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Death and the Compass. Dir. Alex Cox, 1992/1996.
The BAM/PFA does a lot of cool movie retrospectives and whatnot that I never get around to seeing (even when I put them on my calendar!), but I managed to convince my roommate N to see this with me because it has Christopher Eccleston. I'd never actually heard of Alex Cox, but I really enjoyed this movie, both in itself as an adaptation of the Borges short story of the same name.
Cox was actually there at the screening (we watched his personal print, which unfortunately has some sound issues), and in the Q&A afterward I asked how he decided to adapt this story - he said he originally wanted to do "The Aleph," but the BBC didn't have the rights to it, so he wound up with this one. Some elements of "The Aleph" still linger in the movie, even so.
The 1992 version was shot for a TV miniseries event for the BBC and a Spanish television company, celebrating, as Cox put it, "the 500th anniversary of the burning of the library at Grenada." The original version is about 1/3 shorter; Cox expanded it by shooting scenes of Treviranus, post-retirement, explaining the events of the story in increasingly self-delusional, and inaccurate, fashion.
I don't know. I read all of Borges' short stories ten years ago, in high school, but I didn't particularly remember this one; I did really, really like the movie, which is simultaneously surreal, OTT, darkly humorous, and mordantly sarcastic and exaggerated. It was shot in Mexico City, and I think the Latin American setting definitely adds a certain something to the movie as a Borges adaptation. I also really liked the music, which was overpowering and bizarre, and the costume design, which puts the characters in some of the most brightly colored suits I've ever seen and makes, in context, total sense.
The BAM/PFA does a lot of cool movie retrospectives and whatnot that I never get around to seeing (even when I put them on my calendar!), but I managed to convince my roommate N to see this with me because it has Christopher Eccleston. I'd never actually heard of Alex Cox, but I really enjoyed this movie, both in itself as an adaptation of the Borges short story of the same name.
Cox was actually there at the screening (we watched his personal print, which unfortunately has some sound issues), and in the Q&A afterward I asked how he decided to adapt this story - he said he originally wanted to do "The Aleph," but the BBC didn't have the rights to it, so he wound up with this one. Some elements of "The Aleph" still linger in the movie, even so.
The 1992 version was shot for a TV miniseries event for the BBC and a Spanish television company, celebrating, as Cox put it, "the 500th anniversary of the burning of the library at Grenada." The original version is about 1/3 shorter; Cox expanded it by shooting scenes of Treviranus, post-retirement, explaining the events of the story in increasingly self-delusional, and inaccurate, fashion.
I don't know. I read all of Borges' short stories ten years ago, in high school, but I didn't particularly remember this one; I did really, really like the movie, which is simultaneously surreal, OTT, darkly humorous, and mordantly sarcastic and exaggerated. It was shot in Mexico City, and I think the Latin American setting definitely adds a certain something to the movie as a Borges adaptation. I also really liked the music, which was overpowering and bizarre, and the costume design, which puts the characters in some of the most brightly colored suits I've ever seen and makes, in context, total sense.