Julio Cortazar has a way of creating a story that is closely intertwined with magical realism. With an acute sense of the human mind, Cortazar uses a psychological approach at narration in his short stories. “Blow-up” in its English translation, is a short story amongst a collection of mind-bending short stories, each a psychedelic experience with an intricate nature in its own right. The appeal behind Julio Cortazar’s novel as well as his short stories is the way each work has its own character, the stories themselves are the character. Julio Cortazar in his many work can narrate a story with multiple points of views, and have them change back and forth simultaneously and cohesively. Hopscotch being the main example. The film Blow-up, A Michelangelo Antonioni film is an adaptation of Cortazar’s works, focuses on the short story “Blow-up”. An erotic film that won the best picture award in the year 1966, is a tale of free love and youth in post-modern London. A world of parties’ sex, fashion and music, the main goal is to disorient the mind, a trip.
Of course the main inspiration of Antonioni’s film was the collection of short stories by Julio Cortazar and in some aspect the film is able capture the essence of Julio Cortazar’s works. “Blow-up” can be consider Cortazar’s most notorious short story, and despite the amount of articles written on “Blow-up” it has remained to this day a controversial work of literature art. There are certain aspects of the story that keep the audience guessing still today. For example the tentativeness of the person narrating the story or the shift from first to third person narrators to name a few. These are aspect of Cortazar’s work that makes it appealing especially to the younger generations of readers and writers. Where Julio Cortazar is most successful is in his grammatical approach to narration. With great ease the words flow together, and constantly. In some ways what makes a Julio Cortazar narrative so appealing to the eyes is the language, and of course the situations. I recommend watching Michelangelo Antonioni’s film adaptation of “Blow-up” for the full experience of Julio Cortazar’s most notorious and entertaining work of literature art.
While we haven't watched the movie yet, you seem to be knowledgeable of it in your own right. Based on your entry, I wonder if you would argue that essence of the original work is most important in adaptation, rather than sticking to text, plot lines, etc.
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