Biografía de Jorge Luis Borges: Llinás premieres at MALBA

A film of more than five hours about Borges

Director Mariano Llinás premieres Biografía de Jorge Luis Borges this Sunday, November 8, at MALBA in Buenos Aires, a documentary about the writer that runs 323 minutes. The screening is organized in three parts and, according to Clarín, there will be short breaks between them in the theater.

Screenings continue every Sunday from 6 pm at MALBA. According to Página/12, the premiere is exclusive to Malba Cine and the Cine Arte Cacodelphia, and the total running time is 5 hours and 23 minutes, with two intervals.

Llinás wrote and directed, Agustín Mendilaharzu handled the photography and Gabriel Chwojnik the music. El Pampero Cine, the production company of the director of La flor, produced it.

From a commission to an investigation

The starting point was a specific request: to record on film the work on an archive of the writer's manuscripts and documents. According to Clarín, the proposal was to film the Fundación ISLAA collection, but the result ended up as a biography with a path of its own.

According to Página/12, the collector Nicolás Helft asked Ernesto Montequín, a researcher, translator and essayist, to put in order the huge archive he had gathered, with manuscripts, letters, drawings and files. He commissioned Llinás to film that task.

On screen, Montequín leads most of the inquiries, while Llinás provides the voice-over and stays in a secondary role. The two examine crossed-out lines and corrections in the originals and build conjectures from them. Clarín compares them to a pair of detectives.

Borges on film: cities, ranches and Buenos Aires corners

The film follows the writer's footsteps through many places. Among those Clarín mentions are Geneva, Iceland, China, Uruguay, Kansas and Spain, plus the Buenos Aires streets where the characters of his work used to walk. According to Página/12, Salto, Adrogué, Austin, Coronel Pringles, New York and Montevideo also appear.

The route starts in Geneva and ends at a ranch house in Fray Bentos, in Uruguay, where his parents would have conceived him, according to Página/12. In between there are detours, such as a geyser the protagonists come across in Iceland, according to Clarín, or a postcard Borges wrote to his mother Leonor from Reykjavik in 1971, according to Página/12.

In Coronel Pringles, the chair where the writer once sat is stored and cataloged in a municipal warehouse, according to Página/12. And the tiger drawings attributed to him as a child, Clarín reports, were in fact not his but Bioy Casares's.

How the first write-ups received it

Clarín gave it a rating of Muy buena (very good) and describes it as a confessional investigation, with humor and a measured pace that makes its length manageable. It also notes that there are no interviews with people who knew the author.

Página/12 stresses the weight of digressions and compares the film to a garden of forking paths. That paper identifies two models: Adolfo Bioy Casares's book about Borges and the biography of Samuel Johnson written by James Boswell.

According to the same paper, the shots of the pampa at dusk are among the most beautiful in the film. For Clarín, anyone who walks into the theater without having read the writer gets a first-hand introduction.

If you go

The film screens every Sunday from 6 pm at MALBA, according to Clarín. For the premiere, Página/12 also mentions the Cine Arte Cacodelphia. With a running time of 323 minutes and two intervals, plan on setting aside the whole afternoon.

Check each theater's schedule before you head out, because times can change. None of the sources we read gives the ticket price or the sales channel.

It is a film meant both for readers of Borges and for those who have not read him yet. Arriving curious is enough, according to Clarín, to make you want to open his books afterwards.

Source: Clarín