The Invisible threads that interwoven the blurred realities of Julio Cortázar's Las Babas del Diablo, and its filmic adaptation, Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up

Abstract

The objective of this article to do a comparative analysis of the short story Las Babas del Diablo (published in 1959), by the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar, and its filmic adaptation, Blow-Up (released in 1966), by the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni. The methodology is a comparative analysis encompassing the narrative structure of each work, taking into consideration the following elements: plot, characters, time, space, focalization and imagery. In order to theoretically ground the analysis, a brief literature review on adaptation and film theory is presented, based mainly on works by Linda Hutcheon (2006), Deborah Cartmell (2012), Julie Sanders (2005), Linda Seger (1992) and Thomas Leitch (2012). The discussion shows that Hutcheon’s adaptation theory describes very properly how the process of adaptation occurs, taking into consideration its multiple aspects, keeping always in sight the value of both works as intertextual entities that just enrich each other.