Journal of VISUal Literacy, Spring 2006 Volume 26, Number 2, 103-118

Intertextual Media Considerations on a Pair of Classics: "Blow-Up" and Blow-Up

Ken Burke, Ph.D. Mills College Oakland, CA, U.S.A. Abstract Even after forty years, the haunting explorations of reality in Cortazar s short story and Antonioni s adapted film are enticing to re-explore, specifically: confusion over the narrators' identities; difficulties of telling the events; stylistic and content similarities of each author to others oftheir work~ in this period; paucity ofdialogue yet tactics of engagement in each narrative; terse presentation of the characters in each ofthe works; contrasts between specific time frames for events but ambiguity ofthe actual occurrences; concluding alteredperceptions ofrealityfor the two protagonists; andproblematic depictions in each medium seen from today s perspectives.

ince time immemorial, the concept and exploration of reality has intrigued and confounded the human mind, challenging philosophers, physicists, and artists. From Plato's "immutable forms" and their conflicts with mimetic representations in the arts to the puzzling explorations of contemporary quantum scientists, there has been active exploration of what constitutes the actual in phenomenological, empirical, or expressive terms. I One ofthe most interesting aesthetic considerations of this topic occurred around forty years ago. First there was Julio Cortazar's short story "Las babas del diablo" (literally "The Devil's Drool" [or "Spittle" or "Saliva"], but in English re-titled "Blow-Up") written in 1959 (Pessacq, n.d.), published soon thereafter/ followed by Michelangelo Antonioni 's Blow- Up film, released in 1966. While the latter is an acknowledged adaptation 3 of the former, each has a unique identity and represents some intercultural considerations for their respective authors as well.

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Both Cortazar and Antonioni have been connected to larger movementsFrench Surrealism and Latin American Magic Realism for the former (Julio Cortazar [1914-1984], 2000; Garfield, n.d.), cinematic Modernism for the latter (Norton, n.d.}-but they also have been interpreted otherwise and have offered other interpretations of their own work. Cortazar did not feel that his writing fit traditional definitions of Magic Realism (Garfield) but rather "falls into the category of eccentricity [... ] I write by default and dislocation" (Julio Cortazar, n.d.). Similarly, Mast and Kawin (2006) said that "The real subject of the Antonioni films is education. In the course of their journeys, his characters learn the pervasiveness of emptiness and the possible if temporary ways of combating it" (p. 389). Antonioni himself said of his films, "Reality is perhaps a relationship" (Wagstaff, 1992, p. 35). Certainly both he and Cortazar explored that relationship in marvelous fashion in both versions of "Blow-Up" as well as in many others of their texts across the years.

Intercultural Intertextuality
Each of these creators also found himself working somewhat outside his native environment with his own interpretations of the "Blow-Up" narrative elements, although Cortazar was long removed from his Argentine home of many years (born in Brussels in 1914, returned to Argentina in 1918, moved to Paris in 1951 in opposition to the Per6n regime) when he wrote the story under our consideration. He said of himself: I am profoundly international. I am absolutely the opposite of the writer, most of all the Latin American writer, who likes to stay in his own country, in his own corner and produce his work from those surroundings [... ] And I believe Jules Verne is to blame. Since childhood, travel has been an objective in life. (Garfield, n.d.) Although he actively embraced the socialist movements of Cuba, which he visited in 1961, and other revolutionary arenas of Latin America, he did want to distance himself from his expected literary heritage of Magic Realism. He noted that: [I]n the fifties I was inclined towards the most refined and cultured writers, and to some extent influenced by foreign literatures, that is European, above all English and French. It is necessary to mention Borges, at once, because fortunately for me, his was not a thematic or idiomatic influence but rather a moral one. He taught me and others to be rigorous, implacable in our writing, to publish only what was accomplished literature. [ ... ] The worst one can do, as far as Borges is concerned, is try to imitate him. (Garfield)
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Borges acknowledged Cortazar's success in literature, describing his work with great admiration: "No one can retell the plot ofa Cortazar story; each one consists of determined words in a determined order. If we try to summarize them, we realize that something precious has been lost" (Julio Cortazar [1914-1984], 2000). Thus, in the original story of "Blow-Up" the protagonist, Roberto Michel, was a French-Chilean translator and amateur photographer working in Paris. He is a virtual duplicate ofCortazar's situation (with the substitution of Chile for Argentina), reflecting his international perspective and chosen relocation as well as acknowledging that one's cultural reality is largely self-created rather than inherently fixed at birth. Antonioni shared little ofCortazar's background except a close birth date (1912) and an early interest in social reform through his foundational work in Italian Neo-Realist documentaries in the early 1940s; however, his cinematic interests soon turned toward fiction "in a more personal and psychological manner, stressing what he later described as 'spiritual aridity' and 'moral coldness' " (The Life of Antonioni, n.d.). Despite continuing to work in Italy until Blow-Up in 1966, however, Antonioni did share another biographical element with Cortazar: both had become internationally known by the 1960s, via the Argentine's 1963 novel Rayuela (translated as Hopscotch in 1966) and the Italian's 1960 L'Avventura (The Adventure) which appeared on Sight and Sound''s prestigious critics' poll of the 10 Best Films of All-Time in 1962 (also 1972 and 1982). However, with his decision to adapt Cortazar's strange short story of a photographer's intervention into the lives of strangers and the unexpected aftermath, Antonioni moved into a truly foreign realm in terms of both location and language, raising speculation as to whether an "Italian 'tourist,' no matter how celebrated, could really capture an ambience as complex as the [reality of the (emphasis mine)] mod subculture of London" (Huss, 1971, p. 1). One objection along these lines is: the scene with the folk-rock group and the stampede for the discarded guitar. The scene has the mark of tourism on it, a phenomenon observed by an outsider and included for completeness' sake. Obviously Antonioni would not be a member of such a group in Italy any more than in England, but he would have known a thousand subtle things about Italian youths and their backgrounds that might have made them seem particularized, less a bunch of representatives en bloc. (Kauffinann, 1971, p. 75) However, another review, also written shortly after the film's release, noted that "The dialogue, tailored by Edward Bond from the Antonioni-[Tonino] Guerra screenplay, is convincing and unobtrusive [... even though] in an effort
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not to betray unfamiliarity, underplaying [of scenes] is left unchecked. But these are rare lapses" (Harrison, 1971, P 45). Of his own decision to navigate unfamiliar waters, Antonioni said: In the first place, a person like Thomas [the photographer] does not really exist in Italy [".] Thomas is also about to become entangled in events which are easier to relate to London than to life in Rome or Milan [... ] But I do not really intend to make a film about London. The same story could be shot in New York, perhaps also in Stockholm, and certainly in Paris. (Antonioni in the English Style, 1971, p. 10) Thus, Antonioni, like Corbizar, consciously chose to move beyond his known world and the reality it represented to him in favor of new explorations of relationships in his work, a decision that ultimately led him to other locations throughout his life (for example, United States, Zabriske Point, 1970; China, Chung Kuo Gina, 1972; Africa, The Passenger, 1975).

Medium to Medium
But to return to the realities presented in "Blow-Up" and Blow-Up we must explore the discourses of these slightly similar stories in an effort to understand how each author gave us a meditation on what can be known of what we perceive and what responses we might consider in regard to those perceptions. In the following discussion I will detail ten areas of my interest in each telling of the stories, attempting to show comparisons between the two media in regard to each of my ten points beginning chronologically with Cortazar. For the benefit of those not immediately familiar with the original story, I offer the following brief summary so as to more directly highlight the similarities and differences with the more well-known film. Although there is much ambiguity about how the narrator told the tale (and even whether the narrator was [always] the protagonist or not), the basic facts are that a man, Michel, working in Paris went out for a walk one day and decided to take some casual photographs. As he snapped a shot of a woman talking to a young boy she became aware of him, then turned angry; Michel left the scene (as did the boy), understanding that he had interrupted an emerging sexual liaison. Later, he developed the photographs and mounted an enlargement of the failed encounter on his wall, at which time he first saw an older man in a nearby car who was actually the likely partner for the boy. At first Michel was joyous that he had interrupted what he felt was even a more scandalous encounter than the boy being seduced by the older woman, but then he saw that the figures were seemingly alive in his photo and the game was afoot again.
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He somehow interacted with the photo figures, once again prevented the boy's submission, then lost his consciousness in a scream. When he awoke all he saw in the photo were moving clouds and occasional birds, a Magical Realism type of situation which was never explained but which left him at peace. In the short story the first element of the discourse to become apparent was the confusion over the fundamental understanding of who was the narrator, making it unclear from the beginning whether the story was told by Michel himself(as it seemed to be on pp. 114-115) or by another who was commenting on Michel (p. 116). This is somewhat similar to Bob Dylan's later song "Tangled Up in Blue" (1974) presented as alternating observations by 'T' and "he," or possibly Cortazar's opening implied a split personality that may call into question the sanity of whatever narration was offered and the validity of the reality that it purported to transcribe. The very difficulty of transcription through the seemingly secure tradition of narration was noted by the speaker(s) in the opening words: "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" (p. 114). As readers we're also treated to the further confusion of these dual (dueling?) narrating entities which presented themselves early on as a pair even as a singularity also asserted itself in the same sentence ("We are going to tell it slowly, what happens in the middle of what I'm writing is coming already" [po 116]). This is now reminiscent of the conflicted character of SmeagollGollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, made even more famous by Peter Jackson's award-winning film trilogy of recent years, but available to and known by a worldwide audience by the time "Blow-Up" was published, although there was no evidence in Cortazar's story that his narrators were such a single entity with a shared consciousness. As with many aspects of this writing, as readers we are simply not permitted to know. Closely related to my first point of emphasis in the discourse is my second focus, in which the narrating voice (seemingly Michel as experiencer of the phenomena that he was trying to recount) admitted how difficult and confusing this telling would be-which explained why the tense and person of the narrator must be elusive, just as the events depicted were. Further, he (as least as first-person Michel) admitted that words attempted by humans are the wrong medium entirely for the presentation of these events, that a typewriter machine is better qualified to independently state and transcribe what occurred with a camera machine, but given that this was not likely to happen (although in these circumstances the normal laws of physics didn't seem to be much of a hindrance) our narrator(s) continued on as best he (they) could.
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Figure 1. A screenshot from Blow-up. (UKJItaly, 1966; Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni; Cin. Carlo DiPalma)
In contrast to how these two elements were devised by COltizar, Antonioni's film was generally one of conventional third-person camera "narrative" where the presenting agent was not necessarily an embodied or even voice-over entity but simply the audio and visual channels of the film itself (Chatman, 1978). The writer, director, and editor functioned as real and implied authors in assembling the various dialogue, shot, and scene constructions, but the implication was that the cinematic presentational apparatus was "narrating" the discourse structure of the underlying story. Most of Blow-Up followed this familiar-although often unexamined-pattern, but there were two critical scenes where the cinematic narrator seemed to be more active in the "telling" of the text, taking on more of a first-person persona: Thomas' discoveries of the tragic events in the park via his explorations ofthe photo enlargements and the overt intrusions at the end of the film where another consciousness seemed to emerge. In the first instance, as explored in depth by many analysts of this film, the editing together of the various photo "blow-ups" jumped around in a manner that implied a more technique-driven, medium-conscious "frame" experience when contrasted to the naturalistic "window" presentations of most of the cinematography and editing in the rest of the film (Burke, 1999, 2001, 2005a, 2005b); in the second encounter, the camera followed the nonexistent "tennis ball" across the lawn, seeming to direct Thomas to pick it up and return it to the mimes' game, after which at least the film audience was now aware of the sound of racquet on ball even though neither existed visibly on the court. This shift in cinematic "person" narration was similar to
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the grand accomplishments of Citizen Kane (1941) where the opening and closing frames were presented by camera movement and discovery rather than any character's recollections, implying a cinematic storytelling presence that was more personified than the seemingly objective renderings of the various flashback presentations. Stylistically, my third area of focus, both creators presented works with their tales of revealing photographs that were quite consistent with other aspects of their output in this later postwar period. While Cortazar's story is contained in different volumes under different titles, the one now called Blow-Up and Other Stories contains related writings that feature similar uses of long, rhythmic sentences that explored narrative events in a stream of consciousness manner: "The Distances," "Letter to a Young Lady in Paris," "Bestiary." Similarly, Antonioni's films ofthis period-L 'Avventura, La notte (The Night, 1960), L 'eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962), and II deserto rosso (Red Desert, 1964)----<:onsistently worked with the same wide angle, deep focus cinematography that embedded characters into their surroundings as in BlowUp so that viewers must also exercise their perceptive and decoding powers just as with Cortazar's writings: narrative precision was no longer streamlined as with the Hollywood model of closeups, shot-reverse shot continuities, and dramatic orchestral underscorings. Similarly, for my fourth point, Cortazar distanced his readers from traditional investment in the narrative by providing no transcribed dialogue between the characters (although much of what was said by the woman and the older man would seem to have had dramatic value for the experience of this discourse); while only "End of the Game" in this collection of stories virtually matched the avoidance of dialogue altogether, most of these writings relied much more on the narrators bringing the tales to life than readers being able to experience such through the characters' interchanges (although the longer ones, "At Your Service," "The Pursuer," and "Secret Weapons," were exceptions to this pattern, just as the closing montage of characterless shots at the conclusion of L 'eclisse was an exception for Antonioni during this time). Antonioni, of course, was known for his minimal use of the spoken word: "Vague, imprecise feelings of loneliness, uneasiness, and angst do not lend themselves to the terse summary required of movie dialogue. [... ] 'Our drama,' he once said, 'is noncommunication'" (Mast & Kawin, 2006, p. 389). So, if these two discourses didn't snare their audiences with dialogue, what were their connective strategies? For my fifth point I will focus on their tactics of engagement. Cortazar used evocative language and unexpected allusions that often required the reader to halt the flow of mental decoding for quiet moments of meditation, consideration, and appreciation. One such
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, I , :

sentence began, "But the sun was out also, riding the wind and friend of the cats," (p. 117) a decipherable enough description of unexpected late autumn wannth but a marvelous combination of metaphors nonetheless. Likewise, he noted "the wind stopped all at once and the sun came out at least twice as hard (I mean wanner, but it's really the same thing)" (p. 117), an unexpected observation that forces the reader to dwell, pleasurably, on this rich use of language. This reached even greater heights when he combined literature with semiotics in saying "Right now (what a word, now, what a dumb lie" (p. 118), a simple aside that implied the whole You can 1 step into the same river twice chronological conundrum. His parenthetical asides about clouds and birds floating by raised more confusion at first, but later they were resolved for the rich foreshadowing that they provided. As noted above, Antonioni's method also required keen observation, but given the temporal nature of cinema the viewer didn't have time to contemplate except in retrospect (and careful re-viewings, as modern DVD technology allows, somewhat erasing the traditional, seemingly essential difference between these two media). Like Thomas, we felt that we were masters of the images we observed/controlled, but later we found that events occurred in the park that we were not aware of, hidden in plain sight because of the large vistas presented to us through wide angle cinematography. When we probe Cortazar's words we find multiple layers of meaning that clarify some insights even while obscuring others through the endless chain of semantic signifiers; similarly, in Antonioni's images we experience along with Thomas the semantic noise of the grain enlargements that first reveals hidden occurrences, then conceals them again as we probe even deeper but find less closure. Bill the painter admitted that he unconsciously created such visual noise fields but then worked from a discovered clue to bring structure to his work; Thomas also attempted to make sense of his photos but found that the clues were ambiguous and elusive, requiring more effort to validate them (Wagstaff, 1992, p. 35). In keeping with how each of these creators forced his audience to exert productive energy to fully appreciate what the texts presented, my sixth point is how tersely each character was presented to us, requiring us to extrapolate further backstory on each of them to better understand what we were encountering. For example, Cortazar's teenage boy was observed by Michel only from a distance-"a terrified bird, a Fra Filippo angel, rice pudding with milk" (p. 120)-yet even our narrator felt compelled to assume many other specifics about his background and motivations (pp. 120-121), which Cortazar then criticized through the other narrative voice ("Michel is guilty of making literature, of indulging in fabricated unrealities" [po 124]) although we as readers were compelled to do the same; in fact, if Michel's "fabricated
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unrealities" are not to be believed, then maybe everything presented to us in the story was simply an insane rambling-just as if in Antonioni's film we were simply witnessing Thomas' hallucinations during a Beatles-era London "hard day's night" after too many stimulations during his eventful day). Still, if we are to take away any insights into Antonioni's Blow-Up characters we are largely left with Thomas because all of the others were so fleeting, mysterious, and hard to find overt value in, just like the fought-for-then-rejected guitar neck from the nightclub scene. My seventh point of consideration is how each creator photo-based story also kept within the realm of themes being explored by them during this period oftheir artistic output. Strange, "Twilight Zone"-type occurrences and ironic developments were also used in Cortazar's "Axolotl," "The Idol of the Cyclades," "A Yellow Flower," "Continuity of Parks" [a virtual Rene Magritte painting in words], "The Night Face Up," and "Bestiary" in this same collection, while Antonioni was consistent with films that "communicate emotional and moral states that can never be entirely clear or resolved" (Mast & Kawin, 2006, p. 389). So, he defied solving the surface mystery of Anna's disappearance in L 'Avventura, he refused closure for the estranged lovers in L 'eelisse, and left us with nothing but observations and questions in Blow-Up. His early '60s cinema consisted of "texts, in the true sense of the word. They interact with us long after their running time is finished. They are incomplete in both form and content because they are incomplete within us as well" (Norton, n.d.). An eighth element of interest is how specific the time frames were for the events of these stories despite how ambiguous the actual events seemed to be, as if the concrete chronological realities gave more credence to the inexplicable happenings that occurred within these objective units oftime. For example, in the short story we learned that the attempted seduction occurred on Sunday, November 7 of the "current year," about a month earlier than the recounting that we read (p. 116); therefore, Michel's confrontation with the impossibly animated people in his photo enlargement also occurred in the recent past relative to the words that are were being set down about these events. In the film, there was literally a 24-hour cycle from the morning we first met Thomas and the mimes until we witnessed their final encounter in the somewhat haunted park the next morning. While Antonioni frequently ended his films of this period in the morning, this is the only one that followed such a rigid Aristotelian unity thereby implying how fragile our supposed anchors are in a world where events are not what they seem and evidence can easily disappear-including our protagonist just before the final credits. This brings us to the ninth area offocus, the alteredperceptions ofreality at the end of each discourse by which time Michel and Thomas changed

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considerably from their positions prior to their challenging events. While the particulars of the two narratives diverged greatly there was unity in many ways. Both protagonists used a camera to interrupt an event that they perceived as unacceptable for the intended victim, both seemingly found themselves beyond a sense of control over follow-ups to the events they discovered (although Michel's hysterical scream at the second seduction attempt about to occur in his photo enlargement did prevent it, despite his initial feelings of helplessness toward "the framework of drool and perfume" [po 130] he observed), and both became calmly resolved to the changed circumstances of their environments by the conclusion of their narratives. Michel no longer spoke in parenthetical asides about clouds and birds but accepted the new window to the sky that was occurring in his enlargement on the wall (it must no longer have troubled him or else he could simply have removed it). Thomas cooperated with the mimes' tennis match (even though he was largely dismissive of them in his encounters the day before), he possibly heard the sounds of the "tennis ball" (although it is only a long-held assumption that this aural addition is actually heard by him as a diegetic presence in the film as well as by us, the non-diegetic audience), and he suddenly disappeared at the end as ifhe had now entered a different perceptual dimension entirely. What is the reality that we encountered in either of these discourses, especially as conveyed by the weird happenings at their finales? Neither creator provided any structure to explain any of their events nor would they have wanted to ruin the dream worlds they so carefully constructed by offering mundane explanations. Cortazar never let us know for sure who was talking or what to believe of what was said; Antonioni even challenged us as to what to understand as diegetic and what was privileged to us as the audience: As Pessacq (n.d.) explored, we heard the rustling of the trees from the park as Thomas studied the photo enlargements and assumed this to be for our ears only, but given that there seemed to be little other non-diegetic sound in the film4 what are we to really understand of both these tree sounds and the famous "tennis ball"? However, for my tenth point I will note the tangible considerations of depictions of events that were acceptable in most cultural environments of the earlier 1960s but are more troubling in our current climate of concerns with cultural diversity and acceptance. For Cortazar's story an essential 21st century question (although raised in 1968 by Kauffmann, 1971, p. 72) is why Michel found it so unacceptable ("devil spit," p. 125) that the "fourteen, perhaps fifteen" (p. 121) year-old boy would be seduced by the older man when he was content to allow it to occur if the kid were actually the prey of the woman? While he elaborated his discomfort at the youth being dominated by a woman
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who would "seduce someone from a position of strength" (p. 128) he was absolutely horrified that the sexual encounter would be with a man and lead the lad to an "awakening in hell" (p. 129). However, despite this homophobic implication, where Michel's ultimate concern was not with the seduction of the innocent but with the gender of the seducer, Cortazar explained that he wanted to expose, not sanction, such attitudes: (H]omosexuality (is perceived] as a disease, as a physical defect, a concept that psychoanalysis, medicine and psychology had dispensed with long ago. ( ... ] This is beginning to change, but what bothers me is that it is changing more rapidly in capitalist societies than in socialist ones. I believe that there has to be a broad and open attitude towards homosexuality, because someday when homosexuals don't feel like corralled beasts or like persecuted animals or like the brunt of everyone's jokes, they will be able to partake of a normal life and feel fulfilled on an erotic and sexual level without bothering anyone and by being happy to the extent that one can be happy, whether he is a male homosexual or she is a female one. (Garfield, n.d.) Similarly, Antonioni 's film contained sexist depictions of all of its women as objects of Thomas' (and our) gaze, from Patricia's red see-through dress to Jane's topless negotiations for the photos to the fully nude contortions of the star-struck teenage girls. All of them seemed willing to have sex with Thomas to accomplish their ends when he had time to be bothered with it, but the romp with the model wannabe's is especially hard to accept in our culture, which has finally caught up with Michel's concerns about sexual predators. Even in 1971 Huss noted that: Antonioni's camera allows us to witness an orgy and several abortive seductions, and, as one critic remarks, lasciviously watches with us from a low angle as the two teenagers, their behinds straining the material of their tight mini-skirts, climb the stairs to the photographer's studio. (p. 4) But we must also remember that this film was somewhat of an exploration of the mod sexual freedom of the time (when neither feminism nor gender identity freedom were causes as yet emphasized, as were civil rights or world peace) where Antonioni focused on the culture around him (and accordingly achieved a financial success he would never again enjoy) while "he not only makes us voyeurs but he also studies the act of voyeurism itself' (Huss, p. 4) both in this scene and throughout the film as a whole. Antonioni himself said:
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But that scene [ofthe girls] was not constructed for ogling. I believe I filmed it in a way that no one would judge obscene. This sequence is not erotic, any more than it is vulgar. It is fresh, light-and I venture to hope--funny. I cannot prevent anyone from finding a scabrous side, but I needed that scene in the film, and I did not wish to renounce it for fear of its not suiting others' tastes. (Antonioni in the English Style, 1971, p. I)

Reality to "Reality"
Much time has passed since "Blow-Up" led to Blow-Up, yet these fascinating stories and their associated discourses remain marvelous examples of the ephemeral nature of what we understand as reality and the difficulty of expressing it in the various abstractions that we know as the languages of words and images. In attempting to interpret our perceptions and emotional responses into media structures that serve needs from the intrapersonal to the intercultural we inevitably fail, making arbitrary impositions on the experiences, their transfonnations into texts, and the interpretations of these texts along the way. At times we celebrate these oblique understandings of our ever-shifting sense of reality as when COmlzar explained his feelings about photography: Photography is a sort of literature of objects. [... ] someone can photograph two or three incongruous elements, for example, the standing figure of a man who, by some effect of light and shade projected onto the ground, appears to be a great black cat. On a profound level, I am producing literature, I am photographing a metaphor: a man whose shadow is a cat. (Garfield, n.d.) Other times we chastise ourselves (and our mirror images in the arts) for such impositions: Thomas's hubris leads him to impose himself upon the clearing [where he encounters the lovers] and, SUbsequently, impose a narrative on what he saw. As a result, his fate is to return to and disappear in the very clearing wherein the epistemological and ontological modes of vision clash. (Schliesser, 1998, p. 268) In the end, reality may be no more than what we make of it, as aided by our artists' visions. In this case an implication of altered realities emerges in a short story invested with a Latin American literary consciousness that found its way into an even wider understanding through its own European transfonnations as well as a further cinematic adaptation by a sympathetic Italian who continued to enlarge its context:
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Cortizar's theme is the tension between two media, one temporal and one spatial, and the tension between the man who uses these media and reality itself. [ ... ] Michel thought the boy's fate was at stake and he felt satisfied to save him, while all the while it was he, Michel, who was playing the leading role. [ ... ] Yet, reality itself is larger than its representations in the media, for the protagonist [in Antonioni's film], like a movie camera or a narrator, can only perceive part of it However, like a movie camera, which can only record what it sees, and unlike a narrator, who can conjecture what lies beyond his perception, the [film's] photographer is left only with the knowledge of what he has seen: two lovers in a park. [ ... ] Both men have learned the limitations of their media and will now move in a world beyond the grasp of their cameras. (Fernandez, 1971, pp. 165-167) By the end of their respective narratives what did either of our protagonists, or even we, as witnesses to these incredible events, learn about any aspect of the assumed realities explored in these texts? Certainly there is no easy closure to either of the Cortazar or Antonioni discourses because neither Michel nor Thomas understood the events he encountered nor could either explain his discoveries any more than we can in our role as their audiences. What we all have learned, however, is that phenomena are not to be known by their surface elements alone: What we assume is valid through the cultural interpretations of the elusive words and images that constitute our media experiences are only intimations toward whatever "reality" may exist in a multitude of physical (and possibly metaphysical) dimensions. All of the artists here learned enough not to attempt final elucidations, but in the process they gave us marvelous points to ponder along with them in their Journeys.

Notes
1. A version of this article was delivered as part of the panel on "Latin American Cinema and Literature" at the annual convention of the Pacific Ancient and Modem Language Association at Pepperdine University in November 2005. I thank my colleague, Hector Mario Cavallari, Professor of Hispanic Studies at Mills College, for his comments on that previous draft and all my reviewers for their helpful additions. The first collection of Cortazar 's stories to contain "Las babas del diablo" was Las armas secretas (The Secret Weapons) cited as published in 1959 by Russek (2004, p. 85) and several Cortazar websites, including Julio Cortazar (1914-1984) (2000), but Fernandez (1971) said this book first
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appeared in 1964 (p. 164). In English translation the story is in Blow-Up and Other Stories, copyrighted 1985 but originally published as End of the Game and Other Stories in 1967. My citations from the short story come from the 1985 anthology. 3. This is the type of adaptation that I would call a more removed "inspiration" rather than a virtual transference or a reconfigured transformation; I base these concepts on Wagner and Andrew, who would respectively refer to each of my terms as analogy, transposition, and commentary (McFarlane, 1996, pp. 10-11) or borrowing, intersecting, and transforming (Naremore, 2000, pp. 28-37). 4. This exploration can be confusing because although the 2000 DVD version distributed by Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. has music that is clearly diegetic, either source-connected or source-disconnected (Zettl, 2005, pp. 331-332), in the scenes of model(s) photography, negotiation between Thomas and Jane for the contested photographs, and Thomas at the nightclub, the DVD also has a music-only soundtrack that ironically ignores the Lovin' Spoonful and Yardbirds songs but continues some of the Herbie Hancock jazz score in the photo studio scenes in a manner that seems at times non-diegetic and is not heard in the regular version. As the full soundtrack is experienced, however, I contend that all the music present can be interpreted as diegetic (except for the Hancock score under the opening and closing credits) so that the wind sounds when Thomas looked at the park photo enlargements and the "tennis ball sounds" in the mimes' game after Thomas' acquiescence to their reality are possibly the only non-diegetic aural elements present in the film, making everything associated with the park all the more mysterious and indecipherable. Trained assumptions say that the wind with the photos was intended for the audience only, but there was no evidence either way as to whether Thomas heard the "tennis ball" along with us or not.

References
Antonioni in the English style: A day on the set. (1971). In R. Huss (Ed.), Focus on Blow-up (pp. 7-12). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Burke, K. (1999). Communicating the visual: A theory of image presentation. Journal o/Visual Literacy, 19, 179-224. Burke, K. (2001). Novel to film, frame to window: Lolita as text and image. Journal 0/ Visual Literacy, 21, l35-166. Burke, K. (2005a). Aesthetic pursuits: Windows, frames, words, images. Part I. International Journal 0/ Instructional Media, 32, 133-142.
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Burke, K. (2005b). Aesthetic pursuits: Windows, frames, words, images. Part II. International Journal of Instructional Media, 32, 247-257. Chatman, S. (1978). Story and discourse: Narrative structure infiction and film. Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press, 1978. Cortazar, J. (1985). Blow-up. Blow-up and other stories. New York: Pantheon Books. Fernandez, H. (1971). From Cortazar to Antonioni: Study of an adaptation. In R. Huss (Ed.), Focus on Blow-up (pp. 163-167). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Garfield, E. P. (n.d.). Interview with Julio Cortazar. Retrieved June 18,2005 from http://www.centerforbookculture.orglinterviewslinterview_cortazar.html Harrison, C. (1971). Blow-up. In R. Huss (Ed.), Focus on Blow-up (pp. 39-45). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Huss, R. (1971). Introduction. In R. Huss (Ed.), Focus on Blow-up (pp. 1-6). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Julio Cortazar. (n.d.). Retrieved June 18,2005 from http://www.subir.com/ cortazar/ Julio Cortazar (1914-1984). (2000). Retrieved June 18, 2005 from http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/cortaz.htm. Kauffman, S. (1971). A year with Blow-up: Some notes. In R. Huss (Ed.), Focus on Blow-up (pp. 70-77). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. The Life of Michelangelo Antonioni. (n.d.). Retrieved June 18,2005 from http://alumni.imsa.edu/-mitchldirectors/antonioni.html. Mast, G., & Kawin, B. F. (2006). A short history of the movies. (9th ed.). New York: Pearson Longman. McFarlane, B. (1996). Novel to film: An introduction to the theory of adaptation. New York: Oxford University Press. Naremore, 1. (Ed.) (2000). Film adaptation. New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press. Norton, G. (n.d.). Antonioni's modernist language. Retrieved June 18,2005 from http://www.geocities.com/hollywood/3 781 /modernism.html Pessacq, G. (n.d.). Re-creation instead of adaptation. Retrieved June 18,2005 from http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/8 889/Blowup.html Ponti, C. (Producer), & Antonioni, M. (Director). (1966). Blow-up [Motion Picture]. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Ponti, C. (Producer), & Antonioni, M. (Director). (2000). Blow-up [DVD]. Turner Entertainment. Russek, D. (2004). Verbal/visual braids: The photographic medium in the work of Julio Cortazar. Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study ofLiterature, 34(4), 71-86.
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Schliesser, 1. (1998). Antonioni's Heidegerrian swerve. Literature/Film Quarterly, 26, 278-287. Wagstaff, C. (1992). Sexual noise. Sight and Sound, 2(1), 32-35. Zettl, H. (2005). Sight sound motion: Applied media aesthetics. (4th ed.). Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth.

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