I’m almost a century late to this party, but I recently stumbled into the movie reviews of Jorge Luis Borges (in his Selected Non-Fictions) and they’re fantastic: gloomy, sometimes bitchy, hilarious.
Here’s Borges on Citizen Kane:
I venture to guess, nonetheless, that Citizen Kane will endure as certain Griffith or Pudovkin films have “endured”—films whose historical value is undeniable but which no one cares to see again. It is too gigantic, pedantic, tedious. It is not intelligent, though it is the work of genius—in the most nocturnal and Germanic sense of that bad word.
On King Kong:
A monkey forty feet tall (some fans say forty-five) may have obvious charms, but those charms have not convinced this viewer. King Kong is no full-blooded ape but rather a rusty, desiccated machine whose movements are downright clumsy… He is actually hunchbacked and bowlegged, attributes that serve only to reduce him in the spectator’s eye.
On overdubbing foreign films:
The art of combination is not infinite in its possibilities, though these possibilities are apt to be frightening. The Greeks engendered the chimera, a monster with the head of a lion, the head of a dragon, and the head of a goat; the second-century theologians, the Trinity, in which the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are inextricably linked; the Chinese zoologists, the ti-yiang, a bright red, supernatural bird equipped with six feet and six wings but with neither face nor eyes; nineteenth-century geometrists, the hypercube, a four-dimensional figure enclosing an infinite number of cubes and bounded by eight cubes and twenty-four squares.
Hollywood has just enriched this frivolous museum of teratology: by means of a perverse artifice they call dubbing, they devise monsters that combine the famous face of Greta Garbo with the voice of Aldonza Lorenzo.
And on bad movies in general:
Recent bad films—I am thinking of Moscow’s The Diary of a Nazi and Hollywood’s The Story of Dr. Wassell—prompt us to regard the movies as a kind of negative paradise. “Sightseeing is the art of disappointment,” Stevenson noted. The definition applies to films and, with sad frequency, to that continuous and unavoidable exercise called life.
It makes me oddly, warmly happy to know that Borges wasn’t always obsessing over Melville or The 1,001 Nights or medieval theology. Sometimes he brooded over Hepburn and Garbo.
I wonder how he would’ve liked The Big Lebowski. Or Pulp Fiction. Or Star Wars.
Borges on DaVinci:
Oh, this is gold, Brendan! I had no idea Borges wrote film reviews!
Incidentally, his Sonetos have been out of print in Spanish for ages (although I haven’t checked lately), but have been tolerably translated into English and are readily available. They’re well worth it.
“nocturnal and Germanic”! So good.
Yes, Borges was a film critic, but not a perceptive one like Otis Ferguson, James Agee, or Manny Farber, nor did he evince any profound insights into the medium like Andre Bazin. His attack on “Citizen Kane” is pure snarkiness for snark’ sake, with no regard for the merits of the film. The idea that “Kane” is a film that everybody gives lip service to but nobody watches is more entertaining as a notion than as a reality. All serious film goers have seen “Kane” not only once, but multiple times, and I’ve never known anybody to be bored by it. Borges is a great film critic for the likes of Brendan Kiley, who think being cynical is the same as being smart.
He is a far far better critic than the awful Nathan Lane who writes usually incorrect movie reviews for The New Yorker.
Postage stamp illustrator … love that phrase.
His criticisms seem noteworthy more for their vinegar than for their insight.
@4: I’m into film, and I think Borges was right on the money about “Citizen Kane”. Although I’m glad to have seen it once in order to get the cultural references, I was bored by it and have no intention of seeing it again. (You can now proceed to turn your argument into a tautology by claiming that I couldn’t possibly be “seriously” into film with that opinion.)
Hey, Francois Truffaut was bored by “Pather Panchali”, and who can deny his place in film criticism? As it is, I teach film for a living, and it is a challenge to turn today’s kids onto the likes of Renoir, Bresson, Dreyer, Bergman — in fact, into movies made before “Star Wars” in general, just as it is a challenge for English teachers to get their students to appreciate a sentence longer than the average Twitter tweet, much less an entire novel. So I am not surprised that you were “bored” by “Citizen Kane.”
@8, you’re being a prick. It’s entirely possible to be in to movies — even serious movies! — and not find Citizen Kane all that compelling. I’ve liked every other Orson Welles movie I’ve seen significantly more than CK (well, with the possible exception of Transformers: The Movie). Borges pretty much nailed my opinion on the film.
That being said, Kiley, are you kidding? What would Borges have made of Pulp Fiction? Borges the gangster obsessed literary recombinator? Pulp Fiction *is* a Borges story. He would have loved it.
this is amazing
@4: I don’t know if a lot of the original review is lost in translation, or maybe it is a matter of knowing the author, or maybe you were misguided but that little fragment, or whatever. But the thing is that Borges was not criticizing Citizen Kane, but praising it. He actually means that the film in its incredible depth may be out of reach for people not particulary interested in cinema. The phrase “It is not intelligent, though it is the work of genius” while technically correct doesn’t do justice to what the original means. The phrase “No es inteligente, es genial” is actually a turn of phrase from the spanish of Buenos Aires that actually states that to call it just “intelligent” or “smart” would be an understatement. Out of respect to the movie, you should call it “a work of genius” and be fully aware of what a “genius” meant for the German romanticism. And that’s just one example. So, yeah, he’s talking big words about the movie.
Other thing to consider is that this was written in 1941, when the movie came out in Buenos Aires. It was before modern ideas of cinema became popular and in a place where the particular literature for cinema criticism was yet to be invented. And yes, I can admit he wasn’t a full fledged film critic or really invested in the media, so he might not be as perceptive as Bazin.
And he was snarky, alright. But you should read the whole review and in spanish if possible. He compares the film with the works of Hume, Mach, Conrad, Kafka and the Bible. Coming from his pen, that is not gratuitous.
@4: I don’t know if a lot of the original review is lost in translation, or maybe it is a matter of knowing the author, or maybe you were misguided but that little fragment, or whatever. But the thing is that Borges was not criticizing Citizen Kane, but praising it. He actually means that the film in its incredible depth may be out of reach for people not particulary interested in cinema. The phrase “It is not intelligent, though it is the work of genius” while technically correct doesn’t do justice to what the original means. The phrase “No es inteligente, es genial” is actually a turn of phrase from the spanish of Buenos Aires that actually states that to call it just “intelligent” or “smart” would be an understatement. Out of respect to the movie, you should call it “a work of genius” and be fully aware of what a “genius” meant for the German romanticism. And that’s just one example. So, yeah, he’s talking big words about the movie.
Other thing to consider is that this was written in 1941, when the movie came out in Buenos Aires. It was before modern ideas of cinema became popular and in a place where the particular literature for cinema criticism was yet to be invented. And yes, I can admit he wasn’t a full fledged film critic or really invested in the media, so he might not be as perceptive as Bazin.
And he was snarky, alright. But you should read the whole review and in spanish if possible. He compares the film with the works of Hume, Mach, Conrad, Kafka and the Bible. Coming from his pen, that is not gratuitous.