THE BLOW-UP MYSTERIES: TECHNOLOGY AND IMAGINATION IN THE POETICS OF DON DELILLO AND MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI.

The paper explores the relationship between technology and imagination in the poetics of Don DeLillo and Michelangelo Antonioni, as reflected in DeLillo's Libra (1988), Underworld (1997), Falling Man (2007) and Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966). The plot of Antonioni's cult film, loosely based on Cortázar's short story „Las babas del diablo," is well-known: the protagonist, a professional fashion photographer, believes he has unwittingly captured a murder with his camera. The discovery is made in the scene in which he frantically makes a series of blow-ups in the hope of finding clues to the mystery thus reclaiming the past. His belief in the power of photography borders on fantastic, and the paper sets out to revisit this phenomenon in the context of the works of Don DeLillo, who has acknowledged his indebtedness to the European cinema, Antonioni included. In DeLillo's novels characters repeatedly try to find the truth which escapes them in their everyday experience through the power of technology, principally the camera, which, as Walter Benjamin noted, has the paradoxical (and sublime) capacity to represent the past as if it were „Here and Now". Indeed, the photograph as „memento mori" (Sontag) or a „micro version of death" (Barthes) is a little more than a metaphor in both Antonioni and DeLillo's murder mysteries, which abound in dead bodies, or bodies soon to be dead, captured in still photographs or sequences of images, enlarged and super-slowed, from the horrifying sight of Kennedy's exploding head recorded by Abraham Zapruder to the „horrific beauty" of the „Falling Man" shot by Richard Drew. Curiously enough, both Antonioni's and DeLillo's characters seem to call into question the nature of still and moving images, as the specters from these snapshots and videos haunt them, teetering between the real and the imaginary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]