prospective on peavler.

I greatly appreciate Terry J. Peavler’s article “Blow-up: A Reconsideration of Antonioni’s Infidelity to Cortázar” if only for the reason that he nicely summarizes the Antonioni/Crotazar debate until that point. It’s good in that “there’s no sense of reinventing the wheel” sort of way… We can take what he has gathered together and spring off of it.

Peavler also set me at ease as far as my understanding (or lack there of) of Cortázar’s short story. I originally came away from the story wanting to debate whether or not the narrator actually saw a crime take place, more basically what it was the narrator saw at all. After our class discussion, I was worried I might have missed something---that didn’t seem to be a point of interest. Maybe the situation is more cut and dry than I had believed? Peavler reassured me, however, by stating: “As if matters were not already complicated enough, our hypothetical reader-viewer can find no where to turn for help in his comparative analysis, for it is difficult, if not impossible, to find two readers, or two viewers, who concur on what happens either in the story or in the film, much less come to an agreement on what, if anything, it all means. The single best example of ambiguity in each work is the crime that seems so central to the plot.” P888.

With that said, where does this leave us in terms of adaptation and Antonioni’s film? Though I have yet to see the film, Peavler’s explanation of the relationship between the two gives me the impression that their connection is far more fascinating, artistically, than a straight adaptation would present. I like to think about artists being inspired by each other across mediums. It seems as though Antonioni might have wanted to capture some of Cortázar’s essence and was appreciative enough of its existence to state that fact out loud. I don’t think it gets much better than this line in the last paragraph of Peavler’s article: “But Antonioi continues to wink at Cortázar, and Cortázar at Antonioni.” What a great explanation of the whole situation--- and image.