Borges and the classical Hollywood cinema - Style in Cinema - fiction writer

Style, Fall, 1998 by Jose Eduardo Gonzalez

Although there are already a few articles written about the influence that Borges's interest in cinema had on his fictional work, this still remains a largely understudied area of his aesthetics, especially in comparison to the attention given by critics to Borges's use of other products of mass culture. It is widely accepted, for example, that many of his tales borrow the structure of the detective short story, but his appropriation of cinematic techniques is less known and often misunderstood. One of the problems with the existing studies on Borges and film is that the influence of the latter has always been analyzed in isolation from the emerging culture industry in Argentina. It is necessary to see film in his work as related to his interest in other elements of popular culture, such as the adventure tale and the detective fiction. It was not by chance that when Borges wrote his first collection of stories, A Universal History of Infamy, cinema was mentioned in the preface as a source of inspiration, alongside the names of Chesterton and Stevenson. Departing from previous studies on Borges's use of film, which traditionally focus on the influence of a specific technique (montage) or a film director (Von Sternberg), I will study the function of cinema within a general Borgesean strategy to erase the boundaries between high and low culture by appropriating modes of narrative organization from popular culture.

To a certain extent, Borges's interest in cinema was a reaction to the early attention that the introduction of new means of communications and the emergence of a culture industry received in Argentina. In the Argentina of the first decades of the century, large groups of people became immediately fascinated with the possibilities that new inventions such as radio and television offered. In La imaginacion tecnica, Beatriz Sarlo has shown how the introduction of the radio in the 1920s created a legion of followers who were initially attracted to the technical aspects of the medium (building, repairing, inventing), and it was only later in that decade that a different group emerged, one composed of people only interested in being listeners and for whom the radio represented simply a new form of entertainment. The creation of a radio audience was the result of the sudden availability of radios at a lower cost and of the establishment of new broadcasting stations. The story of the reception of film in Argentina was somewhat different. Unlike what happened with the radio, the higher prices of movie making and the small amount of technical information available turned the great majority of those interested in films into mere spectators from the very beginning (Sarlo 109-28). The possibility or at least the illusion of intervening in the development of the technical means of film creation was never there; only a few inventors in Argentina tried to contribute to its development. From spectators, many movie goers quickly moved to the category of fans. The great number of publications dedicated to cinema that appeared during the 1920s gives us an idea of the kind of attention the film industry was receiving from the general public. In 1919, Imparcial Film, the first magazine completely devoted to the film industry in Buenos Aires, appeared, and in the following years others soon began publication: Cinema Chat and Hogar y cine (both in 1920), Argos Film (1922), Los heroes del cine (1923), Film Revista (1924) (Sarlo 29). It was then under the impact of the early culture industry that Borges, as so many other modern subjects in the Argentina of the 1920s, became a movie fan.

Two aspects of Borges' aesthetics should be emphasized here because they will allow us to understand better the attraction that Borges felt for the products of the culture industry, especially film. The first one has to do with a way of structuring fiction that I will give the name of "geometrization" of narrative. The use of an excessive order or symmetry to shape the plot has always been recognized as one of the most distinctive characteristics of Borges's fiction. An important theoretical essay in which Borges explains this view of narrative structure is "Narrative Art and Magic." In this essay, Borges mentions that there are two ways in which one can establish connections among events in a fictional text: the realist and the "magical." The realist way consists in reproducing or mimicking the causality that one normally experiences in the world. The magical is the one that rules the novel of adventures: events are not connected because of any causative relation among them, but by means of the principle of "sympathy." By sympathy Borges means that events that occurred in different places and under different circumstances can be linked to one another through an indirect association, as in a resemblance in the way they took place (he calls this their "figure" or shape) or a previous and unimportant contact between two events. Borges gives the following example from Chesterton to illustrate his point: