Borges Film – Les Autres
- At October 01, 2018
- By Great Quail
- In Borges
0
Les Autres
The Others
1974, France, 130 min.
Crew
Directed by Hugo Santiago.
Produced by Jean-Daniel Pollet and Vincent Malle.
Screenplay by Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Hugo Santiago.
Photography by Ricardo Aronovich.
Music and sound structures by Edgardo Canton.
Cast
Patrice Dally — Spinoza
Noélle Chåtelet — Valérie
Daniel Vignat — Moreau
Roger Planchon — Alexis Artaxerxés
Bruno Devoldére — Mathieu/the journalist
Pierre Julien — Monsieur Marcel
Dominique Guezenec — Béatrice
Pierrette Destanque — Agnés
Maurice Born — Durtain
Jean-Daniel Pollet — Adam
Marc Monnet — Vidal
Synopsis
I have not seen a version of Les Autres with English or Spanish subtitles, so I do not feel qualified to offer a detailed synopsis! However, Clarke Fountain offers this summary: “This surreal French film boasts a screenplay co-written by Jorge Luis Borges. In the movie, Spinoza attempts to discover why his son committed suicide. He discovers a screenplay his son left behind, and also meets his son’s girlfriend and his son’s rival for her affections. As the girl and he get to know one another, they become lovers. When she is found murdered, Spinoza is accused of having done the deed.”
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.
Their second movie together was Les Autres. Again, Borges and Bioy Casares wrote a synopsis, with Hugo Santiago drafting the screenplay. Their idea was inspired by a comment Borges made in his 1941 review of Victor Fleming’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: “we may imagine a pantheistic film, whose numerus characters finally resolve into One, who is everlasting.” Their synopsis for “Los otros” was considerably more involved than the two sentences produced for Invasión:
The Others
The son of a Parisian bookseller commits suicide. His father, a man of some fifty-odd years who thought he understood his son, now feels that he never knew him and begins to search for him among the people who had been his friends.
Earlier there had been a masked ball, a film scheduled to be made, a simulated duel, and a poker game that really was a duel. Then, abruptly, death. And then, as the bookseller goes on with his search, more and more unpredictable actions begin to pervade the film.
There is a man who wonders if he is anyone, a magician who says his name is Artajerjes, a woman whom the son had loved, and a forsaken gambler. There is a film scheduled to be made but that is not made, the girl who does not forget the other side of the ocean, and there is an apparition in a procession of horseback riders. There is another man who flings money into the fire and whips the girl for no reason, there is the bookseller who rediscovers love in that girl, and that girl who deceives him with an unknown man who looks like the dead son. And there is a crime in an observatory, and a final revelation:
After the son’s death, the bookseller went from being one man to being another, and to being still others. He had no part in these changes; something he did not understand happened to him and led him on. He was the one who wondered if he were someone—the magician who appears and disappears, the violent man who snatched the money away from the gambler and thrashed him, the unknown man who robbed the woman during the night. He stopped being himself in order to be many. Now he can be everybody, and he no longer knows who he is.
Filmed in France, Les Autres had very little involvement from Borges or Bioy Casares. Continuing the avant-garde techniques he explored with Invasión, Les Autres further established Santiago as a member of the French nouvelle vague. The Argentine filmmaker and writer Edgardo Cozarinsky writes about Les Autres in his book, Borges In/And/On Film:
In the last lines of his review of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Borges conceived a hypothetical film that Splits brought into actuality: “we may imagine a pantheistic film whose numerous characters finally resolve into One, who is everlasting.” On the other hand, as that avant-garde that likes to call itself materialistic would have it, Les Autres is a film “that records within its text the process of its own production.” The film presents an overture, a starter for the action, a rehearsal, even a clue that is obvious but also subtly inaccessible by reason of its placement. There are sudden breaks in the characters’ erotic ecstasy as well as in the soundtrack’s exultant music, fissures that confront the viewer with the spectacle of a film crew encircling, filming, and motivating a naked couple, fissures that reveal the sight of an orchestra recording those same harmonies which, up to that point, might have created a lofty, metaphysical illusion in purely sonorous terms. According to the director Hugo Santiago, “To present subjects that demand the genuine labor of decodification is even an ideological imperative” (“Introduction,” Les Autres by Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Hugo Santiago; Paris, Christian Bourgois Editeur, 1974). But instead of fulfilling this proposition by stripping away the ingredients of fiction, Les Autres accumulates the outward signs of “cheap” fiction with exacting perversity: money lost in gambling, a masked ball where the fate of the guests is decided, love, death, intrigue. And, to the degree that this intrigue grows increasingly tangled, its twisted strands attenuate until the thing is a mere shadow of situations in novels, a sign for other signs that turn the loveliest images into reflections of the idea that summons and informs them. Again, according to Santiago: “A perfectly classic plot, clearly shaped with originality according to traditions that are part Anglo-Saxon, part Oriental; the ‘final explanation’ of the mysterious framework and its total clarification makes the plot fantastic as well. (Nevertheless, no direct symbols, no allegories: the fantastic as a means to cutting through reality in order to reach a different reality, the fantastic as an analogous operation: an itinerary, a chain of analogies.)”
Seldom has a film so attentive to the beauty of its images and sounds aimed so intently at an effect beyond those appearances, at their eventual confluences and disjunctions. The snow-white skin of an elusive woman, the harmless tricks of some magicians, the mechanism of the search that seemingly controls the plot are all tokens of another process, whisking their unruly, surface appearance out of sight in order to bring the audience face to face with another film—different, conceivable, realizable—that might begin by dissolving those fictitious identities of place and character that move through Les Autres merely to indicate an idea of cinema. In the interview already referred to, Santiago has expressed the point of his film clearly: not to try to ‘disorder’ the story by literary techniques and devices and reproduce this confusion on film, but, on the contrary, to view the story as a ‘natural object’ (like a face, a street, a noise) and treat it, modify it, by cinematographic means, in order to turn it into movie material.”
If, sustained by its “imitation” of a popular genre, Invasión extracted a superfluous though genuine interest from that ironic relationship, then Les Autres, where Robert Louis Stevenson and The Thousand and One Nights are snatches from a scarcely recalled dream, denies the spectator any enjoyment, except for participating in an intellectual adventure whose lucid pleasures demand that he renounce any simpler pleasures.
Michel Lafon has this to say in a paper published in Adolfo Bioy Casares: Borges, Fiction and Art:
The difference between Invasión and the trio’s second film, Les Autres, (1974; The Others) is considerable. Egged on by Santiago, and writing alternatively in French and Spanish, Bioy and Borges helped shape an idea Borges had formulated some thirty years earlier: ‘un film panteísta, cuyos multiples personajes, al final, no son más que Uno, que es eterno’ (Borges, 1941, pp. 70-1; ‘a pantheistic film with multiple characters who in the end turn out to be an eternal One’).
Although there is a central character—pointedly named Spinoza—who is dealing with his son’s suicide, Les Autres loosely examines the knowability of ‘familiar’ others; it is a cinematic experiment which goes far beyond the bounds of narrative. Post-1955, Bioy and Borges’s writing for film is characterized by ambiguity and strangeness; their films are meant to unsettle. Between their first and second films with Santiago their own writing moves away from strong, plot-determined narrative lines which had dictated their literary aesthetic from the late 1930s onwards. Although this transformation in their collaborative work had begun after Seis problemas, with the revolutionary Les Autres there is a qualitative leap into a new aesthetic which, however does not influence their subsequent individual works. Through Santiago there is a shift to a different artistic plane which ponders alienation; a new voice appears which might be said to be that of an unnameable and unpredictable ‘fourth man’.
[From Michel Lafon, “Bioy and Borges: from the Third Man to the World of Bustos Domecq,” collected in Adolfo Bioy Casares: Borges, Fiction and Art, University of Wales Press, 2012.]
In 1979, Borges gave a radio interview with Radio National de España in which he distances himself from Les Autres and protests Santiago’s changes to Invasión. He even pretends to forget Hugo Santiago’s name, a common deception Borges used 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.
Not everyone believed Les Autres was a failure upon its release. Louis Marcorelles offered a glowing review in Le Monde:
Hugo Santiago, qui avait déjà tourné en 1968-1969 un scénario original de Borges et Bioy Casares, Invasión, traite cette histoire fantastique avec une feinte désinvolture, met au présent de narration chaque personnage, chaque événement, réel ou imaginaire, s’offrant au spectateur avec la même apparence de vraisemblance. À ce dernier de jouer le jeu, de faire l’effort d’imagination nécessaire pour bien cerner les frontières parfois imperceptibles de ce double univers. […]
Hugo Santiago dirige les comédiens avec une extrême précision, et d’abord Noëlle Chatelet et Patrice Daily. Roger Planchon, le magicien, par son exubérance, sa simple présence physique, son visage méphistophélique, fait presque éclater ce cadre trop rigide.
Cette œuvre conçue par cinq Argentins est le plus étonnant film étranger jamais tourné sur les bords de la Seine, dans un Paris d’avant les gratte-ciel, amoureusement chéri et recréé.
—Louis Marcorelles, Le Monde, 24 février 1975
Marcorelles’ review has been kindly translated into English by Adèle Saint-Pierre:
Hugo Santiago, who had already shot an original screenplay of Borges’ and Bioy Casares’ Invasión in 1968-1969, treats this fantastic story with a feigned flippancy, putting every character and every event, real or imaginary, in the present, offering himself to the viewer with the same semblance of likelihood. To the latter to play the game, to make the effort of imagining what is necessary to understand the sometimes imperceptible boundaries of this dual universe. […]
Hugo Santiago directs the actors with extreme precision, first off Noëlle Chatelet then Patrice Daily. But by his exuberance, his mere physical presence, and his mephistophelic face, Roger Planchon, the magician, almost bursts this oft too-rigid frame.
This work designed by five Argentines is the most amazing foreign film ever shot on the banks of the Seine, in a Paris before skyscrapers, lovingly cherished and recreated.
—Louis Marcorelles, Le Monde, 24 February 1975
Additional Information
Les Autres
You can watch the entire film on YouTube. [French]
IMDB Page
The Internet Movie Database features a profile of Les Autres.
Wikipedia Page
Wikipedia hosts a page on Les Autres.
French Wikipedia Page
The French Wikipedia on Les Autres contains more information than the English page above. [French]
Les Autres Screenplay
Published by Christian Bourgois Editeur in 1974, the screenplay for Les Autres may be purchased through Amazon.com.
Interview with Hugo Santiago (2008)
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.
Interview with Hugo Santiago (2013)
Hugo Santiago is interviewed about Les Autres for Qu’entre Temps! [French]
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. It also includes Les Autres as a bonus.
Hugo Santiago Obituary
28 February 2018, Cinematropical. This obituary on Hugo Santiago features some information about Invasión and Les Autres.
Author: Allen B. Ruch
Last Modified: 25 August 2024
Borges Film Page: Borges & Film
Main Borges Page: The Garden of Forking Paths
Contact: quail(at)shipwrecklibrary(dot)com