The Theme of the Abstract Ape and the Mistaken Jew: Four Prologues to JLB’s film criticism Provided by Mitchell Miller
‘I think nowadays, while literary men seem to have neglected their epic duties, the epic has been saved for us, strangely enough, by the Westerns.’ JLB The Man on the Sidelines Apparently an elitist, Jorge Luis Borges spent a great deal of time among the common-as muck-patrons of the Buenos Aries picture houses. It is true that he, at times, despaired at the taste of his fellow patrons. In Our Inabilities, an early essay from 1931, he is mortified at their attitude to King Vidor’s Hallelujah, taking from this a lofty vantage point from which to mount a swingeing attack on the Argentine national character: It is impossible to admit them as responsible members of the world. The failure of that intense film Hallelujah to reach the audiences of this country – or rather, the failure of the audiences of this country to reach Hallelujah – was the inevitable combination of that incapacity (exacerbated because in this case the subjects were black) with another, no less deplorable or symptomatic: the incapacity to accept true fervour without mockery. Here for perhaps the first time, the avowed internationalist uses the international art form to finesse both the ideologies of the 20th-century, and the intricate, specific perversities of his homeland. Unwittingly juxtaposed against the universal themes of the cinema, the crowd in the stalls functioned as his Aleph, the point from where he could see with excruciating insight the whole world, in long-shot, middle distance and close-up. Along with Joyce (b1882), Beckett (1906) and Pound (1885), Borges (born in 18991) and cinema are almost exactly contemporaneous. He regularly contributed reviews for the Argentine SUR magazine. He was not especially proud, or assiduous in this work, referring to them as mere ‘scratchings’ which rarely exceeded 1,000 words. Unsurprising for a writer indelibly associated with concision. While condemned by their author, Borges’ film writings are very recognisably his, highly unorthodox, decidedly literary and enjoy a philosophical success less substantial than Deleuze, though perhaps more perceptive. Borges was very knowledgeable about cinema and developed his own touchstones, his own methodology for understanding and contemplating what took place onscreen, guided by his off and onscreen idols, Charlie Chaplin and Josef von Sternberg.
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In continental Europe and the Anglophone countries we are used to – perhaps even sick of – the notion of Borgesian film criticism; Cahiers du Cinema would arguably be a shadow of itself had Borges’ works not begun their steady trickle eastwards in the 1950s2. But in the half-century or so since the Argentinian achieved worldwide fame, his history as a film critic goes largely unrecognised. This cinematic dimension to Borges (as opposed to an important adjective attached to various films, in the mould of Kafkaesque) is even less familiar to English speaking audiences than it is to the French. Of course once it is given some thought, it is not so surprising. It’s all there to be seen in the familiar Borges canon; the gauchos, the ever repeating narratives, the dispensation with the need for an original text and above all, the interest in time, sequence and causality. As far as cinema went, he did not protest too much in its favour; he once said to the author Adolfo Bioy-Casares: ‘At the movies, we’re all readers of Madame Delly (a writer of cliché-ridden romantic fiction)’. He regarded it as ‘the surface of images’ behind which little was to be found, though as Edgardo Cozarinsky noted, in its favour Borges detected its function as a ‘single text fragmented into countless, even contradictory passages, which neither individually represented the text nor exhausted it’. This fragmentation did not always lead to happy results; Borges was appalled at every attempt to film Jekyll and Hyde, referring to it simply as a defamation of the work. He also notes astutely, that in the Spencer Tracy version, Hyde turns into a brute with Negroid features. Even accepting these facts, Borges’ descent to the dark pit amid the peanuts and canoodling couples does not quite fit with our image of the artist himself, what his most recent translator Eliot Weinberger describes (and not for a second, believing in) as ‘the detached metaphysician’. Borges at the pictures might also seem a dreary joke given his blindness, but as a jape it has an added dimension given his reputation as an aristocratic conservative – not the type to be caught chewing a peanut in the stalls. This view – recently resurrected by Clive James in an essay for the American magazine Slate (February 2007) – indicts Borges as a senatorial elitist so appalled by Plebeian democracy he was willing to turn a blind eye to the Junta (1976-1983). James slots Borges further into this Theme of the Traitor and the Hero by quoting the other ‘blind Argentinian writer’ Ernesto Sabato, noted for his consistent opposition to Argentina’s successive dictatorships: From Borges’s fear of the bitter reality of existence spring two simultaneous and complementary attitudes: to play games
in an invented world, and to adhere to a Platonic theory, an intellectual theory par excellence. But in his youth our Plato also disliked the bourgeoisie, lamented the philistinism so prevalent at all levels of Argentine society, and was one of few in his native country to speak out against those ever-so-aristocratic elitists, the Nazis. He did loathe Marxism, though he admired Marxists such as Charlie Chaplin. But James goes way too far in saying his ‘chief objection to fascism is that by mobilizing the people it gives them ideas above their station and hands out too many free shirts’. Nothing in any of the biographies about Borges, or his actual writings about fascism supports this. Perhaps more damning – or accurate – is to berate Borges not as Plato but a latter-day Diogenes, so all embracing and nihilistic in his disdain he loses all ability to be positive, and ergo, worse than useless as an opponent of injustice. To demonstrate just how useless, I refer you to the scholar M. I. Finley’s rebuke of Alexander the Great’s famously sentimental ‘Had I not been born Alexander, I should have preferred to be Diogenes’: No doubt Alexander the Great never said that. But he could have, quite safely, for he was born Alexander.
much more intact.
This is how we find the senator was when his quivering hands finally reached out to sign the ‘round-robin’ condemning the junta. When his younger self was chewing his peanuts and less afraid of the real we find him with the ‘loyalties to truth, justice and mercy’ James has him betray,
Label The youthful Borges preferred to go and see a biograph rather than a cinematograph, the latter being the more technically accurate term favoured by wellheeled cinema patrons and theorists. The usage was telling in the same way that using ‘cinema’ or ‘film’ rather than ‘movie’ or (as plebeian as you can get) ‘the pictures’, socially tags the user. The biograph was ‘the pictures’ of its day, a popular terminology inextricably connected to the proletariat. It describes the effect – the sensation of seeing another life – rather than accurately label the technique, the cause. Biographs wrote life; cinematographs wrote of a science and an art and a grammar of motion. Borges thought enough of the issue to write an essay on the subject in 1929, in The Cinematograph, the Biograph: A film was once called a ‘biograph’; now we generally say ‘cinematograph’. The first term died perhaps because fame required more
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clamour, perhaps because the implication of Boswell or Voltaire made it threateningly lofty. I would not lament that demise if words were indifferent symbols. It is no small thing when JLB, a man of letters, chooses one word over the other. Is this then some unknown, unrecognised popularism at play in Borges’ work? Not quite: The substance of the emotion is the same: bourgeois shock at the devilish antics produced by machines, as invented with an excessive name, ‘the magic lantern’ … for the spectator it is mere frightening technological stupidity; for the fabricator, it is lazy invention, taking advantage of the fluency of visual images. and: The other, the cinematograph, is deserted, with no other connection to human lives except through factories, machinery, palaces, cavalry charges, and other allusions to reality or easy generalities. It is an inhospitable, oppressive zone. That is, the cinematograph encouraged an atmosphere where the exultation in synthetic motion was sufficient – a false sophistication belaboured by the ‘so-called avant-garde cinema’ (dismissed as ‘an institution reduced to nourishing, with more enriched means, the same old fluster’). Borges’ interests lay within the popular cinema of the masses, his frustrations as a critic with its failures to meet his hopes. He goes on to explain his identification with the vulgate term, ‘that which adds people’: The biograph reveals to us individual lives; it present souls to the soul. The definition is brief; its proof (feeling a presence, a human rapport, or not) is an elementary act. It is the reaction we use to judge all books of the imagination. True, he was an elitist even then – but only insofar as he privileged the individual over the mass, and unlike many of his contemporaries, he put no exclusions on who could be an individual, the American Negro, Chaplin’s archly plebeian Little Tramp; all of their biographies were attractive to him, not without prejudice, but certainly free of bigotry. Above them all ranged Chaplin, for him the biograph-poet par excellence, a ‘Borgesian’ figure before the term was coined suggested here by the man himself, ‘his own narrator, that is, the poet of the Biograph’. The choice then for Borges is between a school of thought that fails, even eschews, to engage with the individual, soul to souls, or accepting its more vulgar counterpart that is at least open to doing so. Scholars such as Tom Gunning or Forsyth Hardy might of course dispute the Borgesian reading of this school of early filmmaking as described above (as would I), but
Borges’ response is an authentic one, a considered reproach to the rapidly developing film jargon. It is an elementary act. Scratchings or not, Borges film writings were a symptom of his thinking cinema through, attempting to trace its intellectual contours and inject sagacity and rigour into its appreciation. Ironically, it would be his fictional efforts that would be more influential among film critics – the French particularly – than any of his own contributions to the cineastic Akasha. When I came across the smattering of pieces in Eliot Weinberger’s compendious volume of Borges’ non-fictions (Selected Non-Fictions, Penguin (America), Edited by Eliot Weinberger, translated by Weinberger, Suzanne Jill Levine and Esther Allen, 2000), I wrongly assumed it was the first time these had been translated into English. Published by a small American press in 1988, Argentinian filmmaker/critic Edgardo Cozarinsky’s Borges in/and/on film (translated by Ronald Christ) was first to reproduce some of Borges’ most important film writings (including the SUR pieces) and provides a filmography of films – that is, pictures – adapted from his works. It also delves into the psychology of Borges’ interest in films as a medium ‘free of bibliographies and academies’. To accentuate this point, Cozarinsky reproduces another ‘theory piece’, Films and Theatre, a sneering (and consequently funny) attack on theatre scholar Allardyce Nicoll’s book of the same name, for its ‘appalling taste and lack of imagination’. In particular he takes issue with Nicoll over his critique of retrospective narrative. To do so, Nicoll himself takes issue with Laurel and Hardy’s Bonnie Scotland (clearly a favourite of Borges’) and its use of ‘retrospective narrative’ as ‘not cinematic’, privileging words over images – ‘a veritable apotheosis of pedantry and formalism’. This as one might expect, warm Borges to some of his favourite subjects, time, and narrative structure: More rewarding than either shortening or lengthening a sequence is that of disarranging it, shuffling different times … film (which Allardyce Nicoll correctly observes, has singular means for producing such labyrinths and anachronisms) I recall only The Power and the Glory with Spencer Tracy … the life story of a man that deliberately and movingly suspends chronological order. The first scene is his burial. This shuffling of time was, arguably, never realised in the fullest sense until Donald Cammel and Nicholas Roeg co-directed Performance (1968), which presents a deliberately non-linear narrative where events appear out of sequence in free association. Performance is also the most deliberately Borgesian film ever made; it even over-eggs the pudding (and how) by peppering the mise en scène with Borges paperbacks and, in its climactic head-popping scene, includes an obscure photo of the writer’s fizzog – a somewhat traumatic
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retina-burn when overlaid on the chubby lips of Mick Jagger. Eggbound as it is, Performance is the most sustained attempt to adapt Borgesian notions directly to the moving image. It is also best in its opening hour, which depicts London gangsters free of any sentimentality or any invitation to take pleasure in their transgressions. Borges was notoriously disparaging of Josef von Sternberg’s later work and yearned for the epic vigour of his early gangster films. Incidentally, just as Borges largely ignored the feminine in his fiction, he was equally uninterested at the movies, with his indignation over the misuse of Bette Davis in Now,Voyager an important exception. Borges in/and/on Film is appropriate to its subject in being concise yet comprehensive. But Cozarinsky does not reproduce The Cinematograph, the Biograph. And this essay is important because while somewhat qualified, Weinberger’s important translation still gives us a JLB less senatorial than folklore has permitted. And, it is significant that it should be studied amidst the rest of Borges’ non-fiction, which when read in its entirety demonstrates convincingly that at least in his youth, JLB’s metaphysics were not some remote practice. Whether that faded with his sight is another matter.
Pseudomonkeys Initially, Borges’ great strength as a film critic lay in his distance from the film world, as evidenced in his review of King Kong, which is well worth repeating in full: A monkey forty feet tall (some fans say forty-five) may have obvious charms, but those charms have not convinced this viewer. King Kong is no full-blooded ape but rather a rusty, desiccated machine whose movements are downright clumsy. His only virtue, his height, did not impress the cinematographer, who persisted in photographing him from above rather than from below – the wrong angle, as it neutralizes and even diminishes the ape’s overpraised stature. He is actually hunchbacked and bowlegged, attributes that serve only to reduce him in the spectator’s eye. To keep him from looking the least bit extraordinary, they make him do battle with far more unusual monsters and have him reside in caves of false cathedral splendor, where his infamous size again loses all proportion. But what finally demolishes both the gorilla and the film is his romantic love – or lust – for Fay Wray. Aside from the iconoclasm what appeals is the lack of ‘knowingness’. The film critic, as co-opted and accepted into the web of the film world would make allowances for the crankiness off Kong’s movements. They have that magical, initiate’s understanding that there were processes involved in making the Kong model move. They set Kong in a context of the achievable, of the technical, of the craft, and so the clanks and creaks are indulged. What matters, what is to be celebrated, is that it exists at all, not the nature or quality of that existence. Borges will have none of this; the monkey looks clumsy and ridiculous and so he says so. In fact, the monkey is so fake it jerks him out of the film altogether. Thus jerked, he has no obligation not to say so. He has in short, the true objectivity of the outsider. Of course some might call this philistinism – akin to dismissing the human figures in the Book of Kells as being unrealistic, or the anatomical accuracy of Picasso’s Tauromachy. But then the classicism – or closed romantic realism – of Hollywood was not setting out to create an Abstract Ape, though it may embody abstracted social concerns – Kong’s grin being wide, and ‘Negroid’ enough to terrify certain white audiences. There is other evidence of this ‘rudimentarism’ in Borges’ 1930s scratchings, his utter freedom from the conventions of film criticism. No respecter of reputation, his victims include Hitchcock and Wells (‘of Citizen Kane, he noted, ‘[its] historical value is undeniable but which no-one cares to see again’). Nor would film reviewers of the mature craft dare to relegate their assessment of the acting and cinematography to a mere line – (reviewing Street Scene) ‘acting and photography: excellent’. Few film reviewers would so openly dare to press
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the cinema into service as a badge of intellectual superiority. In the fascinating On Dubbing he is invective against the ‘perverse artifice’ he likens to the Greek Chimera: Those who defend dubbing might argue (perhaps) that objections to it can also be raised against any type of translation. This argument ignores, or avoids, the principle defect: the arbitrary implant of another voice and another language. The voice of Hepburn or Garbo is not accidental but, for the world, one of their defining features. Similarly, it is worth remembering that gestures are different in English and Spanish. What would he have thought of the wave of Kung Fu movies that sell so well in the west partly because of this dissonance between voice and gesture? Or of Anime, its arbitrary-seeming actions and exclamations, again taken not for mistranslation, but charm? Is there not also something pleasing about the great reviewer of nonexistent books reviewing films that do exist through a discipline (film studies) that does not? On a personal level, this continuity could be detected in Cozarinsky’s filmography of Argentine film adaptations of Borges’ work; largely unavailable to an English speaking audience, his descriptions are unintentionally Borgesian in that there is only his say-so that they even exist. Over a short period of time Borges shifted from what could be broadly termed as a naïve and ‘un-academic’ approach to cinema to one that is more ‘knowing’, taking notice of camera-position and montage, and referring more and more to the director as the primary creative force (and this before Bazin and Truffaut identified the auteur in 1954, the last film criticism appearing in 1945). In King Vidor’s Billy the Kid he notices the ‘accumulation of panoramic takes and, to denote the desert, the methodical elimination of close-ups’ as its redeeming feature. There were other premonitions; long before it was acknowledged that all war films that achieved greatness were, to some degree antiwar films, he remarked in a review of The Road Back (1937) that: ‘Works denouncing the indignities or horrors of war always run the risk of seeming to be a vindication of war.’ The review takes us deeper into Borges’ particular understanding of politics, action and world citizenry, noting that such films make him think that pacifism is not enough – it does not recognise that war tempts men with ‘ascetic and moral charms’ and that there is a need for a passion that can replace, or abolish these. Review after review, it is harder to resist the notion that the picture house really was Borges’ Aleph, a vortex that kept at least part of him tuned to the present, as opposed to the dimmer past found in his books – for as James notes, one of Borges’ great political deficiencies was his lack of a ‘near past’ to refer to. Not that the past was ever distant for Borges, champion of the reusable motif, the repeating trope, the persistent meme. In his review of Green Pastures he imagined a translation of the Bible ‘in time and space’ to Gaucho literature, and showed how stock characters of these stories could find their Biblical counterpart. Having erected a ziggurat of possibilities he then confounds his readers by revealing their absence in the film. He also skewered neatly Hollywood’s fingers and thumbs approach to history, in this review of Los Muchachos de Antes no Usaban Gomina: The characters – doctors, toughs, and bullies of 1906 – speak and live solely as a function of their difference from the people of 1937. They have no existence outside of local and temporal colour.
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It is hard not to feel cheated of Borges’ review of Cecil B. deMille’s epics, with their flouncing, portentous and profoundly dull dialogue – only he almost nearly, sort of, did, dismissing a deMille spectacle with characteristic concision: The Russians discovered that the oblique – and consequently – distorted shot of a bottle, a bull’s neck, or a column had greater visual value than Hollywood’s thousand and one extras, hastily camouflaged as Assyrians and then shuffled into total confusion by Cecil B. deMille. Although prefiguring auteurism in his interest in the director Borges does not peddle its theology. Truffaut may have forgiven Los muchachos … director Manuel Romero his linguistic failings by extolling his photographic prowess. It was exactly this critical process that allowed John Ford to be rescued from the journeyman category. It is this director who, in his review of The Informer Borges guns for, with no hint of reverence – he does not even give the director’s name. He notes the excessive motivations given for the hero as lacking in epistemological delicacy, and the phoniness of the sets – the Dublin of the Informer is ‘too European’ and weighted down with ‘local colour’ (see above …). It also offended his emergent notion of the world citizen. In his review of Los Muchachos … he noted that Europe was populated by ‘mere Germans and mere Irishmen. Europeans are scarce’ – no empty comment in 1937. His judgement of the mise en scène of Ford is equally dispensary: … there is no American director, faced with the hypothetical problem of showing a railroad crossing in Spain or an uncultivated field in Austro Hungary, who does not solve the problem of representing the site with a specifically built set, whose only merit has to be the ostentation of its cost. Final nail in Ford’s coffin, for Borges at least, is the sentimental death of the titular informer ‘accompanied by Catholic stained glass windows and choir music’. Borges did not of course, expect Ford to travel to Ireland to shoot his film. His point (which links very snugly into his view of the World Citizen) is that a railroad track in California, while not identical to a railroad track in Spain, looks more like it than an ‘obvious sham’ of a set. There was a genuine universality in the streets of Dublin or Los Angeles that was important to him. Borges’ great hope for his Aleph was that it would make the creation of a world nation its primary business. What he seems to have found are countless distortions through the bottle.
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Parable of Borges and the Little Tramp When penning his capsule portrait of Liam O’Flaherty (1937) Borges describes him as a ‘man of Aran’. Did he lift this from a common Irish terminology, or from Flaherty’s 1934 documentary of the same name? He attacks the latter in Films and Theatre with the superbly dismissive ‘a mere anthology of images’. It may be that he was no friend of the documentary form. Borges’ standpoint remains, at heart, literary. In that sense at least, one might refer to him as a protofilm critic – not quite full fledged. But then, such a judgement raises all sorts of difficult questions as to the clubbishness of film criticism, and what the membership criteria might be. This has not troubled the JLB scholarship who largely agree with their subject that the film writings are fairly minor in comparison to the other works. As noted previously, Borges’ fictions had a far more profound impact on the cinema (the French 1960s in particular) than anything he wrote explicitly, and directly in honour of ‘the pictures’. Next to the Aleph, a review of King Kong certainly does seem slight. Nor are there any rabbits to pull out of the hat to confound the notion. But they are not so minor as to be disregarded altogether, and they are an important, if neglected, development in the history of film criticism. He prefigured many of its conventions, developed a few of his own, and seamlessly wove it into the body of his factual writing. More importantly, we see his familiar concerns and motifs surface within the capsule reviews and in most cases, their exposure to cinema nourished and developed them further. This might seem a grandiose claim if Weinberger’s relatively small selection did not demonstrate the extent to which Borges’ cinematic interests penetrated and permeated his corpus of non-fiction. This is perfectly sensible within the context of his practice of displacing segments from earlier work into another, to see how the meaning is changed or amplified. But there is no question that his imagination was shaped by cinema, especially von Sternberg, and within fictional works such as the many ‘Gaucho’ stories, the camera angle is a clear and strong influence. In essays very much NOT about cinema per se, it resurfaces openly or not. In his new refutation of time, his most sustained philosophical enquiry, it does not explicitly appear; but there are echoes of his meditations on Spencer Tracy, while his consideration of Hume’s ‘bundle of perceptions’ chimes with the hallucinogenics of Cammell and Roeg’s Performance. Above all there is a pathology of his doubt, so carefully expressed in this late essay, to be traced in the film reviews; what is film if not time, a trust placed in
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sequence, or ‘succession’, of everpresence, simultaneity, brute reality of ‘having already lived in the present moment? In Buenos Aries, at 6.30 and 10.45pm, there is not a single moviegoer, no matter how forgetful, who does not experience that impression’ (review of Now,Voyager, 1943)? More concretely, ‘Ramon Llul’s Thinking Machine’ resurrects the magic lantern and Hitchcock is deployed in ‘The Enigma of Shakespeare’, to iterate the anonymity of the screenwriter in comparison to the director (again, another example of Borges’ scepticism at the notion of auteurism). It went two ways: in ‘Translators of the Thousand and One Nights’ he wonders at the ‘bizarre reticences of Hollywood’ against the context of William Lane, the sneakily prudish second (western) translator of the tales. And in his notion of time we find some sort of rationale for his refusal as a ‘true intellectual to take part in contemporary debates; reality is always anachronous’ (‘Notes on Germany and the War’, 1941). The most persistent, recurrent cinematic motif, which returns us to the harsh realities Borges’ detractors accuse of fleeing from with such regularity, is the figure of Chaplin, for whom Borges’ affections are touchingly genuine. He was no expert on Chaplin himself; in numerous allusions to him, he mistakenly believed him to be Jewish, to the extent that the Little Tramp sidles into the celebrated Essay ‘I a Jew’ (1934), falsely identified as Jewish by Borges (though there are many arguments for saying that Chaplin’s gentile abstraction can be easily understood as a Jewish experience as surely as Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman can be extended to the American). Chaplin, as the man happily – but perhaps knowingly – ignorant of temporal realities was as appealing to Borges’ metaphysical musings as Laurel and Hardy – who, in their otherworldly daftness tried so hard to adapt – was to his considerations of narrative art. Chaplin as a mistaken Jew was a common error to the extent that Chaplin famously and regretfully confessed in 1940 during the release of The Great Dictator that ‘he did not have the honour’. The Great Dictator is a film whose sensibilities chimed with Borges’ impassioned and principled rejection of the Nazi creed, from a notably plebeian standpoint. Similarly, Borges, also ‘accused’ of ‘Jewish ancestry, maliciously hidden’ laments: Who has not, at one time or another, played with thoughts of his ancestors, with the prehistory of the flesh and blood?
… it has not displeased me to think of myself as Jewish. It is an idle hypothesis … Two hundred years on and I can’t find the Israelite; two hundred years and my ancestor still eludes me.’ This conjunction of Chaplin and anti-Nazi principles invokes the other cinema idols von Sternberg and by association his Dietrich, arguably the classiest woman to grace Hollywood, the most Aryan woman to not only reject Hitler, but repeatedly risk her life to entertain the troops fighting him. She was not a favourite of Borges (or to be more exact, he found von Sternberg’s fascination with her to be ruinous) but he, she, von Sternberg and Chaplin were world citizens united by movements cinematic and political. Finally a word must be said on Borges’ interest in making films. This leap – from critic to creator – is hardly unique in the arts. In Borges’ own literary output it is famously, near imperceptible, but it is one far harder to make in the resource-hungry world of cinema than it is with a pen and some foolscap. Borges had a number of ideas for films and two – Invasion and The Others – were made by the director Hugo Santiago from treatments he worked up with BioysCasares. Invasion was made in Argentina in 1968 and Les Autres in France in 1973. At the time of his death he was working on a third idea for the Venice in Peril Fund. He did not write the screenplays, but provided the germ of the idea for Santiago to develop. The Others is a tale of interchangeable identities, and according to Cozarinsky, it seems to have been inspired by the earlier review of Jekyll and Hyde, where he mused: ‘We may imagine a pantheistic film whose characters finally resolve into one, who is everlasting.’ Tellingly, the protagonist – the character waiting to dissolve into one – is a bookseller and is, as Cozarinsky rightly notes, a mostly ‘intellectual adventure’ – but it is also, by implication, a kind of epic. The film itself is almost a disappointment next to the terse, vivid possibilities raised by its synopsis, which almost works better as a treatment for a non-existent movie, in the famous Borgesian mould. The synopsis for Invasion is even more complete within itself, and takes concision to the extreme: Invasion is the story of a city – imaginary or real – besieged by powerful enemies and defended by a few men, who may not be heroes. They fight until the end, without ever
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suspecting their battle is endless. And that’s it, a living example of the ‘surface of ideas’ on the printed page. Cozarinsky’s summary of the film links the sham critic to the great critic agitator Brecht, who: ... recalls his concern with staging a fight for the sake of the fight itself: a rigorous selfsufficient mechanism like that of a boxing match. Invasion he tells us was written with no presupposed interpretation, though these have since proven irresistible. Borges’ leap from critic to maker – sideliner to a protagonist (of sorts) – bookseller (or lender) in search of a man to be – was in this regard, far from complete. He was no Godard, no Lindsay Anderson, almost as accomplished as prose stylists as they were visual poets (though in a self-sufficient belle-lettres boxing match none of them could withstand the librarian). Brecht’s attention to this idea allowed him to analyse the specifics of literary creation: … form and content – those pittances of the critic, those hindsight mirages of the reader – disappeared in an endless, creative interaction among simultaneous aspects of a single work. But in Borges’ epigrammatic treatment for Invasion, does he not attempt to correct that same decline of the ‘epic quality’ in literature, through the cinema? Wherein the critics’ pittance disappears within the wholeness of the work? Such was the goal. We understand now perhaps, that Borges’ horror at Kong, the desiccated, clanking, abstracted ape, was horror far beyond the niceties of criticism. For what is the pseudomonkey but a falsehood of form and content made crudely obvious, an inefficient mechanism dependent on the forgiveness and indulgence of the audience, a poor show to the Mistaken Jew who would labour so long to surpass the ‘pittances of the critic’?
(Endnotes) 1 F or some, cinema begins with the Lumiere’s first exhibition of moving pictures at a Paris café in 1894. Since then it has been understood that moving pictures are anything up to a decade older, the oldest confirmed apparatus for showing moving pictures being Louis de Prince’s 1888 film of Leeds trams. This was taken with a camera the size of a fridge, and could only be viewed through a viewfinder built into the apparatus. 2 For a succinct and well argued commentary on the impact Borges made on the French critical and cinematic New Wave see ‘A Source for Exegetes’ in Edgardo Cozarinsky, Borges in/and/on Film, Lumen Books, (New York), 1988.
Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions, Penguin (New York), Edited by Eliot Weinberger, translated by Weinberger, Suzanne Jill Levine and Esther Allen, 2000. Edgardo Cozarinsky, Borges in/and/on Film, Lumen Books, (New York), 1988.
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