From Blowup to “Blow-up.”

If one understands the relation of a film adaptation to its literary source as being analogous to that between signifier and signified, then, it is difficult to make much of a case for Blowup as being a version of “Las babas del diablo.” The many modifications made to the story’s plot in the film—Paris is changed to London, an amateur into a professional photographer, an inter-age homosexual encounter into a murder, the self-shattering despair of the narrator into the more enigmatic reaction of the film’s protagonist—make it impossible to see Antonioni’s film as attempting to be a “faithful” adaptation of Cortázar’s story. The freedom with which Antonioni handled “Las babas del diablo” is obviously implied in the credits. There, it is claimed that the movie is “based on a short story by Julio Cortázar.”

However, Dudley Andrew argues for a second mode of adaptation in which filmmakers use the source as a springboard for the development of a new text which, while derived from its predecessor, makes no claim to being its intermedial translation. As Andrew puts it: “Adaptations claiming fidelity bear the original as a signified, whereas those inspired by or derived from an earlier text stand in a relation of referring to the original” (28). “Las babas del diablo,” therefore, is the referent, not the signified, of Antonioni’s Blowup. Given the critical and popular success of Blowup, it may very well be that Antonioni’s decision to take Cortázar’s story as only the starting point for a freely conceived autonomous movie was the correct choice. In fact, the elision of the short story’s title is a sign of the freedom to refer which makes Blowup a major movie.

As I mentioned in an earlier entry, short stories are generally less revered than novels. Can one imagine a movie claiming to be “based on a novel by Gabriel García Márquez” without mentioning which one? However, I cannot help believing that the comparative cultural capital of Cortázar and Antonioni also played a role in the lack of a direct mention of the film’s source. After all, Antonioni was widely hailed as a world film master, while Cortázar was far less known, particularly, in English language circles.

I want to conclude this superficial look at the relationship between “Las babas del diablo” and Blowup by noting its most peculiar aspect: this is one of the few cases where the film actually modified its source. “Las babas del diablo” is known in French as “Les fils de la Vierge” (“the threads of the Virgin”), taking up an equivalence proposed in Cortázar’s text, and in Italian as “La bava del diabolo,” to mention languages in which, one imagines, Antonioni could have read the story. However, the English translation, which came out in 1967, soon after the film, is known as “Blow-up.” If the film does not mention the story, the story has incorporated the film’s title as its own, thus highlighting its relationship with a celebrated cultural product. (In fact, the second edition of the collection of Cortázar’s stories, originally titled End of the Game and Other Stories, was re-titled Blow-up and Other Stories). Undeniably, there is a certain commercial opportunism in the renaming of the story. Blowup was a widely seen, widely honored, movie. By linking the story to its “film adaptation,” the editors wanted to borrow some of its audience. But there is also an attempt at acquiring some of the aura of the film masterpiece for a less known story, book, and writer. Granted it is the paratext—in this case the title of the story and, later, of the anthology in which it was included—that was changed, not the actual text. Nevertheless, by being identified as the source of Antonioni’s movie, the manner in which readers approach the story has been changed.