SOURCE: “Antonioni’s Blow-Up and Pirandello’s Shoot!,” in Literature-Film Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 2, April, 1989, pp. 129–33.

[In the following essay, Cole argues that Pirandello’s 1916 novel Shoot! provided more inspiration for Blow-Up than the Julio Cortazar story which is its credited source.]

Although the credits for Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) indicate that the screenplay was “inspired by a short story by Julio Cortázar,” essays treating both film and story inevitably conclude that the differences between the two are far greater than their similarities. Cortázar’s amateur photographer takes one picture of a woman talking with an adolescent boy while he speculates on the possible outcome of what he deduces is a sexual “pick-up.” His action interrupts the encounter; the boy runs away; and a man waiting in a parked car is seen joining the woman in apparent anger and agitation. Several days later the photographer, contemplating an enlargement of his picture, experiences, first, shock, as he now reconstructs imaginatively that what he interrupted was an attempted homosexual seduction; and second, relief at having had a role in permitting the boy to escape. Apart from the obvious complexities of Antonioni’s adaptation, the carefully elaborated social and cultural context of “liberated” young people in a trendy, “mod” world, there is an essential difference even in the central experience of a photographer coming to a belated realization that what he had photographed was more horrible than he had earlier realized.

Cortázar’s photographer is in fact horrified and disgusted at the “reality” of the attempted seduction, but we have no way of determining with certainty that what he imagines to have been the case was in fact the case. His perceptions and descriptions all tend to point in that direction, but he himself provides a perspective of ambiguity in narrating the incident. He confesses very early that he is troubled about the difficult process of telling the story: “It’s going to be difficult because nobody really knows who it is telling it, if I am I or what actually occurred or … if, simply, I’m telling a truth which is only my truth. …”¹ Later, as he imagines the possible human responses of the boy to the woman, he accuses himself as one “guilty of making literature, of indulging in fabricated unrealities” (157). Despite all such self-conscious warnings, however, the reader is inclined to share the narrator’s conclusions about what was about to happen, and—even more important—is convinced of the personal truth of his emotional revulsion.

In the case of Antonioni’s photographer, on the other hand, the murder is more than a probable speculation; it is real; it did happen. And his response to that discovery is in telling contrast to that of Cortázar’s photographer: there is neither shock nor revulsion, but an amoral fascination at having been a recording witness of the death. Coming upon the actual corpse, his chief response is the desire to photograph it. And even that wish is liable to quick submergence when the more immediate pleasures of a pot-party overwhelm him.

Because the corpse has mysteriously disappeared by the next morning, and because the film’s final sequence shows the photographer witnessing and even participating in a mimed tennis match (there is no ball, but mimes and photographer act as if there were one), some critics have been inclined to assert the theme of illusion and reality as central to the film, and in that connection have often alluded to Pirandello. The allusions are made in a general way, associating Pirandello with the theme itself, and with technical theatrical strategies that embody that theme. But there is a far more relevant connection to be drawn between Antonioni’s film and Pirandello’s work: it lies in several close similarities between Blow-Up and Pirandello’s novel, Shoot! (Si Gira, 1916, 1925), a narrative cast in the form of notebooks by a motion-picture cameraman who has undergone the traumatic experience of filming a scene of simulated violence that suddenly becomes an actual human slaughter. Indeed, given the nature of the themes and attitudes elaborated in Pirandello’s novel, it would be far more accurate to credit it rather than Cortázar’s short story with having inspired Antonioni’s film.

One of the most striking sequences in the film presents the photographer at work in his studio with a glamorous model (played by Verushka): their interaction takes on the characteristics of sexual love-play, the model responding with increasing intensity to the photographer’s excited direction. Their mock-climax takes place as the model, writing slowly on the floor, with the photographer first standing and then kneeling astride her, heeds his suggestive words: “Go at it. Go, go. Great. That’s it, keep it up. Lovely. Yeah, make it come. Great. Don’t give up now. … Love, for me. Love for me, Now, now … Yes, yes, yes. …”² The abrupt conclusion leaves the model prostrate on the floor and the photographer slumped exhausted on his divan. For all its surrogate sexuality and mock-intimacy, the bizarre procedure has been “professional”—both photographer and model are being paid for what they are supposed to do: to provide images of sexual glamour. The commercial manipulation of sexuality is “all in a day’s work.”

Pirandello’s motion-picture cameraman in Shoot!—Serafino Gubbio—works for a Rome film studio in the days of silent movies; unlike Antonioni’s figure, he plays no directing role, but merely operates the camera in response to the commands of others. His studio also is interested in providing images of sexual glamour, among other, fantasies, and one of the scenes he must film is a counterpart to the Antonioni sequence. In it, the leading actress of the company plays a young Indian woman who kills herself in the course of a dagger-dance which she performs nearly naked. The cameraman recalls the intensity of her performance:

Through the painful contortions of that strange, morbid dance, behind the sinister gleam of the daggers, she did not take her eyes for a minute from mine, which followed her movements, fascinated. I saw the sweat on her heaving bosom make furrows in the ochreous paint with which she was daubed all over. Without giving a thought to her nudity, she dashed about the ground as in a frenzy, panted for breath, and softly, in a gasping whisper, still with her eyes fixed on mine, asked now and again: “Bien comme çͣ? Bien comme çͣ?”³

The quasi-sexual intimacy between actress and cameraman leads, at the scene’s end, to mutual exhaustion:

I was utterly exhausted … I saw Carlo [an actor] help the woman to rise, wrap her in the cloak and lead her off, almost carrying her, to her dressing room.

(128)

Pirandello’s protagonist is a remarkably reluctant participant in the world of surface sensations that he meets around him; in fact, his deepest feelings run counter to the profession that employs him, a profession he finds meretricious, impersonal, mechanized, and fraudulent. His journals record disturbing sentiments and questions which would never occur to Antonioni’s photographer, who has not only “bought into” the restless, sensation-hungry, and technologically enhanced mod culture but also drifts on its erratic currents without reflection, thought, or judgment. People like that are just what Pirandello’s cameraman despises. Two or three instances of his reactions to particular incidents bring to mind analogous situations in the film.

The first occurs very early in the book, when he recounts meeting up with an old friend who is now a teacher in a “Casual Shelter”—a social service center and charity “hotel” for the down-and-out, not unlike the London “doss-house” where Antonioni’s photographer has spent the night surreptitiously photographing that segment of the human scene which is ordinarily excluded from his more fashionable surroundings, and which will be quickly “translated” into parts of a photo-book he is soon to publish. Pirandello’s character is struck by the sordid plight of many in the shelter, but is far more upset to see the place invaded by a troupe of film-actors who have come there to shoot “a scene from real life” (30): “I remained to look on disgusted at the indecent contamination of this grim reality, the full horror of which I had tasted overnight, by the stupid fiction which [the director] had come there to stage” (31). Motives of exploitation for amusement purposes, and insensitivity to actual human distress are what offend him most. Although such feelings are not shared by Antonioni’s photographer, it is evident enough that the perspective of the film gradually establishes just such an implicit judgment upon its central character, who manipulates and exploits others for his own esthetic and commercial ends.

Pirandello’s cameraman also resents and resists the mechanizing aspects of life in a technological age. He finds the dizzy, mechanical pace of modern life out of measure with more reflective, human experience; and he becomes increasingly cynical about his own impersonal role as that of a mere hand that turns a handle. So much does mechanical function define the man that on the studio lot he is known by the nickname, “Shoot.” (The depersonalization has taken still another step in Antonioni’s film—the photographer is never named at all!) Machinery has opened the way to new sorts of amusements, thrills, and excitation, but Pirandello’s character is not at all attracted to them. Two small but symbolic instances underline that judgment. In the first, the cameraman on his way to work in a horse-drawn carriage is overtaken by a motorcar carrying three actresses: they “laugh, turn round, wave their arms in greeting … amid a gay, confused flutter of many-coloured veils” (77). He sees this as an artificial excitement, something not quite genuine: they do not greet “because there is anyone in the carriage particularly dear to them”; rather, “the motor-car, the machinery intoxicates them and excites this uncontrollable vivacity in them” (78). Surely there is something of the same flavor in the “staged” rag which opens Antonioni’s film, with its waving and shouting students in mime make-up who erupt from their whirling jeep to pour into the otherwise silent morning streets. When he arrives at the studio, Pirandello’s photographer also notes with some contempt the pitiful hangers-on who wait patiently for work as “supers”—some of them content with the mere opportunity to don a costume (82). Something of the same impulse lies behind the two young would-be models who hope to be photographed by Antonioni’s photographer; ironcially, their yen to don a new costume leads to their getting stripped in more ways than one.

Gubbio’s function as a camera operator combines two elements of modern life inimical to the human spirit: the mechanical, and the sham. He finds himself reduced to something mindless and will-less as he turns the handle of the camera; and he finds the cinematic enterprise itself a huge hoax:

How are we to take seriously a work that has no other object than to deceive, not ourselves, but other people? And to deceive them by putting together the most idiotic fictions, to which the machine is responsible for giving a wonderful reality?

(87)

What is more, he senses that there is something inimical to life in the process of cinematography, that it feeds upon life and transforms it to dumb images, that it deprives the actors of their greatest artistic satisfaction, the emotional interaction with a live audience. The camera, in such ways, kills and devours, transforming humans into phantom images.

Although identified by the outsiders with his function as a cameraman, inside, Pirandello’s narrator is thus deeply at odds with the goals and procedures of his profession, precisely because they threaten human sensitivity, individual personality, the more genuine sources of emotion and relationship. His private notebooks contain a sense of outrage which his fellow-workers never see, but for the reader it is always clear that his voice is the voice of a judge and prophet within modern culture. Nothing could be farther from the role of Antonioni’s photographer, who seems to bob atop the crest of the wave of his culture—a high priest in the “fab” world of fashionable fantasy, amoral spontaneity, and the recreational imperative. Nevertheless, both novel and film are energized by an implicit tension between the spectacle of a modern culture, amplifying its capacities for sheer sensation, and a sense of stifled humanity, losing its attachment to values of love, compassion, justice, intimacy, responsibility. Pirandello’s narrator is still stirred by humane feelings and judgments; at one telling point, struck by the suffering of a tormented and rejected man, he is very nearly moved to call him “brother.”

No, I did not utter that word. There are certain words that we hear, in a fleeting moment; we do not say them. Christ could say them, who was not dressed like me and was not, like me, an operator. Amid a human society which delights in a cinematographic show and tolerates a profession like mine, certain words, certain emotions become ridiculous.

(323–24)

Gubbio’s bitter realizations are Pirandello’s chief means of criticizing the new insensitivities of contemporary culture; Antonioni’s way is more subtle. His photographer sees and feels but never judges, or, more precisely, judges only by criteria of esthetic or pleasurable impact. Through his camera’s eye and his own voyeuristic eye, all persons, places and events are reduced to stimuli, some of which he packages photographically for consumption by others. The absence of any ethical dimension in his responses to those stimuli is a key mark of his diminished humanity. He plays the spy among the urban down-and-out to expand his portfolio of candid images of human blight; but he is shaping an artsy book, and shows no sign of one disturbed by injustice or ill-tended misery. London itself he judges adversely “this week” because it fails to “do anything” for him. Most telling of all is his response to the murdered corpse; which he perceives not as a victim of crime but as an object to be photographed. Whatever comes his way he reduces to an actual or a potential frame in a sequence of images, which is also the task of Pirandello’s more reluctant cameraman.

Gubbio, too, in the climactic episode of the novel, films inadvertently a premeditated murder. The killer in this instance is a love-crazed actor who, in a hunting scene where he is to shoot an attacking tiger, suddenly turns his rifle against the actress who has rebuffed him and shoots her before getting mauled to death by the animal. The cameraman, in a kind of mechanical trance, films all of this unrehearsed violence. The profits of this unexpected footage bring him and the company financial success, but Gubbio himself (“Shoot” by nickname) loses his power of speech in the shock of the incident. In his silence he finds an ironic perfection, a finishing touch to his role as mechanical image-maker, a hand and an eye without anything to say as a human being. Antonioni’s photographer, though unable to film the corpse after he has assured himself of its reality, is also reduced finally to an eerie silence. The last episode in the film shows him observing a mock tennis game performed by mimes, a game which draws him into its illusion when the players beckon him to return the “ball” which has supposedly been hit out of the court. He mimes the return throw, and an ironic smile plays briefly over his face as he seems to realize his immersion in illusory games.

Antonioni has claimed that one of his film’s chief themes is “to see or not to see properly the true value of things.”⁴ His photographer’s way of seeing (and not seeing) is a splendidly supple embodiment of that theme, wherein persons, places, and events are manipulated into an esthetic frame for esthetic “effect.” Their value is reduced to that effect, and ordinary human concerns and values (personal respect, compassion, responsibility, privacy, justice) are rendered irrelevant. The fashionable mode of esthetic (and frequently fantastic) seeing anesthetizes human feeling. That theme was also at the core of Pirandello’s novel, which clearly prefigured, and perhaps even influenced directly, Antonioni’s film. In any case, Pirandello would certainly have appreciated the movie, not only out of sympathy for its underlying judgments, but above all for its startling paradoxical achievement as an invented image whose human resonance is inversely proportional to the loss of human resonance in the image-maker whose story it portrays.

Notes

1. Cortázar, “Blow-Up,” End of the Game and Other Stories, trans. Paul Blackburn (New York: Random House, 1967), rpt. in Focus on “Blow-Up,” ed. Roy Huss (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971) 152.

2. “Blow-Up”: A Film by Michelangelo Antonioni (London: Lorrimer Publishing, 1971) 31–32.

3. Shoot!, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Dutton, 1934) 127–28. Page references for subsequent quotations will appear within parentheses in my text.

4. Interview in Cahiers du Cinéma (Jan. 1967), quoted in “Blow-Up”: A Film, 14.