 cineACTiON The novels of the "Boom"—as it came to be called best cap­ oblivious to the strange drama that's unfolding a few meters tured the fragmented nature, incipient violence and absurdity away from them. In this final incongruous shot Antonioni lays of the period as well as the sense that there was a new highly the groundwork for his subsequent work of the 1960's. urban social matrix that was much more intense, flexible and In Blow-Up we follow a highly successful fashion photogra­ ambiguous than any that had been experienced before. The pher in the midst of London in 1966. He is now named everyday world was a palimpsest where we caught glimpses of Thomas—as in doubting Thomas—named after the apostle other realities—usually haunted by history of some kind— who refused to believe that Christ had arisen from the grave underneath the familiar everyday world that we could never after his death unless he could see and touch the wounds him­ understand completely but only catch in subjective episodes. In self. Thomas wanders from an antique store that he plans on short the glimpse replaced the look in the new work and it was buying as a real estate investment into Maryon Park located in Cortazar who was the most adventurous in his choices. a then gritty low-income area of South East London. There he The Devil's Drool is a sixteen page story in which a photog­ takes some shots clandestinely of two lovers at play—a young rapher named Michel living in contemporary Paris narrates an woman played by Vanessa Redgrave and an older man whom event in the first person using a laconic and self deprecating we never meet. The woman sees him and asks Thomas for the prose style. This is how the story begins: "I'll never know how film. He refuses and later in his studio after blowing up the neg­ I'm supposed to tell this, in the first second or third person plu­ atives sees that in fact he may have recorded a murder in ral or inventing continuously new forms that wouldn't be of any progress. There is a hand holding a gun off to the side behind use anyway."1 He seems strangely removed from events even as some bushes. The woman seems to know what's going on—the he experiences them—he wanders around Paris seemingly man is oblivious. An idyllic encounter that was supposed to fin­ without aim. The casual tone becomes sinister in a very subtle ish Thomas' work in progress, a photography book about the way for we intuit that the instability in the narrator's choice of poor in London, seems to have recorded a man's murder. But point-of-view is the subject of the story itself: "I had no desire of course there are doubts. Thomas returns to the park and to take pictures and lit a cigarette just for something to do"2 He finds the body, but it has vanished when he returns with his immediately contradicts himself and takes some pictures of a camera to take a picture of it. In the midst of this the woman couple kidnapping a boy—he's not sure—using a very small from the park turns up at his studio and continues to demand Contax camera, that was then euphemistically referred to as a the original negatives to the pictures; this is interrupted by spy or detective camera. On returning to his studio he blows up some flirting and the arrival of a propeller from the antique the images he's taken and what he saw—or what his camera store that Thomas had purchased on a whim. The woman captured—emerges and he ruminates on the horror. Or is that leaves with what she thinks are the negatives (that he has what happened? Here he describes the situation he thinks he switched) and Thomas is left completely in the dark. He decides saw on crossing one of the islands of the Seine: "Curious that to investigate what really happened via the images he took in the scene (nothing really, the two there, young in different the park, find the woman and solve the mystery—in short he ways) would have a disquieting aura. I thought that I was mak­ becomes a detective. Siegfried Kracauer described the detective ing that happen, and that my photograph, if I blew it up, would as an essentially modern figure who is on a rational quest for reconstitute things to their real nature. I would like to have meaning and narrative closure.4 It is the detective who uses known what the man in the grey hat was thinking, sitting in the logic, keen observation and deductive skills to assemble frag­ front of the car waiting by the dock reading a paper or sleep­ mentary details into a meaningful narrative and thereby arrive ing. I had just discovered that because people sitting in cars at the truth - but does he? Blow-Up is a meditation on this ques­ always disappear, they get lost in that miserable private cell that tion. The sense of dislocation and anxiety in the film are acute gives them movement and danger. Yet the car had been there but never fully articulated as they would be in a conventional all the time forming part (or deforming part) of the island. A narrative film. For example when the woman in Roman car, how to describe it? A beam of light, a bank in a plaza. Polanski's Repulsion is suffering from dislocation we understand Never the same light, the sun, always being new on the skin that it is her perceptions which are distorted because she is and in the eyes, and the boy and the woman alone as one, put deranged, not the world, we are merely seeing it through her there to alter the island in some way, to show it to me in some eyes. Conversely in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange it is new light"3 The narrator is clearly unreliable. Antonioni, who society itself which is deranged having become dislocated from already had experience translating the prose style of moody a collective sense of common human values that bind us and it novelists, such as the troubled Cesare Pavese in The Girlfriends is the adaptation to that society that is seen as morally repre­ (1955), took on Cortazar's story for his second English language hensible and comically grotesque. In Blow-Up it is not possible film. The first was one of the three short films that make up The to pinpoint either a trauma in the characters or a social dystopia Vanquished (1953). In this short episode, that could be a first at work. Antonioni gives us good helpings of the disjunctions draft of Blow-Up, a young man and would be poet kills a and psychological dislocations that we have come to expect woman seemingly for no reason in a London park. He then tries from "art" films, but then keeps them in play without resolving to financially profit from the murder by selling his story to a them with brilliantly suggestive shots that appear headed newspaper by pretending to be the person who discovered the toward metaphor or toward a conclusion and then the symbol­ body. Liking the attention he's receiving he cavalierly confesses ic evaporates, the possible philosophic explanation becomes to the crime that he claims was perfect because it had no logi­ muddied with contradictions, the psychological becomes cal motive. His story becomes a sensation and he in fact does opaque. receive the attention that he desperately wants. The film ends The role of Thomas, brilliantly played in the film by David with a perplexed newspaperman phoning in his story from a Hemmings, has been touted as being modeled on the photog­ phone booth while the camera pans away from him to the rapher David Bailey. As recently as 2007 Kieron Tyler writes: same park where a couple is now playing a game of tennis— "Blow-Up also subverts London on its journey towards the cineAdiON 33 34 cineACTiON "Summer of Love".