Anthology Film Archives will present this November the special film series “Memorable Fantasies: Jorge Luis Borges & Adolfo Bioy Casares on Film” programmed by filmmaker Matías Piñeiro and celebrating the relationship between the famed Argentinean writers and cinema.
Borges and Bioy Casares were famously friends, colleagues, and frequent collaborators – writing numerous stories together, including many under the pseudonym, Honorio Bustos Domecq – but less heralded is their shared interest in the seventh art.
Though many filmmakers have tried their hand at filming Borges and Casares’s novels and stories, these adaptations are only one aspect of the rich intersection between the world of cinema and their literary universe. This film series attempts to expand the resonance of these two major figures of the 20th century, looking beyond their literary fame to explore what made them men of cinema.
As the two authors’ fame grew exponentially over the years, filmmakers around the world drew inspiration from their writings, spurred on to create their own innovative and deeply personal work. Rather than adaptation, these films would take unbridled liberties with the original sources, liberating a new form that would enlarge the possibilities existing between film and literature. And still other filmmakers would make films that, without qualifying even as loose adaptations, would have been very different if they hadn’t encountered the work of Borges and Casares.
A celebration of the myriad ways in which the cinema has been enriched by Borges and Casares’s writings, this film series is divided into four sections, reflecting their diverse connections to the cinema: Scripts, Adaptations, Inspirations, and Cinephilia.
The series will feature 13 films including Invasión (Hugo Santiago, Argentina, 1969), The Spider’s Stratagem (Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy, 1970), Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, France, 1974) Oribe’s Crime (Leopoldo Torre Nilsson & Leopoldo Torre Ríos, Argentina, 1950), The Others (Hugo Santiago, France, 1974), Pandora’s Box (Georg Wilhelm Pabst, Germany, 1929), Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, France, 1961), On Top of the Whale (Raúl Ruiz, France, 1982), Man on Pink Corner (René Múgica, Argentina, 1962), Death and the Compass (Alex Cox, U.S., 1992), Underworld (Josef von Sternberg, U.S., 1927), Practice Makes Perfect (Philippe de Broca, France, 1979), Balnearios (Mariano Llinás, Argentina, 2002).
“Memorable Fantasies: Jorge Luis Borges & Adolfo Bioy Casares on Film” takes place November 11-22 in New York City.
