Extraordinary Stories · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man eats in a hotel room. That is everything the screen is doing: a plate, the actual furniture of an actual roadside hotel, a body performing a functional action. Over it, a voice explains that he is in serious danger. The voice knows his name is X, knows what he saw on the road, knows more about the killing than he does. The man goes on eating.

Four hours later that gap has not closed, and closing it was never the plan. Extraordinary Stories is an adventure film in which the adventure is entirely in the telling, while the image supplies weather, distance, and men walking. Mariano Llinás's invention is not voiceover. Marker had voiceover, Welles had it, Duras had it. What Llinás built is an engine: shoot mute in the flattest inhabited landscape on earth with a crew that fits in a car, then write the plot afterward at a desk, where plot is free. Story costs nothing. The image costs a drive, a wait for light, a permission. He ran that asymmetry at feature length, as fiction, for four hours, and the asymmetry became the form.

Deleuze split cinema in two. In the movement-image — classical cinema, roughly through the war — a character perceives a situation and acts on it, and the action changes the situation; the cutting exists to serve that chain. In the time-image, the chain snaps. Someone ends up in a situation he can only look at. Deleuze called those pure optical and sound situations, opsigns and sonsigns.

This film does something strange with that split: it runs both regimes at once, in separate channels. The images are time-image throughout. Empty road, water, grass, a parked car, provincial civic architecture, a man reading in an office — unremarkable or deserted spaces that no longer function as a setting for any action. Deleuze's name for that is the any-space-whatever, a space that has stopped being a stage. When the voice reaches an ellipsis, the frame holds on something inconsequential: dead time, temps mort, stretches where nothing advances. The soundtrack, meanwhile, is running a full-blooded movement-image: a killing on a country road, a coded notebook, a map, monoliths on a riverbank, treasure, conspiracy. Situation, decision, act, consequence — the whole classical circuit, uninterrupted, with Gabriel Chwojnik's score supplying the propulsion and menace the pictures decline to provide.

But that cinema is never in the frame. And it is not in the relative out-of-field either — the room next door, the space just past the edge that a pan could reach. It is in what Deleuze called the absolute out-of-field: something beyond the frame that cannot be located anywhere in space at all. The adventure here is off-screen in a way no camera move could recover, because it lives in a sentence.

You could call all this ironic voiceover and stop. That reading makes the film one joke held for four hours, and nobody sits still that long for one joke. Deleuze offers something better: heautonomy. Sound and image each become a complete, self-standing whole, and they communicate only across the gap between them. Neither illustrates the other. The camera runs alongside the narration rather than under it. Deleuze found this in Duras, where the soundtrack is entirely post-synced, the actors are staged as silent behavioral presences, and the drama happens only in the voices off. India Song is the extreme case, and Llinás took the technique straight from it — but Duras used the divorce for grief, and Llinás uses it for appetite.

Once the image stops being self-evident, it has to be read. Deleuze's term for that is the lectosign, the readable image. A grain silo is a grain silo; under this voice it becomes evidence. Long lenses turn two men crossing a field into a slow, ambiguous event that could be a meeting or a pursuit. The film keeps handing you landscape that declines to confirm what you were just told, and you keep reading it anyway. That is not a failure of the image. It is the film teaching you a way of looking.

And the voice is not reliable. It speculates. It admits it does not know things about its own characters. It sometimes sounds like it is inventing as it goes, and there is more than one of them. Deleuze called this the powers of the false: not lying, but making true and false undecidable so that narration becomes creative instead of merely reporting. The precedent is on the record — Welles in F for Fake promising that for the next hour everything you hear is true, having already arranged to break it. Llinás's narrators are that promise without the wink, sustained past the point of joke. Deleuze also names how such descriptions work: crystalline description, a description that composes its object and then replaces it. The monoliths exist because H was hired to account for them. The dead manager's secret exists because his notebook is in code. Nothing verifies from the picture side. The telling constitutes the thing told, and the storyteller is the film's real forger, the one who makes truth rather than finds it.

This is a raid on Bazin's territory. Bazin's case for realism rested on the automatic credibility of the photographic image, the way a recorded thing carries its own claim to have been there. Llinás keeps the Bazinian image completely intact — real unmodified rooms, available light, people waiting and driving — to the point where, with the sound off, four hours of this would read as observational documentary. Then he hires a liar to narrate it. Marker proved the principle in five minutes in 1957: Letter from Siberia narrates identical Yakutsk footage three times to opposite meanings, settling the question of whether commentary or image assigns sense. Llinás extends the demonstration to feature-length fiction, and the stakes change. You get no comparison version, no control. One telling, and you have to live inside it.

The structure obeys the same logic. Three men, barely linked or not linked at all — Deleuze's dispersive situation, slack causality, elliptical cuts. Griffith cross-cut so that lines would meet; the last-minute rescue is convergence in its classical form. Llinás cross-cuts in order to leave. He abandons a strand at the moment your appetite for it peaks and hands you another, so you are perpetually mid-story and never post-story. Rivette licensed exactly this in Out 1, where a conspiracy is invoked as pure narrative fuel and never delivered — the same treatment Llinás gives the monoliths and the man dead in the field. Deleuze calls it the condemnation of the plot: a diffuse plot behind the plot that no scene will ever land on. The engine underneath, a tale that spawns further tales faster than any can be paid off, is Ruiz's, from Three Crowns of the Sailor: each port a new story, each story a new debt. Meanwhile the men travel and change nothing. H goes down a river. X takes a hotel room and stays in it. These are voyages in Deleuze's slack modern sense, trips that transform nothing, and their pointlessness is what makes room for the telling.

Which leaves the province, and this is where the film is quietly radical. Argentine cinema had filmed the Buenos Aires interior as social document or nostalgic hinterland. Llinás films it as a theater of murder, treasure and secret history, with a completely straight face. Deleuze called this fabulation: not lying about a place but legending it into existence, telling a territory that is not given in advance. The monoliths do the heaviest lifting — anonymous structures on a riverbank, spoken over by a past nobody can produce, close to what Deleuze described as the stratigraphic image, an emptied landscape narrated by an absent history. The voice itself is not dialogue but an act of storytelling in a nineteenth-century register, comfortable with 'meanwhile,' with parenthesis, with confessing ignorance.

The significance is double, and both halves are the same half. Formally, Llinás demonstrated that narration can carry an entire fiction while the image is freed to behave like documentary, and that a viewer will follow that arrangement for four hours if the appetite keeps being fed. Economically, he proved the arrangement was buildable outside the subsidy system: shooting mute means no sound crew, no waiting for silence, no retakes for dialogue, and that single economy is why the plot supply is inexhaustible. El Pampero Cine turned the method into a practice — Llinás's fourteen-hour La flor, Citarella's Trenque Lauquen — and a generation took from it the permission to be long, literary and cheap at once.

Watch it again and put your attention on the seam. The interesting moments are not where voice and image agree. They are where the picture seems to know something the narrator hasn't mentioned — a look, a building, a river doing what rivers do — and you have to decide, with no help coming, whether the voice is describing this world or building it.