Borges Film – Invasión
- At October 03, 2019
- By Great Quail
- In Borges
0
Invasión
Invasion
1969, Argentina, 123 min.
Crew
Directed by Hugo Santiago.
Screenplay by Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Hugo Santiago.
Cinematography by Ricardo Aronovich.
Music by Edgardo Canton.
Cast
Lautaro Munia — Julián Herrera
Olga Zubarry – Irene
Juan Carlos Paz – Don Porfirio
Martin Adjcmian – Irala
Daniel Fernández — Lebendiger
Synopsis
Borges himself wrote the synopsis of Invasión with Adolfo Bioy-Casares: “Invasión 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 suspecting that their battle is endless.”
Comments
In the mid 1960s, the filmmaker Hugo Santiago contacted Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges to express his interest in making a movie together. Born in Argentina but living in France, Santiago learned his trade working as assistant director to Robert Bresson. His fellow Argentines agreed—an agreement largely brokered by Bioy Casares—and Santiago proposed the idea for Invasión. Bioy Casares and Borges produced a synopsis, and Santiago developed a screenplay before filming in Buenos Aires. Borges also wrote a milonga for the soundtrack, “Milonga de Manuel Flores,” which was set to music and recorded by the tango legend Aníbal Troilo.
The finished film was a disappointment for Borges, who believed that Hugo Santiago’s early embrace of the French nouvelle vague ruined the clarity of his plot. Adolfo Bioy Casares believed otherwise, calling it an “extraordinary film.” The reaction of the public ranged from bafflement to delight, but Invasión soon fell afoul of the Argentine authorities. With its prescient scenes of mass executions held in football stadiums, the film became somewhat uncomfortable for the regime during Argentina’s “Dirty War,” and was subsequently banned from theaters and television. In 1978, military authorities confiscated eight reels of the original negative and destroyed them. Fortunately, a 35-mm print was discovered in 2004, and Invasión was successfully restored. It is now considered a classic of Latin American cinema.
The Argentine writer and filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky writes about Invasión in his 1980 book, Borges In/And/On Film:
Like Brecht’s In the Jungle of the Cities and Losey’s Men in a Landscape, Invasión presents a story whose motivation remains concealed. In some notes for a new edition of his early works, included in Writings on Theater, Brecht recalls his concern with staging a fight for the sake of the fight itself: a rigorous, self-sufficient mechanism like that of a boxing match. This concern made him pay renewed attention to the smallest details of the action, to the substance and color of the words epitomizing the conflict. While working on his problem, he corroborated the special complexity 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.
In the theater, words may take on exceptional vigor if the omission of logical motives for dramatic action enhances them, if they must serve as the rationale for actions overturning all the demands of naturalistic verisimilitude. The information withheld from the audience blots out the transparency of the language, turning it into a solid, luminous surface not meekly yielding to being a vehicle. Films, instead, do not allow similar possibilities for cutting away: every contingent element of the image produces an effect of connotation as inevitable as it is difficult to control. In Men in a Landscape it is not enough to conceal the crime committed by the fugitives, the suffering they have fled, even the country that serves as the setting for their flight. Stripped of every informative connection, any inkling of the past, the mere physical presence of the actors as well as their gestures and tone immediately suggest various possible contexts. The resulting paradox—valid in the theater too, but less intensely there—is that these mechanisms, reduced to their plainest function, assume hypothetical significance: an example of the horror vacui that Henry James shrewdly foresaw in stories where a central ellipsis sustains complex narrative architecture and hurls the reader into the game of interpretation.
Invasión takes place in a city that does not exist outside the film. Its name—Aquilea—resonates with a certain mythological connotation, while its city plan, shown at various times during the film, is a stylized version of the layout of Buenos Aires. The city’s visible topography is that of Buenos Aires as well, but with vast sections omitted and the remainder grouped in unexpected neighborhoods and arrangements. The city explored by the film is like shorthand for more complex, missing signs; yet, at the same time, the film provokes a double shock of recognition and surprise in people who know Buenos Aires. It would not be inappropriate to compare this city to the urban counterfeit in “Death and the Compass.”
All that is known about this city is that invaders and defenders fight over it in an undeclared war consisting of skirmishes that prepare for the final resolution in occupation and resistance. Impatient to discover an allegorical meaning in this action, whose causes are hidden, the audience is defeated by contradictory information. The most misleading clue is the date, 1957, which appears next to the name Aquilea at the start of the film. According to the authors, this date was chosen because it is not open to interpretation and, at the same time, thwarts those who might point to the absence of a precise time.
Nevertheless, even though Borges, Bioy Casares, and Santiago deny it, Invasión has been accumulating a meaning ever since it was filmed, with the course of subsequent history perhaps coloring the purely fictive object that the film attempted to be. The resolutely gray city, those characters who cultivate a stoical tight-lip, might be components of the “hard-boiled” novel before being cheapened by the série noire, but they are also the circumstances of the porteño, the citizen of Buenos Aires, who is defeated in advance and inherits a discredited tradition. As the film progresses, the dark clothing, the lonely sipping of maté, the tender, ripping sound of the accordion become signs for a way of life capable of being idealized (that is, where a seed of myth can be found) to the same degree that it accepts being condemned, as a proud, liberal city, to remaining on the fringes of history—left, like Alexandria or Trieste, to a splendid or obscure extinction. The invaders, with their white clothes, definite gestures, and sparsely furnished offices triumph, just as a race of technocrats can triumph over a handful of sportsmen, just as the notion of efficiency destroys the idea of fair play. The groups of young people who have appeared occasionally during the film become the resistance movement and take charge of the fight, but “in our own way.” This last sequence is the most noteworthy. It appears after the phrase “The End,” and its successive dissolves superimpose almost identical images from minimally different angles, producing two important effects: (1) an indefinite multiplication of the number of youths who take up arms for the fight, and (2) a violation of cinematic “grammar,” which has been respected up to that point. In every sense, this portion situates itself outside the film, and beyond its laws, in a human, narrative, cinematic, ideological space that is totally other.
Interpretation may be irresistible, but it is certainly unnecessary in order to appreciate a film whose meticulous production affects every level, posing continually different oppositions: gaps that serve to punctuate what is basically an action film; snatches of tangos and milongas on a soundtrack composed like a score for concrete music; natural sources of lighting in a film that unemphatically scorns all naturalism; concise and definitive dialogue, like that in sagas, between characters whose heroism has overcome their modern, urban condition in the first place. All of which gives rise to a play of tension and release that equally determines the narrative order and the mise-en-scène, alternating brief and intensely violent acts with delicate or ominous pauses. In a word: cinema.
Like its characters, who do not mean to please but to play elegantly and honorably—a game whose rules are demonstrated in the very act of obeying them, Invasión—difficult and proud—imposes itself on the viewer. The film offers itself as a stage where different conceptions of the cinema, which in theory should be mutually exclusive, confront each other—Walsh and Bresson, for example. Far from destroying each other, their encounter produces a severe, complex, intelligent cinematographic object—unavailable to either allegory or sequential narrative—that grants itself the luxury of achieving a closed form of perfection only to violate it in its final minute.
Borges on Invasión
In 1967, American writer Richard Burgin conducted a series of interviews with Borges at Harvard. Burgin asks Borges about Invasión, still in production at the time:
Richard Burgin: I know you’re working on a screen play now. Since you can’t see so well, I wonder how you can go about it? It must confront you with difficulties.
Jorge Luis Borges: Well, no, but I’ve written only the dialogue. Besides, I can imagine, I’ve seen hundreds or thousands of films in my time, I can imagine a film.
Burgin: I know that you’ve, of course, written some film criticism.
Borges: Oh yes. I’m very fond of films. In Buenos Aires people go to films far more than they do here. In Buenos Aires, every day, well, I suppose you can choose between forty different films, and those films, well, most of them are American, but you can also have your pick of Swedish, English, French, Italian or even Russian films.
Burgin: Why don’t you tell me something about the plot of your movie, The Invasion?
Borges: Well, the plot is, the central plot should be that a city is about to be invaded and then—the whole thing is rather fantastic—the authorities take no measures whatsoever. The invaders are very ruthless and very powerful and then the city is defended.
Burgin: The invaders, who are they?
Borges: Well, you don’t know. The invaders, you see them and you feel that they are very ruthless and very efficient and many. And, of course, you have a conflict. All this has no political meaning—we were not thinking, say, of the communists, or the fascists, and then the city is defended by an old gentleman and his friends. Now his friends are very half-hearted, they are very skeptical about the whole thing and they are bound by circumstance. For example, a man has to go and save his country, but he can’t do that because he has to go with his wife to a party or because he has a bad cold, no? And yet somehow those people in their half-hearted, skeptical, unbelieving way defend the city. And then, in the end, the city falls out of the hands of the enemies and you know that the defenders will go on fighting, somehow. That’s the story, not a very impressive story as I tell you, but it makes quite a good film. And then, you see those people are rather helpless, some of them are even figures of fun, and yet somehow they get away with it and they defend the city successfully. And, of course, the whole thing has many adventures, because you have these people rushing to and fro.
Burgin: There seems to be an epic quality about the film.
Borges: An epic quality, yes, and at the same time, the whole thing is rather desultory. Those people may, when they are in a great hurry, they may have a poker game or a card game and they’ll be losing time over that, or a man may have an assignation with a girl and may forget all about the invaders. I think it’s quite a good film. Of course, as I tell it to you, it doesn’t sound like a good film, but….
I think it should be a very amusing film also, because you have all those kinds of characters, the characters are quite unlike each other and there are, well, for example there are some epic moments. There is a man who’s a coward and he is one of the defenders. And the others, they accept him, they’re all friends. And they say, “Yes, so and so, well he isn’t too good, no? I don’t think we can count on him, no?” Because they know that he’s a coward. And then, there is a moment when one of them has to get himself killed. Well, they have to send somebody, and this man who is a coward says, “Look here, I want to go. Yes,” he says, “after all you are very efficient men, you are brave men, you can be helpful. What can I do? You have been very kind to me, all of you, but I know the way you feel about me and besides, what is more important, I know the way I feel about myself. The only thing I can do is to die. So let me go.” And then the other says “Thank you” and he shakes hands with him. And another is just about to shake hands with him, but he thinks better of it because he feels that if he shakes hands, he is acknowledging that the other is right that he will die, and then the man does go off and gets killed. And there are many moments of that kind, no?
Burgin: Yes, I see.
Borges: Yes, but that’s a good moment, no? When a man says ‘‘The only thing I can do is to die. After all, I’m not very good at fighting but I have one advantage, I can get myself killed as well as anybody precisely because I am a coward.” And one of them pats him on the back and they all feel very uncomfortable and then they say, “Oh no, you’ll do fine, we wish you luck.” And he goes off grinning and they know he’s going to die.
There are many episodes of that kind. And there’s a love interest also. There is a man—he’s in love—and he doesn’t want his lady to know that he is risking his life. So he invents all sorts of excuses. Sometimes she takes him to task, and says, “I feel you are really more in love with those schemes than with me.” But he says, “No, you know that I love you,” and they make plans. But in the end, it comes out that she knows all about it. But that she doesn’t want him to be worried thinking she knows.
I think it’s quite a good film. I’m telling you those two episodes, they’re the ones that come to mind, but there are more. And, of course, as I was saying to [Hugo] Santiago, it’s quite unlike any other Argentine film.
Burgin: Do you know anything about this director? Is he a prominent director in your country?
Borges: No. He’s been working in Europe, but in quite a minor capacity for seven or eight years and he’s a personal friend of a very famous English director. I can’t recall the name. [Borges possibly means the French director Robert Bresson.] He knows a lot of the technical side. And he evolved the plan. And the central character is based upon a friend of mine named [Macedonio] Fernández, a humorist, but a metaphysical humorist. I think it should be quite a good film, but if they muff it, well, you never can tell, no? Now I’m rather worried because Santiago says that he’s found the most wonderful actress on earth and that he’s also about to be married. But I’m afraid that he’s about to be married to the most wonderful actress, and the most wonderful actress may be no good as far as I know.
Burgin: He’s going to marry the main actress in the film?
Borges: Yes, that’s what I’m afraid of, because he says, “I’ve discovered the most wonderful actress in Paris.” I don’t like that because why should he discover in Paris a wonderful actress for a film to be acted in Buenos Aires? Of course, she may be Argentine for all I know, and then he says, “Also, I want you to know that I’m going to be married.” But I’m afraid that both ladies may be the same and in that case we’ll have to put up with somebody merely because he’s in love with her and she’s his wife. That doesn’t do us any good, no? But of course, if he found a fine actress, and he’s married to another lady, then that’s all right, no?”
[From Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges, “Part V.” Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968. Comments in brackets are mine.]
Two years after this interview Invasión was released. In May 1969 Adolfo Bioy Casares praised Santiago’s film:
Invasión modernises the theme of The Iliad: it does not praise the shrewdness and effectiveness of the conqueror, but rather the courage of a handful of warriors ready to defend their Troy—which is far too much like Buenos Aires—where there is always a group of friends and a tango inviting you to fight for just and noble causes. Homer will forgive me: the heart is always on the side of those who resist. I believe Hugo Santiago has created an extraordinary film.
Borges and Hugo Santiago
In 1979, Borges gave a radio interview with Radio National de España. Having now seen the film, Borges changed his tune considerably from his Burgin interview. He even pretended to forget Hugo Santiago’s name, a common deception Borges employed when he didn’t want to acknowledge a person:
Luego hubo una película titulada Los otros. Eso se hizo en francés. No recuerdo el nombre del director. Se estrenó en París, donde fracasó. Yo no la vi nunca. También hicieron otras películas de las cuales no quiero acordarme. (…) Aunque participé en alguno de los guiones, luego todo aquel trabajo fue transformado de tal manera—quizá mejorado—que yo no lo reconocí al ver el producto final. Por ejemplo, en uno de aquellos films habían invertido el orden cronológico del relato: empezaban por el medio, luego iban al final, y para terminar, volvían al principio. Todo eso sin que yo tuviera nada que ver . Por eso siempre les digo a los cineastas que hagan lo que quieran con mis argumentos. Yo prefiero que no pongan mi nombre para no hacerme responsable de nada. Aun así, ellos insisten en poner mi nombre y luego yo resulto responsable de la ofensa.
Rendered into somewhat passable English through Google Translate, with a few tweaks added for clarity:
Then there was a film entitled The Others. That was done in French. I don’t remember the name of the director. It premiered in Paris, where it failed. I never saw it. They also made other films that I don’t want to remember. (…) Although I participated in one of the scripts, all my work was transformed in such a way—perhaps improved—that I didn’t recognize it when I saw the final product; for example, in one of those films they reversed the chronological order of the story: they started in the middle, then went to the end, and finally, they returned to the beginning. I had nothing to do with it. That’s why I always tell filmmakers to do whatever they want with my work. I prefer not to put my name on films, so as not to be responsible for anything. Even so, they insist on using my name, and then I am responsible for the offense.
A few years later, Borges conducted a series of interviews with Osvaldo Ferrari for Argentine radio. During “Conversation #24,” Borges placed even more distance between himself and the film:
Osvaldo Ferrari: We also have the scripts that you have written, for example, Invasión with Casares.
Borges: Well, that’s fine, but I had nothing to do with that. In Invasión, I provided two of the deaths. But I never understood the plot. When I saw the film, I understood it even less. It seemed to me a very confused film. Moreover, I think that the temporal or chronological order was inverted. That made it completely impenetrable. I thought that the film was very bad. It was titled Invasión and there’s a group, including Macedonio and his disciples, and you cannot tell if it plots to invade the city or is secretly defending it. But why a city is not defended by proper soldiers and by 10 people is never explained.
Ferrari: Every time it’s shown in cinemas it seems that it’s twisted even more.
Borges: That’s right.
[English translation from Conversations Vol. 1, “Conversation #24, Westerns or Cinema Epics.” Seagull Books, 2014.]
Additional Information
Invasión
You can watch the entire film on YouTube. [Spanish]
IMDB Page
The Internet Movie Database features a profile of Invasión, with numerous stills.
Wikipedia Page
Wikipedia hosts a small page on Invasión.
Interview with Hugo Santiago
Aubrey Richard Wanliss-Orlebar interviews Hugo Santiago in Paris in September 2008 with a particular focus on Invasión and Les Autres. The interview is conducted in French with live translation into English.
La alternativa | Crítica a Invasión de Hugo Santiago
18 August 2013, Cine Maldito. Rubén Redondo writes about Invasión. [Spanish]
50 años de “Invasión”
28 February 2019, Infobae. This celebration of the 50th anniversary of Invasión is worth running through Google Translate. [Spanish]
Memorable Fantasies: Jorge Luis Borges & Adolfo Bioy Casares on Film
Notes on a screening of Invasión and Les Autres at the Anthology Film Archives.
Imaginary Criterion Edition
“Make Mine Criterion!” is a charming site that creates fictional Criterion editions of existing films. Their entry for Invasión, written by “Spinenumbered,” is fantastic, informative, and could easily pass as the real thing.
Hugo Santiago Obituary
28 February 2018, Cinematropical. This obituary on Hugo Santiago features some information about Invasión and Les Autres.
Fear, Estrangement and the Sublime Moment in Hugo Santiago’s Invasión
Yvonne F. Cornejo, 2004. “This paper examines how the sublime aesthetic combines with science fiction tropes to articulate estrangement and dislocation in Hugo Santiago’s film Invasión.”
Author: Allen B. Ruch
Last Modified: 25 August 2024
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