Borges Film – Splits

Splits

1978, U.S.A, 27 min.

Crew
Directed by Leandro Katz.
Screenplay by Ted Castle, Lynn Anander, and Leandro Katz, based on “Emma Zunz” by Jorge Luis Borges.
Photography by Viktor Vondracek and Leandro Katz.
Music by Josef Haydn.

Cast
Shiela McLaughlin
Lynn Anander

Synopsis:

From Leandro Katz: Based on “Emma Zunz,” a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, the film moves through the internal voices of Emma’s character, whose evolution between crime, revenge and justice assumes—read from the context of the social struggles of the 60s and 70s—a decidedly political character.

Comments

Born in Argentina in 1938, Leandro Katz lived in New York City from 1965–2006 before moving to Buenos Aires. An artist, teacher, and novelist, Katz is best known as an avant-garde filmmaker. In 1978, he produced a unique adaptation of the Borges story “Emma Zunz.” As described by Proa, Splits is “an open-narrative film that splits each frame into five different territories. The upper section of the frame is divided into four pieces, each representing the narrator’s different voices. Its lower section interprets her actions in a logical sequence through diverse strategies. Simultaneously, Splits enunciates and analyzes the character’s action embarking in a reflection on cinema, suspense and violence representation.”

The Argentine filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky writes about Splits in his 1980 book, Borges In/And/On Film:

A film by a visual artist whose work has evolved toward the audio-visual, Splits might at first seem to “betray” Borges—at least in regard to his most frequently expressed political sympathies (which really were antipathies). In fact, Splits is profoundly faithful to Borges.

Splits divides its story into a series of narrative “gestures,” overtures not shaped according to narrative criteria. It also divides the central character’s voice-over between two female voices: Emma, who always speaks in the third person, and Muriel, who slips from third to first person. Also, by means of the split screen, the film divides its images into series that multiply the action— sometimes concurrently, sometimes consecutively—just as the voices overlap or follow one another.

All these divisions, however, attempt to establish evidence of an underlying unity, to resolve the identities of Emma and her victim into collective figures of the exploited and the exploiter. Emma’s motive for revenge—established in the exposition only to be cancelled later—is here displaced by a ceremony in which those officiating vanish as individuals: “It was clear in her mind that there was no distinction between her personal loneliness and her political loneliness, between her day-after-day life and her ideas about being used by everyone as a token with no sense at all….”

Like Borges’s story, Katz’s film culminates in Emma’s killing her father’s employer. But where Borges presents Emma’s believable falsification in order to play with the notion of truth and the truth-like, Katz attempts a parallel reflection on the means of representation that allows him to stage his own fiction: “It was a seminal death, an homage to the death of imagination, to the dead cinema of cinema death . . . a rupture…”

Based on an ideological analysis alien to but not incompatible with Borges’s story, Katz’s film coincides with both the writer’s skeptical treatment of all forms of individuality and with a certain discreet pantheism by which Borges occasionally let an individual be other individuals or a mere actor in a plot whose scope he does not realize. In this instance, it is only a matter of hailing “the time when History liquidates the Masters….” In the film’s proposed reading of Emma Zunz’s crime, it is also possible to discern a relationship between the artist/director and Borges’s prestigious text, a relationship dispersed within a still larger text, which might be that of History itself. The originality and independence of Katz’s endeavor resides, precisely, in his not having accepted the received meaning of the master’s words, in his forcing them to yield a meaning that was unrecognized, or, at any rate, other.

Additional Information

Splits
You can watch the entire film on Vimeo. [English]

Splits Screenplay
The “voice screenplay” of Splits is available for reading at Leandro Katz’s homepage.

Leandro Katz Homepage
This page is available in Spanish and English, and contains notes on many of Katz’s experimental films.

Leandro Katz Wikipedia Page
Wikipedia has an informative page on Katz and his art.

“Splits”
By Kaja Silverman, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, No. 20 (1983): pp. 29-36, [JSTOR paywall]. An analysis of Splits.

“Changing the Fantasmatic Scene”
Additional commentary from Kaja Silverman, located on the director’s homepage. 

Author: Allen B. Ruch
Last Modified: 28 August 2024
Borges Film Page: Borges & Film
Main Borges Page: The Garden of Forking Paths
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