THERE IS NO NEED TO BUILD A LABYRINTH WHEN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE IS ONE: INFINITE RECURSION, ONTOLOGICAL VERTIGO, AND THE TERRITORY YIELDING TO THE MAP
“A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.” – Jorge Luis Borges
There are those who imagine that a labyrinth is constructed from walls, corridors, and deliberate perplexities. This is an agreeable error. Any sufficiently intricate order, if contemplated for long enough, becomes a labyrinth: a city, a memory, a mirror, a genealogy, a library, an afternoon, the life of a man.
The films assembled here record certain encounters with that order. They concern themselves with doubles, mirrors, invented memories, counterfeit histories, stories that become worlds, and worlds that reveal themselves to have been stories all along. Their characters wander through impossible cities, recursive narratives, shifting identities, and worlds where originals and copies can no longer be distinguished. Together they form a cinematic labyrinth; not a puzzle to be solved, but a place to get wonderfully, productively lost.
This program is an invitation to wander through cinema's strangest landscapes, where every answer opens up to another question and the line between imagination and existence gradually disappears.
Films in this Program
LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD
1961
Alain Resnais’s coolly glittering, fascinating, frustrating film, made in collaboration with novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet.
THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT
1965
The hallucinatory epic, adapted from Polish nobleman Jan Potocki’s 19th-century novel, relates the adventures of one Alphonse van Worden, a Belgian officer making his way across battle-torn Spain during the Napoleonic Wars.
MIRROR
1975
A subtly ravishing passage through the halls of time and memory, this sublime reflection on twentieth-century Russian history by Andrei Tarkovsky.
THE SPIDER'S STRATAGEM
1970
Athos Magnani arrives by train alone in Tara, where his father’s old mistress has asked him to come and find out the truth about his father’s murder years ago.
INVASION
1969
A kind of updating of The Illiad that breathlessly morphs from police thriller to dream-like fantasy, the film is set in Aquiléa, a city that looks a lot like Buenos Aires currently under siege by sinister forces.
THREE CROWNS OF THE SAILOR
1983
A callow student, scared stiff of the consequences of the murder he has just committed, allows himself to be dragged to a dance hall by a a mysterious sailor marked for death who insists on making the shaken youth a captive audience to the recounting of his life story, a surreal trawl through ports of call and seedy brothels across Latin America.
DEATH AND THE COMPASS
1992
In a nightmare city inhabited only by criminals and police, DEATH AND THE COMPASS follows a philosophical detective named Lönnrot and his arch-nemesis, a criminal mastermind named Red Scharlach.
THE INVENTION OF MOREL
1967
In Emidio Greco’s stylish adaptation of Adolfo Bioy Casares' celebrated novel, a refugee washes up on the shore of a strange and barren island.
SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK
2008
SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK follows regional theatre director Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) as he struggles with romantic relationships, the problems of aging, and a mysteriously degenerative medical condition.
L'IMMORTELLE
1963
Unfolding in a fragmented, almost elliptical fashion, Robbe-Grillet places us in the shoes of a French lecturer, new to Istanbul and looking to find a connection with anyone who will let him.
