Cortazar Vs. Antonioni

5 Pages 1284 Words

People often make swift judgments about surface appearances. Often they later find that their first impressions are incorrect. Such is the case when comparing Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up to Julio Cortazar’s short story of the same name, on which the film is loosely based. While the two appear very different at first glance, many of the ideas and themes in Antonioni’s picture are the same as those in Cortazar’s tale. One such similarity is the way that both Antonioni and Cortazar play with perspective in their narratives in an attempt to trick and mislead the partaker.
Cortazar and Antonioni use the opening of their works to skew a person’s observations. Cortazar uses the beginning of his short story to create a sense of confusion and disorder that sets the mood for what is to come. Instead of just starting the account of Roberto Michel from the beginning, Cortazar first wonders aloud how to relate what is going to unfold; according to him, “it will never be known how this [story] has to be told” (Cortazar 114). His puzzling switch between tenses, and his rambling from subject to subject, such as how he wishes that “one might go to drink… and [have] the typewriter continue by itself,” all combine to give the reader a sense of disorientation (Cortazar 114). Antonioni achieves a similar feeling in the beginning of his movie. It starts with a shot of a group of loud mimes riding through the streets in a dilapidated truck, then it cuts to an almost silent image of old men walking away from a grungy building, and then it goes back to the mimes, who are now out running through the streets harassing people. The camera cuts back and forth between these two images until it finally comes to focus on a disheveled-looking young man in the crowd of older men, whom we later know as Thomas, the main character of the film. The two different scenes finally collide when the mimes surround a nice-looking car drivin...