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...