Content area
Full Text
There comes a moment of crisis in Julio Cortäzar's short story "Blow-Up"1 as Roberto Michel, a translator-photographer, now distanced from an event he had previously observed and photographed, looks back at an enlargement of the scene only to discover that his original manner of construing characters and situation was really a lie, a falsification of personal experience only belatedly realized. The same traumatic revelation of the photographer's error is given central importance in the Michelangelo Antonioni film, loosely based upon the CortSzar story. Both versions suggest in strikingly similar terms the inauthenticity of certain forms of representation of reality; each reveals a growing dissatisfaction with the very processes of articulation - verbal and graphic languages - which have reached such a schism with the content they presume to express, that they come ultimately to betray that reality. 2
In both works we find a character who. at the moment of external challenge to his way of being, voices a statement in his own defense: "I am a photographer." This revealing assumption of personal identification with the technological means of reproducing images is one which forces us to consider a series of essential relations and values emanating from the peculiar way in which each protagonist looks upon his experience and upon himself.
The photographer considers himself to be a communicator of what is for him a problematic reality emerging from his experience of seeing. He investigates that reality. From the vantage he has defined for himself he struggles to sort things out, as though deciphering a message from some longforgotten language; eventually he attempts to convey the meaning he sees in the events and objects he has examined. In the film the pattern of the detective story, first suggested to the photographer by his friend the painter,3 becomes an analogy to his task of photographing and then arranging the details of the world in some coherent order. The photographer's compilation of a book of photographs, to include a picture of a couple he saw embracing in a deserted park, becomes a further manifestation of his rage for order in seeing and experiencing the world. Cortázar' s photographer is concurrently involved in the task of translating a legal treatise into French, yet another parallel to the idea...