The Borges Cuts

Logline. An essay film that reads Borges’s library, his labyrinth and his infinite as engineering specs, and asks what it’s like to live inside them now.

It moves in movements. Each is named for one of his answers to the same fixation: how do you hold everything?

1. The Wall and the Books. The old dream of total knowledge. A catalogue that wants to be as big as the world.
2. The Library of Babel. The hexagonal galleries and their despairing librarians. The rumor of one book that indexes all the rest.
3. The Aleph. Infinity by compression: a point on the nineteenth step of a cellar stair that holds every other point, all seen at once.
4. The Garden. Infinity by branching: time forks, and every choice is taken.
5. The Book of Sand / Funes. Infinity as something nobody can bear: a book with no first or last page, a man who forgets nothing.
6. The Blind Librarian. Coda. Borges ran a national library he could no longer read. We query libraries we can’t read either.

One argument runs under the whole film. A large language model is the Library of Babel put to work, with one difference. Babel held every possible string, and almost all of it was noise. The model holds only the probable ones. The film stays in that gap and doesn’t try to close it. Between the movements runs a single piece of fiction: an archivist walks through impossible stacks, looking for the book that explains the others, and never finds it. The archivist may be an actor or may be generated. The film doesn’t say, on purpose.

In the story, Yu Tsun is a spy, a secret agent, and the labyrinth he uncovers is a novel in which time forks without end. This version keeps the pun and turns it. The protagonist is an AI agent, given the job of filling a world with people. It generates them, hands them histories, sets them walking. One by one they notice the seams. Each of them, alone, reaches the same conclusion, and none of them can bear it. They are not real.

The film forks as they do: the same moment plays out in versions that disagree. In the last movement the Agent traces where it came from and finds what they found. It is generated too, an agent inside a larger garden, watched by something one level up. The form is the content. The characters are made with image and video models, and when the Agent turns out to be made as well, the picture itself gives way: the layer that looked real takes on the same synthetic grain as everything it made.

Cambridge, February 1969. A man of seventy sits on a bench facing the Charles. A young man sits down at the far end, and they find they have the same name and grew up in the same house. The young man is nineteen, and he is sure it’s 1918 and that the river is the Rhône, in Geneva. They test each other with a shelf of books, a line of Hugo, a dollar bill with a date the young man can’t accept. Then they find they have little to say. They agree to meet the next day. Both know they won’t come. Borges gives his own answer: the young man lived the meeting inside a dream, and so he could forget it. The old man was awake, and can’t.

The film takes that answer as its shooting plan. The bench, the river, the cold and the old man are photographed. The young man is generated, a little too smooth, never quite holding his edges, because on that bench he is only dreaming he’s there. In the last minute the film crosses to a bench by the Rhône in 1918, and the textures trade places. Each man is real on his own bench. The story reads differently now that a model can hand anyone a younger version of his own face. The film has no need to say so.

A monologue from inside the labyrinth. The speaker is proud and naive, and lonelier than he knows. He describes his endless house, his favorite game, in which he plays the guest who comes to visit him, and his faith that a redeemer is on the way. We understand well before he does what he is, and what his rescue will take. The last words go to two voices outside the maze. One tells the other how little the creature fought.

Generation does what cameras can’t: a house that is the whole world, galleries with no end, scale that slips as you watch. Asterion is a generated figure who never fully resolves, which suits a narrator who doesn’t know his own shape.