Jorge Luis Borges – Page 2

Strange Adventures: a film list

This is science fiction.

Presenting the list I mentioned earlier in which I highlight a number of worthwhile science-fiction films (also some TV productions) that aren’t the usual Hollywood fare. I’ve spent the past few years watching many of these while searching for more. This isn’t a definitive collection, and it isn’t filled with favourites; I’ve deliberately omitted a number of popular films that would count as such. It’s more a map of my generic tastes, and an answer to a question that isn’t always spoken aloud in discussions I’ve had about SF films but which remains implicit: “Okay, if you dislike all this stuff then what do you like?” I tend to like marginal things, hybrids, edge cases, the tangential, the unusual and the experimental. And for the past two decades I’ve increasingly come to value anything that isn’t a Hollywood product. There are two Hollywood productions on this list but neither of them were very successful. Not everything here has been overlooked or neglected but many of the entries have, either because they made a poor showing at the box office or because they have the effrontery to be filmed in languages other than English. Not everything is in the first rank, either, but they’re all worth seeing if you can find them.

Liquid Sky.

The starting point is around 1960 because prior to this date any marginal or unusual examples of SF cinema are harder to find. A genre has to be somewhat set in its ways before radically different artistic approaches emerge, and pre-1960 there wasn’t much testing of the SF boundaries in the film world. Science-fiction cinema has also tended to lag behind the written word, so even though the literature was growing more sophisticated during the 1950s, films from the same period are mostly filled with monsters, spaceships and mad scientists. By the 1960s enough written science fiction was playing with (or ignoring) genre stereotypes for a “New Wave” to be identified. Some of the films detailed here might be regarded as cinematic equivalents of SF’s New Wave but I’ll leave it to others to argue the finer points of definition. A few of the choices are a result of directors going in unexpected directions, with several selections being one-off genre excursions by people better known for other things. I’ve omitted many films and/or directors that receive persistent attention, so there’s no David Cronenberg, Nicolas Roeg, Andrei Tarkovsky or John Carpenter; and no Mad Max 2, Akira, Ghost in the Shell or The Prisoner. A couple of edge cases are so slight I couldn’t really justify their inclusion so you’ll have to look elsewhere for appraisals of The Unknown Man of Shandigor (a spy satire with Alphaville influences) and Trouble in Mind (more of a neo-noir fantasy). 2010 is the cut-off point. I’ve never been someone who watches all the latest things so it often takes me years to catch up with recent releases.

Avalon.

I can imagine there might be questions about the availability of some of these films. All I can say is search around. I’ve managed to accumulate half the things on this list on either DVD or blu-ray so they’re not all impossible to find. I did consider posting links but the whole issue of region coding complicates matters. Most of the short films circulate on YouTube, as do a number of the features although these don’t always include subtitles. Have I missed something good? (Don’t say Zardoz….) The comments are open.

Invention for Destruction (Czechoslovakia, 1958)

An evil millionaire named Artigas plans to use a super-explosive device to conquer the world from his headquarters inside an enormous volcano.

(Previously.) It seems fitting to start with a film that adapts a novel by one of the founders of the genre, Jules Verne. Karel Zeman’s third feature extended his technical effects to combine live-action with animation, creating a film in which the engraved illustrations of Verne’s novels are brought to life. With music by Zdenek Liska.

La Jetée (France, 1962)

The story of a man forced to explore his memories in the wake of World War III’s devastation, told through still images.

Chris Marker’s haunting short is one of the great time-travel stories, a 25-minute film that JG Ballard often listed as a favourite. Memory was a recurrent theme in Marker’s work, and memories here provide a physical route into the past, with the predicament of the unnamed protagonist concentrated on a single memory from his childhood. Marker’s interests ranged widely but he haunts the margins of science-fiction cinema in France, assisting Walerian Borowczyk with an early animation, Les Astronauts (1959), as well as the Pierre Kast entry below.

Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution (France, 1965)

A secret agent is sent to the distant space city of Alphaville where he must find a missing person and free the city from its tyrannical ruler.

Another Ballard favourite, and not a neglected film by any means but the first in our collection of one-off SF excursions by directors better-known for other things. Alphaville is also important for being the first film to present itself as science fiction without any of the obvious or expected trappings of the genre. Paris in 1965 is Alphaville because Godard says it is. In part this is the director doing his usual thing of self-consciously adopting a genre; this is “science fiction” in the same way that Breathless is “crime”. But the conceptual leap was an important one for cinema, a step that freed film-makers from the need to build expensive sets and dress their cast in silver jump-suits. With Raoul Coutard’s high-contrast photography, Paul Misraki’s noirish score, Eddie Constantine’s bull-in-a-china-shop performance (he makes Ralph Meeker in Kiss Me Deadly seem soft-hearted), and the incomparable Anna Karina.

The Heat of a Thousand Suns (France, 1965)

(Previously) A one-off animated short by Pierre Kast with assistance from Chris Marker, drawings by Eduardo Luiz, and an electronic score by Bernard Parmegiani. A young man with his own spaceship solves the problem of faster-than-light travel then heads into the cosmos with his pet cat.

Fahrenheit 451 (UK, 1966)

In an oppressive future, a fireman whose duty is to destroy all books begins to question his task.

Francois Truffaut’s first colour feature has always seemed a little dull despite its incendiary subject matter and the Hitchcockian urgency of Bernard Herrmann’s score. It might have been improved with an actor other than Oskar Werner in the central role but there’s still a lot I like about this one: the music, the shots of the SAFEGE monorail, Nicolas Roeg’s striking photography, and Julie Christie in a double role. There’s also some amusement for Brits in seeing a Frenchman presenting ticky-tacky English suburbia as a soulless dystopia. With spoken titles, flat-screen TVs in every home (it’ll never happen…), and Genet novels condemned to the flames.

Je t’aime, Je t’aime (France, 1968)

After attempting suicide, Claude is recruited for a time travel experiment, but, when the machine goes haywire, he may be trapped hurtling through his memories.

(Previously.) Much as I like toying with the idea that Last Year in Marienbad is science fiction there really isn’t anything in it that easily justifies the claim. Director Alain Resnais said that this one wasn’t SF either but it does at least feature a time machine. Resnais had collaborated with Chris Marker in the 1950s, and the pair remained friends, so it’s tempting to see this as a riff on La Jetée. (There’s even an echo of Marker’s film in the title…) Both films use a doomed romance as a focus for their examination of memory and time, and both feature choral scores, the music for this one being composed by Krzysztof Penderecki.

Continue reading “Strange Adventures: a film list”

Morel’s inventions

1: The Invention of Morel (1940), a novel by Adolfo Bioy Casares.

Cover art by Norah Borges.

A fugitive hides on a deserted island somewhere in Polynesia. Tourists arrive, and his fear of being discovered becomes a mixed emotion when he falls in love with one of them. He wants to tell her his feelings, but an anomalous phenomenon keeps them apart. (more)

Jorge Luis Borges declared The Invention of Morel a masterpiece of plotting, comparable to The Turn of The Screw and Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Set on a mysterious island, Bioy’s novella is a story of suspense and exploration, as well as a wonderfully unlikely romance, in which every detail is at once crystal clear and deeply mysterious. Inspired by Bioy Casares’s fascination with the movie star Louise Brooks, The Invention of Morel has gone on to live a secret life of its own.

Octavio Paz:

The Invention of Morel may be described, without exaggeration, as a perfect novel….Bioy Casares’s theme is not cosmic, but metaphysical: the body is imaginary, and we bow to the tyranny of a phantom. Love is a privileged perception, the most complete and total perception not only of the unreality of the world but of our own unreality: not only do we traverse a realm of shadows, we ourselves are shadows.

2: Last Year at Marienbad (1961), a feature film directed by Alain Resnais.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, Sight and Sound, Autumn 1961:

What are these images, actually? They are imaginings; an imagining, if it is vivid enough, is always in the present. The memories one “sees again”, the remote places, the future meetings, or even the episodes of the past we each mentally rearrange to suit our convenience are something like an interior film continually projected in our own minds, as soon as we stop paying attention to what is happening around us. But at other moments, on the contrary, all our senses are registering this exterior world that is certainly there. Hence the total cinema of our mind admits both in alternation and to the same degree the present fragments of reality proposed by sight and hearing, and past fragments, or future fragments, or fragments that are completely phantasmagoric.

Rosetta Stone to Last Year in Marienbad:

In the mid-Fifties, when Casares’ novel was translated into French, it was read by Robbe-Grillet. We know this since he wrote a favorable review of the book in 1955. In 1961, Resnais and Robbe-Grillet were interviewed by filmmaker Jacques Rivette, who commented on the link between Morel and Marienbad, parallels briefly acknowledged by Robbe-Grillet (who didn’t elaborate). Resnais and Robbe-Grillet had evidently never discussed this, as indicated by Resnais’ comment that he was unfamiliar with the book! An English translation of this interview was readily available to all New York critics in 1961, but none of them picked up on the significance of those few sentences.

Louise Brooks, Delphine Seyrig.

Ann Manov, The Invention of Marienbad: Resnais, Robbe-Grillet, Morel, and Adolfo Bioy Casares on the Left Bank:

L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) is an adaptation that became a theft. It is plainly based on La Invención de Morel (1940), and this was immediately apparent to the critics who first viewed it. The Cahiers du cinéma that came out with Marienbad is full of references to Morel, of critics saying how immediate the connection was. And on a biographical level, it’s pretty obvious: in 1953, the screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet asked his editor at Critique magazine if he could write about an interesting Argentinean novel; he wrote an admiring but mixed review about the importance of the themes of solitude, memory, and the modifiable past, and how he hoped another artist could do them more justice; and seven years later, he wrote a screenplay with the same setting, characters, motifs, and themes, complete with, in first drafts, Hispanic names.

But the orthodox view about this connection, on the exceedingly rare occasions it is mentioned outside of the Hispanic world, is summarily dismissive: as a recent master’s thesis summarizes, “Since the release of Last Year at Marienbad in 1961, some critics have taken to circumventing the difficulty of the film by drawing on The Invention of Morel as the alleged inspiration for the film.”

Thomas Beltzer:

Without Morel, Marienbad is mostly an exercise in formalism; however, with the intertextual juxtaposition of the two, it becomes another, different work. It becomes an early false reality film, perhaps the first.

3: L’invention de Morel (1967), a TV film directed by Claude-Jean Bonnardot.

• The entire film on YouTube (with English subtitles).

4: Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), a feature film directed by Jacques Rivette.

Jacques Rivette:

When we discussed how the second film should be integrated with the first, we considered various possibilities. At one stage the idea was to go much further in fragmenting the second film, particularly in dispersing the various elements, letting the montage range freely, thus permitting a variety of different meanings. At this point, naturally, we thought of Comedie Policiere and about a writer who has been much in view since L’Année dernière à Marienbad (and even before): Adolfo Bioy Casares and his novel The Invention of Morel. Of course we knew all this existed—Marienbad and the TSE and The Invention of Morel—but we were trying to find a motif for ourselves which would be both similar to theirs and at the same time different…

5: L’invenzione di Morel (1974), a feature film directed by Emidio Greco.

• The entire film on YouTube (Italian only).

6: The Invention of Dr Morel (2000), a short film directed by David Lamelas.

7: Lost (2004–2010), a TV series.

8: The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2005), a feature film directed by the Quay Brothers.

Virginie Sélavy: Was The Invention of Morel an influence?

The Quay Brothers: Yeah, it was very important. We couldn’t get the rights for it. We actually wrote to Adolfo Bioy Casares and he said, “sure, you can have it”, and then he wrote back a day later and he said, “I forgot, I gave it to somebody else”. (laughs) We found out that this guy, some Argentinean in Paris who’s had it for thirteen years, never got it off the ground but keeps renewing the rights. So Alan [Passes, co-writer of Piano Tuner] and the two of us said, well, let’s just work around the themes a little bit. So all you really have is the island, the tide, elements like that.

VS: I thought you also kept the idea of people being replaced by their images and living this kind of eternal but illusory, disembodied life.

QQ: Yes, exactly. Perpetuum mobile almost, because at the very end the character in The Invention of Morel asks that if anybody should invent a machine capable of reuniting their images, they help him enter into Faustine’s consciousness, which is a little bit what the Felisberto character is attempting at the end of Piano Tuner. He claims to have succeeded—he says, “we’re together, buried among the rocks”. In his imagination at least he’s done it. The Invention of Morel was actually a homage to Louise Brooks—Faustine really is Louise Brooks. Bioy Casares was fascinated by her.

VS: And there’s also the character of the mad inventor.

QQ: Yes, I think he features less in The Invention of Morel, he’s more like a shadow figure. (more)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Marienbad hauntings

The Others, a film by Hugo Santiago

The Others (1974) is the second of the feature-length collaborations directed by Hugo Santiago from screenplays developed with Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges. The film was produced in Paris with a French cast, together with two of Santiago’s collaborators from Invasion: cinematographer Ricardo Aronovich and composer Edgardo Cantón. The association of Borges with this one seems to have been little more than providing a very simple idea which I won’t reveal here since doing so would give away the entire story. In later years Borges was dismissive about film adaptations derived from his works but this one is still creditably Borgesian even if it isn’t as satisfying as Invasion.

The story concerns one Roger Spinoza (Patrice Dally), a middle-aged man with a very Borges-like name who runs a bookshop, Librairie des Ameriques, in the centre of Paris. The abrupt and apparently meaningless suicide of Spinoza’s son, Mathieu (Bruno Devoldère), precipitates for the bookseller a personal and possibly metaphysical crisis which prompts him to visit his son’s friends in the hope of discovering an explanation for the tragedy. Spinoza’s visits to Mathieu’s girlfriend, Valérie (Noëlle Chatelet), develop into a romantic relationship which brings him into conflict with Moreau (Daniel Vignat), a lawyer who was Mathieu’s rival for Valérie’s affections. (Valérie works at an astronomical observatory which gives her a natural affinity with Spinoza, a man who shares a name with the Dutch philosopher who supported himself by grinding lenses for Christiaan Huygens’ telescopes.) These events are complicated and rendered mysterious by the presence of “the others”, a number of strange men who individually shadow Spinoza’s investigations while harassing Mathieu’s friends and acquaintances. The actions and identities of the men remain inexplicable until the very end when an explanation—the original idea from Borges—makes everything clear. The philosophical side of Borges’ suggestion is absent, however, which makes the explanation seem both glib and fantastic, but it has the effect of presenting all the events of the past two hours in a very different light.

So why is this not as satisfying as Invasion? In part because Santiago sporadically interrupts his narrative with brief scenes that show the film itself in the process of creation. These are continuations of a 10-minute prologue of outtakes, scene setups, rehearsals, Santiago’s asides to the camera, and so on, all of which are differentiated from the film proper by the cold blue/green cast you get from film footage that hasn’t been filtered for daylight. There was a lot of this kind of Brechtian fourth-wall breaking going on during the 1970s, usually without achieving very much. Santiago’s story is confusing enough without being further fragmented by distracting interruptions. Another distraction is the Edgardo Cantón score which follows Invasion in its use of musique concrète as well as more conventional orchestral scoring. But where the Invasion soundtrack complemented the action the score here works against the film, especially when the sounds and snatches of music are more abrasive than they were previously. I can put up with all manner of directorial eccentricities but this example tested my patience. It’s hard to see why a story such as this would warrant a Brechtian treatment, which suggests that the distractions are more of a result of the director’s lack of faith in his screenplay.

Bioy Casares, Borges and Santiago.

Flaws aside, The Others isn’t without attractions for Borges readers. The film is truer to the spirit of Borges than many of the adaptations of the author’s stories: mirrors abound, and play a significant part in the narrative, while Borges’ words are present in the Grove Press edition of Ficciones seen on a shelf in the bookshop, and in the character of Valérie who informs Spinoza that she was born in Buenos Aires. After the pair have spent the night together Valérie recites in Spanish the Borges poem Spinoza. “Do you know that poem,” she asks. “Yes,” says Spinoza, “it’s from a fellow librarian.” The librarian himself is seen at the very beginning of the film during the production prologue, talking (silently) to Santiago and Adolfo Bioy Casares.

In a note about Death and the Compass, Borges said that most stories should stand or fall by their general atmosphere rather than their plot. The Others would have succeeded very well on this level if not for its flaws; the events are persistently intriguing and the streets of Paris are effortlessly photogenic, a sombre city captured at angles and cropped views by Aronovich’s camera. Three years later Aronovich was photographing another series of enigmas for Alain Resnais in Providence. Like the Resnais film, The Others has been unavailable for far too long but may now be viewed with English subtitles here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Invasion revisited
• Goodfellow and Borges
• The Rejected Sorcerer
• The Immortal by Jorge Luis Borges
• Borges on Ulysses
• Borges in the firing line
• La Bibliothèque de Babel
• Borges and the cats
• Invasion, a film by Hugo Santiago
• Spiderweb, a film by Paul Miller
• The Library of Babel by Érik Desmazières
• Books Borges never wrote
• Borges and I
• Borges documentary
• Borges in Performance

Invasion revisited

More Borges. Recent posts about the Venerable Jorge had me searching again for a subtitled copy of Hugo Santiago’s Invasion, the feature film he made in Argentina in 1969 from a script co-written with Borges and the latter’s friend and frequent collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares. Subtitled copies of Invasion are now easier to find than they were when I wrote about the film back in 2014; there’s one here although this wasn’t the copy I was watching at the weekend so I can’t vouch for the quality of the subtitles. As before, this is the précis:

In 1957, a small group of middle-aged men fight a clandestine battle against forces quietly invading and taking control of their city, Aquilea. Enigmatic in its story-telling, Hugo Santiago’s once-lost film obscures the motivations of either side, leaving only a series of moves and counter-moves that evokes past dictatorial oppression and those still to come.

Don Porfirio (Juan Carlos Paz).

“Aquilea” is Buenos Aires masquerading as a fictional city, with a name borrowed from Roman history. For Borges readers the views of the city are fascinating in themselves since they show us the streets and café interiors which are settings for many of the writer’s stories; we also see one of his books, El Hacedor, prominently situated on a shelf. Beyond this, the fictionalising of the city pushes the story away from Argentina’s turbulent political history towards the fantastic and the mythic, as does the lack of any background information about the life-and-death struggle we’re witnessing.

The writer visits the set. Left to right: Hugo Santiago, Ricardo Aronovich, Jorge Luis Borges and Lautaro Murúa.

This was Hugo Santiago’s debut feature, made after several years working in France as an assistant to Robert Bresson. For a debut it’s an impressively assured piece of work, a fast-moving thriller of a type you wouldn’t expect Bioy Casares and Borges to be involved with; less time is devoted to dialogue than there is to gunfights and assassinations. Reviewers tend to compare Invasion to Alphaville but this is misleading; Aquilea may be an invented setting but there’s nothing about the place that’s futuristic or unreal beyond the surreptitious invasion which is being staged and resisted in the midst of an oblivious citizenry. A direct influence was a long-running and very popular Argentine comic strip, Héctor Germán Oesterheld’s The Eternaut, in which the surviving inhabitants of Buenos Aires fight against alien invaders; but this is a typical science-fiction scenario, with most of the human beings wiped out and the survivors battling a variety of monsters. Santiago’s film is more elusive than this, although Lautaro Murúa as Herrera, the leader of the resistance, physically resembles the stern protagonist from the comic. Invasion is deadly serious in a way that Alphaville never is, free of the quotation marks that frame all of Godard’s fictional excursions. The photography by Ricardo Aronovich is the high-contrast chiaroscuro of a late film noir like Kiss Me Deadly, as is the atmosphere of doom, paranoia and escalating urgency; characters are shown continually marching or running towards their destinations. Murúa strides through his scenes with the grim determination of Lee Marvin in Point Blank; in fact Boorman’s film is a better comparison than Alphaville, a spare and elliptical neo-noir that was one of the first Hollywood features to embrace the innovations of the Nouvelle Vague.

The harsh separation between black and white extends to the white raincoats of the invaders and the black suits of the resistance, the latter being directed by Don Porfirio (Juan Carlos Paz), an elderly man who spends most of the film in his apartment where he plans operations while talking to his black cat and drinking maté tea (a South American habit frequently referred to in Borges’ stories that you seldom see on screen). Most surprising of all is the soundtrack by Edgardo Cantón, a musique-concrète assemblage of animal cries, metallic shrieks and electronic tones. The inexplicable presence of these sounds complements the inexplicable nature of the scenario while resisting easy interpretation.

Invasion‘s ambiguities may help the film sidestep an overtly political reading but they were deemed threatening enough by the Argentine dictatorship of the 1970s for the negative to be seized and kept from circulation for many years. (Parts of the film are also disturbingly prophetic: the invaders base their operations—which extend to torture and murder—in the city’s athletic stadium; a few years later similar South American stadia were being repurposed as venues for mass execution.) Restoration work on the film in 1999 led to the copies that circulate today. Borges wouldn’t have seen anything of this during his lifetime, his blindness was almost total by 1969, but we’re more fortunate. If you enjoy unusual thrillers this is one I recommend.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Goodfellow and Borges
• The Rejected Sorcerer
• The Immortal by Jorge Luis Borges
• Borges on Ulysses
• Borges in the firing line
• La Bibliothèque de Babel
• Borges and the cats
• Invasion, a film by Hugo Santiago
• Spiderweb, a film by Paul Miller
• The Library of Babel by Érik Desmazières
• Books Borges never wrote
• Borges and I
• Borges documentary
• Borges in Performance

Goodfellow and Borges

Last week’s story search had me looking through this handful of Penguin volumes again, all of which have cover illustrations by Peter Goodfellow. These were the first Borges books I bought, beginning with the Labyrinths collection in 1985. The Book of Sand is two volumes in one—The Book of Sand and a late poetry collection, The Gold of the Tigers—with cover art suitable for both. I used to think that the covers of the other books were pastiching or quoting well-known artists but now I’m not so sure. Two of them definitely are quotes or pastiches: The Book of Imaginary Beings is a play on the weird growths you find in Hieronymus Bosch, while Doctor Brodie‘s contemplative skeleton is from the famous anatomical engravings in De Humani Corporis Fabrica by Andreas Vesalius, with some Chinese or Japanese landscape details added to the background.

Two positive artistic references suggested that the other covers might follow suit, so I used to take the Labyrinths cover as a vague reference to the anomalies that Salvador Dalí would situate in his desert vistas, while A Universal History of Infamy was de Chirico, perhaps, although this no longer seems certain at all. Those columns look like Bernini’s double colonnade from Saint Peter’s Square in Rome, not a Turin arcade, and the picture lacks the disjunctive perspectives you find in de Chirico’s “Metaphysical” paintings. The pastiche thesis is further diluted when you discover that Goodfellow had been quoting from Bosch as far back as his cover for Ursula Le Guin’s Rocannon’s World in 1972, while he borrowed another skeleton from Vesalius for Structures by JE Gordon. Sometimes you can reach too far for meaningful connections.

The Bosch-like cover does seem to have had an enduring influence, however. When Penguin published the Collected Fictions in the UK in 1999 they used a detail from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights for the artwork. Bosch details turned up on a later edition of A Universal History of Infamy, and have subsequently appeared on a series of Turkish Borges editions. Not a bad choice for a writer whose fictions offer universes of possibility.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Rejected Sorcerer
• The Immortal by Jorge Luis Borges
• Borges on Ulysses
• Borges in the firing line
• La Bibliothèque de Babel
• Borges and the cats
• Invasion, a film by Hugo Santiago
• Spiderweb, a film by Paul Miller
• The Library of Babel by Érik Desmazières
• Books Borges never wrote
• Borges and I
• Borges documentary
• Borges in Performance