Mariano Llinás in the Footsteps of Borges: Playful Encounters with Documentary and Literature

Like the new generation of directors who introduced a fresh face to Argentine cinema at the start of the new century, Mariano Llinás believed it was time to close one chapter and begin another in filmmaking. Among other innovations, he explored a type of connection with literature quite distinct from the local cinema that preceded him.

This diptych is a translated part of an unpublished book, Restos diurnos. La literatura en el Nuevo Cine Argentino (Daytime Remains: Literature in the New Argentine Cinema), which explores the literary legacy in contemporary Argentine cinema and examines two of Llinás’s works. It addresses his debut film, Balnearios (2002), a tribute that is both roguishly and deceptively nostalgic to the beaches of Buenos Aires, and Historias extraordinarias (Extraordinary Stories, 2008), an elephantine film over four hours long that demonstrates, among other things, that Llinás is one of the great contemporary storytellers with a singular narrative ability. In both films, the influence of the most important Argentine writer of the 20th century, Jorge Luis Borges, is highlighted.

Balnearios

1. Balnearios: The Barefoot Life

Balnearios opens with Super 8 footage from decades past, where women in caps and one-piece swimsuits and men in solid-coloured, patternless briefs enjoy a dip in the sea, a stroll along the coast, and a moment of relaxation on the beach. As we watch these scenes and a few more, we hear the following words:

“This is a film about seaside resorts.

Years ago, in the era of the great ocean liners, racetracks, and casinos, men invented the seaside resorts. It was a wild and festive idea, an innocent idea. They believed that paradise was something possible, immediate, and easy. They took a strip of the coastline and filled it with palaces, promenades, and palm trees, then undressed to spend hours and hours in the water or in the sun.

Seaside resorts emerged as a game. They were invented by a century that still played, that was still a child. That’s why thinking about seaside resorts is always thinking about childhood, about the childhood of the century, the childhood of the country, and also one’s own, about simple and translucent happiness, about times we recall as exhilarated and brilliant. They are the place of past things, of good things. They are, probably, something sad. And the strangest thing is that to say “all the seaside resorts” is to say something joyful.

Seaside resorts are born from something ancient and deep, almost animal. They arise from the pleasure of water; from swimming, diving, or floating; from exploring, challenging, and celebrating it; from turning it into a celebration. It’s like fire, speed, or like music; something primary, something primitive. And in the essence of the seaside resorts, that animal thing still resists; they are places made to be near water.

Seaside resorts are the only cities that the century produced. And there is always something epic about them. First there is the fight against the sand. The history of each resort always includes the battle against natural forces, against the wind, the sea, the sand, the salt. Facing the sea, in the middle of nowhere, a pharaonic, imperial city was built, whose palaces were the casinos and whose temple was the hotel. And so the seaside resorts began. At first, they were distant and remote. There were few people, few buildings, few things. Years later, they had become monsters. They had become their own parody, their own caricature. The gold rush that attacked them every year, every summer, slowly made them into something else, a strange thing.

The resort is an extravagant, dreamlike world, a world of unreality. When one visits a resort out of season, it seems as if one were in an empty theatre with its sets and masks abandoned. There is always something mysterious about them. And moving.

The resorts were imagined by a rapturous and arrogant era, and when that era ended, when its ocean liners went to the bottom of the sea, and when its dirigibles caught fire, the resorts remained as the only survivors, like castaways, like beings from another world, like dinosaurs.

And this film speaks of all these things.”

These words are accompanied by images that, at times, function as illustrations of the narration. When we hear “Facing the sea, in the middle of nowhere, a pharaonic, imperial city was being built, whose palaces were the casinos and whose temple was the hotel,” the Hotel Ostende appears, bearing witness to a type of palatial construction on the Buenos Aires coast itself. Text and image seem to go hand in hand as well when we hear that “The seaside resort is an extravagant, dreamlike world, a world of unreality” and we see bare-chested men facing the camera with captain’s hats, making grotesque and playful faces, surely encouraged by that environment that encourages relaxation and, even more so, unabashed uninhibition.

The images accompany the text in another sense; they also follow it closely but in a different way than before: “They come and go” with it, no more, no less, to the rhythm of the waves. “They come” when the text makes references close to us and the sequence becomes colourful in its recording of water sports and rest on inflatable loungers, both in the bright colours of the Super 8 shots and the muted tones of those that seem to have been recorded in video format. “They go” when the story goes back to a mythical past and the scenes appear in black and white, as befits any timeless image according to the imaginary constructed by cinema. They come and go, they come and go, and thus we move from colour to black and white, and vice versa, in a succession of one and the other range that paints and unpaints scenes that accompany these paragraphs heard as one reads the epigraph of a promising book.

But even as they accompany the text, the images are often its contradiction. In this opening section of Balnearios, there is “a relationship between the sayable and the visible that plays with both its analogy and its difference.”¹ In other words, we find the healthy disagreement between text and image that inhabits good cinema.

Melancholy – as we will see later, falsely so – especially in this preface-like section, the text reveals that seaside resorts are “probably something sad.” Neither slow nor lazy, festive scenes of dancing on the shore and clowning around in the water appear; both leave behind or rather suspend the gloom induced by the phrase spoken in unison.

In the face of these scenes, one might think that the beach itself, and even more so the state of being “with the water halfway up” that these images point to, that amphibious state that occurs when one has not yet entered the sea but is not yet on the shore either, invites conscious and consensual ridicule, joking with one’s companions, flippancy and even self-deception, a state that takes us back to the freedom and unconsciousness of childhood, to that lost paradise, hence, as it is rightly pointed out, seaside resorts are “something sad.” Why not portray this unique moment with a touch of nostalgia and at the same time with a sense of the ridiculous?

Balnearios

The disagreement between text and image, established from the beginning and not abandoned until the end – we witness quite a few scenes composed of serious text and image that make us laugh – shows that this is not a classic documentary, but neither is it a full-fledged mockumentary, a genre that New Argentine Cinema has not been fond of.

If Balnearios prevents us from blindly trusting what we see and hear, it is not because it adheres to the format used almost exclusively by J. L. Marqués in Fuckland (2000), a film that showcases the absurd plan of an Argentine man to impregnate English women so that they have Argentine children who will then decide to return those lost islands to their rightful owner, but rather out of devotion to literature and its power to show that every scene of life is founded on stories, each one more secret and implausible than the last. Or isn’t it perhaps Llinás’s hallmark to make something banal, every day, and seamless into something disturbing, unique, and labyrinthine?

By skilfully arranging materials to engender in the viewer a half-hearted trust in the documentary record and a blind faith in the narrative, Llinás’ fictional documentary, divided into five sections, tackles four episodes. The first is “History of the South Seas”; the second, “Episode of the Beaches”; “History of Miramar” is the third; the fourth being the “Episode of Zucco.” The last section is a black and white epilogue with no title or text, where a woman – a mermaid, perhaps? – bids us farewell without a word or greeting.

In the presentation of the chapters, the title of each one appears placed on a map of the Buenos Aires coast, a map that gives a precise territorial anchor that the text takes care of blurring by making the story mythical and universal. The first, “History of the South Seas,” could be the title of a chronicle of real events documented in a history book about a sea that bears that name. But, as for Pampero cinema as a whole, for Llinás the word history does not refer to the trail of blood and inequities bequeathed by heads of state, revolutions and counterrevolutions; at most its aesthetics, more in this film, approaches what we could call cultural history. Llinás prefers the pure and exclusive realm of fiction. It is that space of fiction that gives life to an abandoned site in the first episode.

Amidst the backdrop of big band music, the narration begins:

“Everything recounted in this film is true. However, it may not seem so. This story, for instance, bears a closer resemblance to an ancient horror legend, of a town built around a castle, an impregnable and gloomy fortress inhabited by a sole proprietor; a reclusive, solitary, and misanthropic hermit. In this case, that castle is merely an old hotel from the turn of the century, a gigantic and anachronistic structure amidst a southern seaside resort town, a pale and forgotten town like so many that languish along the coast. A town of low-lying houses, of dirt roads where almost no one lives, where almost no one goes. In this landscape, the hotel stands out like an apparition, like a towering and mysterious mountain. The unlikely traveler, upon seeing it, is startled, moved. Moved by its decadence, its immensity, its majesty. However, this traveler remains oblivious to it all: the murders, the deaths, the scams. He knows nothing of the singer’s story, nor the lawyer’s, nor the Uruguayan’s; and even less, the extravagant tale of Mr. G.”

Balnearios

Like the fish that was once an emperor and will be a butterfly in another life, “History of the South Sea” is a tale of a hotel that was once a mansion and before that a casino, which in turn concealed a brothel. It is composed of two sections, one in colour, which opens and closes the episode, and the other, the heart of the chapter, in black and white. In the first, the only protagonist is a man who does not utter a single word, wears sunglasses in all the sequences in which he appears – daytime scenes – and acts as a guide. This man, less enigmatic than laughable, is the one who opens doors and windows, showing us this place that, devoid of the off-screen narration that mythologizes it, is just an abandoned mansion. It is also he who will open a desk drawer in which there are photos that treasure the bizarre story that will be told later, the same one who puts on a record and plays the music that we will hear in the background while a dark plot of betrayal is narrated that links a handful of characters with that enigmatic Mr. G.

This story is told with photographs falsely gnawed by time, images that simulate being archival, simulating them not to accredit verisimilitude, but quite the opposite, to, as an exposed simulation, show that everything is artifice.

Structure (a guide and a story with more literary roots than documentary) and tone of the episode (solemn text and laughable image) are repeated in the third chapter, “History of Miramar.” It begins with these words:

“The third story begins as a deception. It begins in a peaceful and calm town. A charming seaside town frozen in time. Oblivious to the sorrows and the overwhelming march of the world. A town that barely waits, year after year, for the minimum quota of vacationers from neighbouring towns, attracted by the immense lake of salt water that they call “the sea.” But this placid panorama hides a horrifying secret. Soon after arriving, the visitor will begin to notice oddities. He will notice how the city seems to stop abruptly. Walking through the streets, he will observe streets that lead, without further ado, into the water. Then, finally, with some disturbance, he will know the truth. The real town is submerged.”

In this episode, there are two guides. The first man, from a boat, confirms the existence of this authentic submerged town by pointing out precise locations under the sea. The Venice Hotel, the poor people’s little beach, the Gareto Hotel, the Mar Chiquita Hotel, the thermal baths, the Milo inn, the Marchetti boarding house; these are “all the buildings (that remained) underwater,” he says, mentioning each one by name and surname so that there is no doubt. To verify this with our own eyes, we then travel with the help of a diver, the second guide, who takes us to see the ruins underwater.

Images follow of objects above water (lampposts, a slide, more than one building; all “knee-deep in water“), indicating that we are facing a flood, a common, pedestrian, mundane event. Whether it was caused by a storm or an unintended consequence of a distant dam, what is clear is that there is a city under water.

However, the film does not emphasize the “real city” – at least to leave it behind quickly, in contrast to the imaginary city built for vacationers as in Construcción de una ciudad (Nestor Frenkel, 2007), a documentary built around the city of Federación. Similarly, in the first episode, no precise information was sought about the abandoned hotel. In both episodes, what should matter in a documentary, the facts, do not matter. What matters, as in all of Llinás’ cinema, is the suggestiveness of the story, the effectiveness, in this case, of taking a handful of remnants of a culture and turning them into a majestic castle or a submerged Atlantis.

Balnearios

The world fits inside a small sphere found in a house about to be demolished. It also fits within a handful of imaginary stories set in real seaside resorts. A confessed Borgesian since his stylistic exercises (from Derecho Viejo, 1998), in Llinás’ debut film, “The Argentine” cohabits with the universal. Nothingness itself or something like it, a bare shore; then a prodigious building surrounded by palm trees, houses, apartments, and campsites; and finally, a seaside city that will be visited by generations to come. Literature, painting, music, jazz, but also Argentine folk music. Coca-Cola, wine, and mate. The tedious vigil when the most predictable acts in a summer resort are repeated. The dream of every night with its labyrinthine setting and its characters, more strange than nightmarish. Seurat, Monet, Cezanne superimposed on an amateur artist, who at the same time stages an ancestral art. Atlantis and Leviathan. The mythical news program “Sucesos Argentinos” and the record of public works in a pivotal time in our history. A detailed shot of the map of the Buenos Aires coast that serves less as a guide than Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and all literature that encourages drawing castles in the air and lying down, free from ties, to build sandcastles.

In the prologue to Evaristo Carriego: A Book About Old-Time Buenos Aires, Borges states that his book is “less documentary than imaginative.”² The same applies to Balnearios. Although in an audiovisual mode, and full of stories rather than hypotheses—which it has, but they count more for their narrative function than argumentative—the film by Llinás is a magnetic imaginative exercise on that “barefoot life” travelled by those who vacation on a beach.

An essay on this scenario is La vida descalzo (The Barefoot Life, 2006) by Alan Pauls. In it, the author analyses the “progressive Gesell” of Central European origin that he knew in his childhood, the one in which he was happy and now looks at with a critical eye and a touch of melancholy. Published in the in situ collection of Editorial Sudamericana – a collection that includes Edgardo Cozarinsky ‘s memorable Palacios plebeyos – the book shares several coincidences with Llinás’s film that illuminate it – or rather, expose how much Llinás shies away from History – just a few years apart.

Apart from the fact that the author of El passado, another book by Alan Pauls, closes one of his chapters with a question that calls into doubt the rather idyllic setting he describes (“But were we happy?”),³ both the filmmaker and the writer look back with nostalgia—detached from a biography in one case, subject to the demands of fiction in the other—moreover, they regard the beach simply as a lost paradise.⁴ 

Both Pauls and Llinás examine the idiosyncrasies and rituals imposed by the beach turned into a resort. Although Pauls’s account is more intimate and Llinás’s stories may seem transferable to other times and places, both focus on the same figures: the virgin territory, the shipwreck, the desert. With a touch of humour, the author of El pudor del pornógrafo and the patriarch of “El Pampero” scrutinize identical scenes: the spasmodic and even gymnastic leap to avoid burning the soles of their feet when the sun has turned the sand into burning embers; the lost child who, after being carried on an adult’s shoulders and cheered like a champion – for absent-mindedness or a thwarted prank – ends up finding those parents with their hearts in their mouths; the dreaded jellyfish. While one takes a stand in history (Pauls refers to hippies and the fact that “the bloody 70s were running”), and the other eludes it or rather harks back to a mythical past, both view the resort as a “provisional model,”⁵ and find in the beach that “communal sphere.”⁶ Pauls who wrote one of the most solid essays on Borges (El factor Borges), who was his most faithful disciple in cinema, both as if they were one, dissect the bestiary of the beach during the vacation season and its grotesque cultural physiognomy. I retrieve a passage from La vida descalzo (The Barefoot Life) akin to the most remembered episode of Balnearios:

“The beach (…) is made of detritus: remnants of rocks, reefs, corals, bones, shells, clams, snails, fish, plankton. To this ancestral impurity (…) Villa Gesell added another, no longer geological but cultural, and unmistakably Argentine, that made dunes coexist with rhododendron jams, battered Land Rovers from the war with songs of protest copied from Georges Brassens, dirt roads and feather dusters with braided leather sandals, beaches so wide that in full sun it was impossible to cross them barefoot, with hip bars like La Jirafa Roja, wild boar meats under skies so blue they lasted impassive for whole weeks, centers of child perdition like the Combo Park—with its ping pong tables, its iron foosball tables, its pinball machines, its automatic bowling alleys, and above all its token system, the first childhood currency and first general notion of economic equivalence, which the kids bought on their own from employees just one or two years older than them, always grumpy.”⁷

Despite the director’s wishes, who loves all the chapters equally, or rather, does not prefer the one the audience favours, the “Episode of the Beaches” is the one that has remained in the memory of the viewers of Balnearios. It describes the place where a resort is located, its beach rituals, and its daytime and nighttime customs, the same every damned day. The luxury of detail in the description, no less than the narrator’s voice (a superb J. Palomino Cortéz), a voice more than circumspect, pretentious, refers, with a parodic tone of course, and as and as M. Caparrós and A. Pauls did in El año del ñandú directed by Carlos Sorín (1986), to the popular science documentary, the one we used to find on the National Geographic Channel and that has disappeared under the force of reality shows on the History Channel as well as cable television.

The use of the popular science documentary has a more distant precedent than that film of “dubious authenticity” – the expression is mentioned in that film – in which the documentary was worked on with the rules of fiction called El año del ñandú.

Ellipsis or Waiting for Barbarians

“Between 1970 and 1971 I produced and directed an underground film which, for the sake of having a title, I called: … or, for phonetic convenience, Ellipsis. I wanted it to be an experience of language, but it turned out to be rather a formalist scream, a draft both aestheticist and wild.”⁸ This is how Edgardo Cozarinsky defined his first film, Puntos suspensivos o Esperando a los bárbaros (Ellipsis or Waiting For Barbarians, 1971), a film that he has not included in retrospective screenings because he feels it is, before being distant, deeply alien to what he has been doing all these years. In a passage from this “draft”, simulating that of a popular science documentary, in this case about Calcutta, an off-screen (voiceover) analysis of the city’s metropolitan district is carried out. While we listen to this description (we can even hear an English speech in the background that would be the “original” of this translation), the images show the anodyne hustle and bustle of the people wandering around the centre of Buenos Aires. What is remarkable about this passage is that it parodies the popular science documentary by playing with the non-correspondence between text, soundtrack and image,⁹ something that occurs in Balnearios. 

Now, in that episode of Balnearios, there is a peculiar enumeration. The narrator, or rather the announcer of this strange scientific documentary grafted into the film, describes that:

“According to statistics, 2,709,000 vacationers arrive in the region each year, 1,700,000 of them from Buenos Aires, 45,000 from Tucumán, 827,000 doctors, 650,000 elderly people, 1,000 blind people, 1,200,000 women, 40,000 gauchos, 300,000 babies, 890 priests, and 1,000,000 blondes.”

Lists are not new in New Argentine Cinema. In El notificador (2011) by Blas Eloy Martínez, the protagonist mentions a list of “things I hate.”¹⁰ In Los rubios (The Blonds, Albertina Carri, 2003), A. Couceyro, the actress playing the role of director A. Carri, compiles a rosary of irritations that, replacing the lives taken away that they refer to, function as an act of exorcism.¹¹ Only superficially similar – the record of an obsessive one, the soul of a mourner the other – these lists show at first glance what, for different reasons, disturbs the speaker. Nonetheless, these lists are conventional. In contrast, the one in Balnearios is anomalous, though not unique.

Michel Foucault quite literally acknowledged that The Order of Things was “born from a book by Borges”; specifically, from the laughter he experienced from the classification of animals found in a “certain Chinese encyclopaedia” cited by Borges in The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, an essay from Other Inquisitions. According to this classification, animals are divided into:

“(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tamed, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in this classification, (i) that thrash about as if mad, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, (l) etcetera, (m) that have just broken the vase, (n) that from a distance look like flies.“

This list, which reminds us of more than one singular Borgesian collection,¹² is grounded not only in the disparate enumeration that is already a stylistic hallmark of Borges,¹³ but also, typical of one who sees that “the inventions of philosophy are less fantastic than those of art,”¹⁴ a mistrust of taxonomies, in particular those that try to bring order to chaos.¹⁵

The list from Balnearios provokes the intellectual laughter elicited by certain essays and stories by Borges. Like Borges’s, this “postulation of reality” that discriminates among those arriving at the coast is a contingent invention, “an invented order, (…) another form of ordering and schematizing the world.”¹⁶

The incongruity of this classification in Balnearios, whose “terms (…) appear separated by the very thing that, like an electric current, unites them: incongruity, paradox, mere otherness,”¹⁷ indicates an order of discourse that is, more than present, founding in the film. Like Borges’s list, Llinás’s list shows that the way we order the world could well be different. The one we use is no less “monstrous”—the term is Foucault’s—than the one postulated by Borges, and is, as both said—and now Llinás with them—only one of the possible ones. Llinás has chosen a way to order the visitors to a resort and the resorts they frequent, a monstrous mode that resonates with Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings.

This exploration in the article demonstrates that although Borges has been displaced as a source of inspiration or denigration in the literary field where other references now prevail (C. Aira, Fogwill, J. J. Saer, etc.), with Balnearios, and with many other films from the generation to which Mariano Llinás belongs, we see that Borges, if he does not have disciples or detractors in literature, certainly has them in that New Argentine Cinema born in the late 90s.

Extraordinary Stories Poster

2. Extraordinary Stories. The Museum of the Novel

The fact that the tales of the three characters are impostures does not diminish the fine horror that their fables communicate. For the rest, all fiction is an imposture: what matters is to feel that it has been sincerely dreamed.

– J. L. Borges, Prologue to The Three Impostors by A. Machen

“What is it with Argentine directors and voiceover? Why this distrust of the image, this deadly redundancy in words?“, wondered A. Ricagno in his review of Matar al abuelito (Killing Granddad, Luis César D’Angiolillo, 1993).¹⁸

With a commitment to the layers of meaning in the image, plots reduced to their barest essence, and a narrative pushed to the point of “unwording,” what came to be known as New Argentine Cinema tried to be the antithesis of the cinema of the eighties. Over the years, this New Cinema turned into a cliché. In the face of this cliché, Historias extraordinarias was born, a film that tips the balance back in favour of words, but never loses faith in the image.

As in a novel, it is through a narrator (in this case three) that we learn each and every one of the stories in this, M. Llinás’ second feature film. Unlike what happens in Marguerite Duras’ India Song (1975), where the narrator wanders through the scenes where the characters have passed, in Historias extraordinarias the narrators (played by V. Llinás, J. Minujín and D. Hendler) accompany them perpetually.

One of these narrators tells the story of X (performed by Mariano Llinás), a young man who has been both a witness to and an unwilling participant in a crime, a situation for which he has no better idea than to become a detective to unravel the mystery and try to get out unscathed. Like Dupin (a fictional detective created by Edgar Allan Poe), like Bustos Domec, he spends his life tying up loose ends, which in his case involves reading the file with obsessive meticulousness and paying attention to what is published in the local newspaper and announced on the radio news

Another narrator focuses on the life of Z (performed by Walter Jakob), who arrives at a state office in the province of Buenos Aires to replace a certain Cuevas. Z undertakes the tasks assigned to him and discovers that the real occupation of Cuevas, who has been nothing more than a ghost to everyone, was the illegal trafficking of animals. He ceases to be a ghost himself and a family eventually takes him in as one of their own. They call him Raúl and uncover aspects of his character he was unaware of. It turns out he’s funny, what a way to find out. Reading letters, following the trail of a bank account – the “treasure”, as it is mentioned – Z retraces Cuevas’ steps and ends up traveling far away, to Africa.

The last narrator follows the journey of H (performed by Agustín Mendilaharzu), who is hired by a stranger to photograph monoliths that would serve as crucial evidence to win an absurd bet between two members of a town association. In his Kafkaesque journey, H meets an old European immigrant named César, a pyromaniac who will detonate the monoliths as soon as H photographs them; a man who serves as his guide, but also as a heavy burden as he is an incessant, rather tortuous, storyteller.

The omnipresence of a narrator is a hallmark of literature. If we add to this the fact that the spectator, over more than four hours, is transformed a listener — he listens to voices reading a previously written text – someone bewitched by the story enchanted by the narrative, we might fall into the misconception that the important aspect of Historias extraordinarias are the literary virtues of the director. Much of the critique believed this.

Theodor W. Adorno said that once a philosophy is recognized as poetry, the strangeness of its ideas is overlooked and therefore dismissed. Adorno thought of Kierkegaard, who, he believed, suffered from being recognized as a writer. Bestowing this praise on him was the best way to disarm his philosophy. Simply put, not to read it.

Llinás felt that being positioned as the narrator of the tribe, as a sort of “Scherezade porteño,” (a storyteller or a figure akin to Scheherazade, the legendary storyteller of One Thousand and One Nights from Buenos Aires) was a subtle way of sidelining other merits, the most important for the construction of Historias extraordinarias, a fiction machine rather than a linear, classical story. It is perhaps no coincidence that the epitome of straightforward storytelling in this plot, César (Diego Alarcón), does nothing but put his interlocutor to sleep. It is Llinás, more than anyone, to whom such stories are soporific.

In literary terms, both by the reminiscence to some authors (Stevenson, Chesterton, Salgari) and the use of certain narrative paths (the adventure novel, the detective novel, the romantic novel) as well as by the omnipresence of the narrator, we might think of nineteenth-century narration as a reference. However, the viewer of Historias extraordinarias does not act like a nineteenth-century reader who fully trusts the narrator. Antithesis of the naive viewer from The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999) and closer to the reader of the modern novel, he is an accomplice in a calculated deception, in that imposture which, following the lines of the prologue that serves as an epigraph, we call fiction. The complicity is sealed from the first sequence where the motives that will return time and again are displayed: the omnipresence of the narrator, the viewer as voyeur, the story as an obvious artifice, the characters as an “excuse” or pretext for the fiction to continue until it is unresolved. In that sequence, after watching a man walk in front of the camera and only hearing footsteps for almost a minute, it is heard: “Well, that’s how it is. A man, let’s call him X, arrives in the middle of the night to any city in the province.”

“A film that becomes real with a conjectural beginning in the style of ‘The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,’ where the narration is part of the same construction,” says Llinás.¹⁹ Thus, the fiction begins by making the artifice evident. Hence the disinterest in the name, nothing more and nothing less than one of the protagonists, as well as the place he arrives at, which is even more unknown than his name, is at most a “zone.”

Clarifying the obvious literary legacy, it is necessary to specify that:

“The debts to literature involve certain specific procedures that are not very common in cinema: the ability to summarize long periods of time in a few notes or a couple of events, the ability to draft biographies of people in the span of a few minutes, the ability to develop complex plots and provide them with intricate explanations; the Borgesian procedure of pretending that what is being narrated already exists and that one is merely offering a summary of it.”²⁰

The debt is therefore “procedural.” From Llinás’s words, it is clear that Historias extraordinarias employs a significant array of literary-rooted procedures, procedures that go beyond those established in the 19th century.

Extraordinary Stories

“I like it when the characters are resting and the voiceover is at work.” 

– Mariano Llinás

In the era of silent cinema in Japan, there were Benshis, narrators who, according to Cozarinsky, described the action of the films with “a dramatic emphasis that no intertitle could match, and whose feats were celebrated by fans often more attracted to the narrator than to the film itself.”²¹ Noël Burch adds that this art of commentary “consisted in helping the audience to enter a hallucinatory state in front of the images.”²² Both critics refer to narration as suggestion and emphasize the enchantment of the word.

Edgar Morin recalls that situation, but “downplays” the Benshis and their spell by saying that “the sound commentary was as important as the vision itself.” This is what happens in Historias extraordinarias. The importance of oral narration is self-evident, but it wouldn’t be as effective if it did not come into tension with the image. In other words, the film demands a listener, but one who is attentive to the disjunction between what he hears and what he sees.

The constructed omniscient narration, which at times takes on the role of a witness, of a mere observer (“we do not know, we cannot know,” it says when describing a situation), plays with the information it reveals or withholds. There are situations where the narrators recount what has happened, in others they anticipate what will occur, and in doing so, if they do not lie to us as Hitchcock did in a flashback, they engage in leading us down paths that are lost and even dead ends. At the beginning, when narrating an episode involving X is narrated, it announces: “What is going to happen now is the following.” But when we finish not only believing in what was said but also in what was corroborated with images, it states: “However, that is not the case. X is wrong in every detail from the beginning,” setting aside the facts that entertained us for a long time.

Antithetical to the classical nineteenth-century omniscience and rather close to the modernist enunciation of Henry James where “a central ellipsis supports complex narrative architectures and precipitates the reader into a game of interpretation,”²³ the narrators leave us facing the (functioning of) language. Is it not the spectator, and not the characters, who is active less for following their pilgrimage than for chasing the traces of an always elusive meaning?

Classic cinema was that which managed to make the arrangement of images suffice by themselves, the same that in literary terms had consolidated a blind trust in the narrator and in the transparency of language. On the contrary, the modern narrative, whether literary or cinematic, provokes disbelief in the narrator and the evidence of the equivocal—and openly manipulated—character of language. Historias extraordinarias works precisely with that evidence and spreads a similar disbelief arising from the pleasure of conjecture and mistrust of an order—the order of the classic narrative—that pretends to read a man’s life as a chain of circumstances without missing links.

As in some novels of the nouveau roman, despite the long journey of nomadic trajectory, we find ourselves in a “stationary advance” where what matters is the functioning of “a simulacrum, a chaos of appearances,” according to Borges in his surgical review, which includes images that tell stories, narrators who comment on or deny them—in short, who bifurcate them—puppet characters or anti-characters (nameless, without psychology and embodied not by actors but by friends)²⁴ and a spectator who, like a reader of Borges’s work, conjectures about the meaning, the possible—and never realized—intersections of the stories.

“The text can be (…) the exposition of apocryphal theories (Three Versions of Judas, The Theologians), the report on an invented reality (The Lottery in Babylon, The Library of Babel), even the association of probable episodes through a fictitious link (The Story of the Warrior and the Captive, The Search for Averroes).”²⁵ Each of these variants that Cozarinsky foresaw in the world of Borges serves to describe in Historias extraordinarias a fiction that constructs its own artifices and a system that operates by its own force, almost abstract.

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Extraordinary Stories

Scalabrini Ortiz wrote that the Pampa is “almost inhuman, godless, flat land (that) lying belly up under a gigantic sky, promises nothing to the imagination, delivers nothing to fantasy.”²⁶ This image was not dictated by the muses. It emerged from the pen of English travellers and writers who believed they were escaping barbarism by exile, no less than from men with rifles—also English—used in military campaigns that massacred the true owners of those lands. Thus, the Pampa ended up as a desert generating both literary and cinematic fictions. 

To this desert arrived one day Francisco Salomone, a man who occupies a central place in Chapter 15 titled “The Devil’s Son.”

“Francisco Salomone was born in Catania, Sicily, at the end of the 19th century. Before he was ten years old, his family had already settled in Argentina, in Córdoba. He entered university at eighteen and by twenty had earned degrees in architecture and construction engineering. (…) By twenty-four he was fully aware of being a genius, someone for whom the capacity for action and invention knew no bounds. Around the same time, he began to take an interest in astrology. An astrologer once told him: ‘You are destined for great things. In your field, you are the greatest. You will change history. There will be a before and an after you. Rest assured, glory awaits you.’ He asked, ‘What should I do?’ ‘Nothing, just wait, you will realize when the time comes.’ 

Eventually, the time did come. The governor of Buenos Aires province summoned several architects to modernize the public buildings across the province. (Salomone) requested to take on what everyone else rejected: the smaller and forgotten towns in the interior of the province, communities of a few hundred inhabitants, scattered across the map, languishing alone on the infinite plain, alien to the march of the world, to modernity and progress. (…) He thought: ‘Here, in these miserable towns, at this end of the world, I will build the most astonishing buildings ever remembered. These towers and porticos will be famous, as famous as the Chartres Cathedral. People will come from all sides, crossing these sad, deserted prairies to see them. And I, in each one of them, will be saying: ‘Here I am. This is Salomone.’”

As this story is told, the montage concatenates images of Salomone’s works: cemeteries, slaughterhouses, towers, and municipal buildings; all formidable monuments in flat landscapes gazing at the sky. This sequence that begins the final stretch, his farewell, is an epitome of the film. The narrative is accompanied by buildings that seem to loom over us just as the countless stories that have riveted us thus far.

This “prequel to the story of X in the form of an apocryphal biography in the manner of Imaginary Lives by Schwob,”²⁷ clarifies Llinás in a footnote in the script edition, is also, I add, an allegory of the one who embodies X, the director of this film. Or does he not believe that “he is destined for great things”, that “in his field he is the greatest”, and that “he will change history” (at least of Argentine cinema)?

Putting aside Wagnerian caprices, indeed “the story of the unbridled dreamer who seeks to transform the placid and monotonous plain into the territory of the unexpected and the fantastic can be applied, almost as an allegory, to the film itself,”²⁸ highlights Llinás, who made this desert a labyrinth. Because, as Borges taught in The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths, a desert is also a labyrinth. But it is also something more: “I wanted to populate that landscape with stories. (…) To turn that nondescript into the fantastic. (…) To make that landscape a gateway to the universe. Well, The Aleph,” he acknowledges.²⁹

There was an Argentine writer who set out to make the plain a territory of the unexpected. César Aira countered the emptiness of the desert with the incessant proliferation of fiction to the brink of the unthinkable. The presence of a lion on the plain would be a clear proof of this act in this film.

Now, if Historias extraordinarias shares a kinship with the world of C. Aira, it is less due to a common topic or a particular style—certain frivolity and mocking tone, the deliberate work on the plausibility of endless genres, the opposition to a cinema and literature where “nothing happens”, the excess—than by the defining trait that places Aira in the Argentine literary field, that is, his literary project conceived as a machine that produces fiction, regardless of whether it is good or bad (he boasts of writing “bad little novels”), but that produces it to saturation because what matters, as Aira states in one of his essays, is “that ‘the work’ be the procedure for making works, without the work.”³⁰

An heir to the avant-garde tradition on one hand and modern cinema on the other, both resort to the modern strategy of diluting the plot. Historias extraordinarias is a fiction-creating machine, which once set in motion, goes out of control and begins to produce fictions in an almost senseless or irresponsible manner,” says Llinás.³¹ As in La liebre (The Hare, by Aira Cesar) where the Indians “are subject to the good will of the narrator for their activity to exist in reality,”³² in the 18 chapters of this centreless narrative “the argument loses its central power due to accumulation, baroque excess, overabundance, and overflow.”³³ The production of fiction, a forward flight like that which drives the action in Aira’s novels, occurs as a simultaneous coexistence of stories: some that never intersect, others that are mere sketches not fully outlined, others, on the other hand, are delineated as framed stories (the one dedicated to the figure and architectural work of Salomone, the one portraying the love story of Lola Gallo, the sequence of the Jolly Goodfellows).

Victor Hugo maintained that Shakespeare contains Góngora (Spanish Baroque lyric poet, renowned for his complex and intricate style). Kracauer placed Flaherty between Homer and Hesiod. Amid countless literary reminiscences, Llinás stands between Borges and Aira, whose work precisely “can be read as a performance of Borgesian fiction.”³⁴

***

Extraordinary Stories

According to Llinás, “the plot has exploded as the sole vehicle for storytelling in cinema, and a filmmaker can simply choose what to do with it.”³⁵ As occurs in La historia (History, by Martín Caparrós), a novel of almost a thousand pages that pushed to the limit that dynamite bonsai titled Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (short story by Jorge Luis Borges), a massive tome with which Caparrós tested that “Borges has the curious merit of having constructed the largest literary object (in size) in the history of literature,”³⁶ Llinás seems to have had a not very different project. To achieve this, he chooses the path of saturation, a film of 274 minutes.

How to deal with a film of five, six, ten hours? Shoah (1985) by Claude Lanzmann, Sátántangó (1994) by Béla Tarr, Dukhovnye golosa (Spiritual Voices, 1995) by Aleksandr Sokurov, all the dazzling and disheartening cinema of Lav Diaz; there is something at play in terms of experience when a film works in or on duration.

In a culture of the instant like that of zombie-phase turbo-capitalism, facing the experience of extension is a challenging act. Beatriz Sarlo defined the challenge posed by the length of El pasado by A. Pauls as an “avant-garde offensive.”³⁷ The same could be said of the latest novel by an author who was considered a postmodern exponent. 4321 by Paul Auster challenges us to a reading of more than 1,000 pages.

Although Llinás wanted the film “to be as close as possible to a nineteenth-century adventure novel,”³⁸ it is known that his proposal has a determined modernist impetus.

Borges saw the western as the last reservoir of the epic. When the culture of books, no less than that of cinema, has been replaced by that of screens, when the novel—as narrative and exploration in the psychology of a handful of characters—seems to survive only palely in series, Llinás contests this format with the possibility that the novel may truly revive in cinema.

Anyone could say that Llinás, by extending some passages of Historias extraordinarias, could well have made a series. A persistent cinephile, a stubborn modernist Bartleby, Llinás “would prefer not to do so.” He didn’t do it and he won’t. The proof is La Flor (2018), an experience that serves as a rejection of that format, which seems to undermine what cinema proposes.

If series are the persistence of the nineteenth-century novel, cinema opens the possibility of continuing that stage of self-awareness of literature that is the modern novel. Llinás proposed that with Historias extraordinarias, “fiction would be constructed in a new way. (…) As if one were to say: let’s destroy the narrative, expurgate it and see if it can re-emerge alone and renewed.”³⁹ Treasure Island resolved in the style of Perec, Historias extraordinarias is the true museum of the modern novel.

Endnotes