First and foremost, I will be discussing the work of fiction, The Garden of Forking Paths by: Jorge Luis Borges. Like most of his other works, The Garden of Forking Paths deals with a theme of books, time, and circles. The story begins as such:
"In his A History of the World War (page 212), Captain Liddell Hart reports that a planned offensive by thirteen British divisions, supported by fourteen hundred artillery pieces, against the German line at Serre-Montauban, scheduled for July 24, 1916, had to be postponed until the morning of the 29th."
Throughout most of the work Borges uses long descriptive sentences that have something resembling a historical ring to them, as if the unnamed man is scribbling in a journal, denoting moments of history as well as moments in his history. The use of words and the structure of the words and sentences creates a visual sound and picture of time. The story is warped in that we do not know if the account of the man telling it is true but that is the case for most literature. What we can tell from the story though is that the man is a spy who set out on a mission to kill a man. The irony in the story is that spy is a descendent of Ts’ui Pen, the author, the maker of The Garden of Forking Paths which was to be the book of all books, infinite… and the man who found out its secret (that the book is a labyrinth) is the man the spy must kill.
Part II:
Ballet Mécanique is a film directed by: Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy. It is an abstract film that uses a circular theme of progression… it is in itself a labyrinth much like The Garden of Forking Paths. We first begin with a woman on a swing, her face, her expression, her movement draws us into the picture. We can relate to her because in a sense, she is like us, she is us. Then the picture is disrupted by objects hats, bottles, and even faces that have been distorted, taken out of the context in which we are so used to seeing them portrayed in. Layers upon layers of objects are spread out on the screen disrupting our perception of reality. The pictures flash in front of us like a rhythmic dance, slow at times and then powerful and even agitated like the cogs in a clock winding endlessly at light speed until we expect it to break. Images are constantly flashed in front of our eyes and repeated in patterns. The patterns themselves, are somewhat sporadic, we don’t know what will come next, the hat and bottles, a woman’s smile, or played out motion of a woman walking up the steps… never getting to her point of destination, just stuck there in time and space. These same images flash before us for what seems like an eternity, the material vs. the flesh… but the flesh is not what it should be it is abstracted. Then the film concludes where it began, with the woman, but instead of feeling anything for her or the scene, everything seems amazingly eerie. She seems mechanical and cold because she has been abstracted just like the rest of the images throughout the film.
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