Invasion

Snapshot

Invasión is the debut feature of Hugo Santiago Muchnik, made in Buenos Aires when he was twenty-nine, from a story devised with Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. It is set in 1957, in a city called Aquilea that is transparently Buenos Aires and yet is not — Aquilea has mountains and islands the real city lacks. A loose confederation of middle-aged men, convened and directed by an elderly strategist named Don Porfirio, defends this city against an invasion that is never explained: the invaders have no stated nation, ideology or objective, they arrive by ordinary car and boat, they carry ordinary guns, and they wear light suits while the defenders wear dark ones. The defenders lose, more or less continuously, for two hours.

Borges supplied the synopsis that has been attached to the film ever since, written when it was selected to open the first Quinzaine des Réalisateurs at Cannes in 1969: Invasión is "the legend of a city, imaginary or real, besieged by strong enemies and defended by a few men, who are perhaps not heroes. They will fight to the end, without suspecting that their battle is infinite."

That is an accurate description of the film and a fair description of its afterlife. It opened commercially in Buenos Aires on 16 October 1969 and failed badly. Eight reels of its original negative were stolen from the Alex laboratory in 1978, during the military dictatorship, and never recovered. It was reconstructed from surviving positive material around the turn of the 2000s, screened in restored form at BAFICI, and has since been canonized — retrospectives at the Cinémathèque française, MoMA, the New York Film Festival — as one of the essential Latin American films of its decade and the strangest thing Borges ever put his name to.

Industry & production

Argentine cinema in 1969 was operating under the Revolución Argentina, the military government installed by Juan Carlos Onganía in 1966: a censorious, culturally reactive regime, with a state film institute that dispensed credits and classification boards that dispensed cuts. The commercial industry ran on comedies, melodramas and folkloric vehicles. Against that, two avant-gardes: the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, which for most of the decade was the hub of experimental music, art and performance in Buenos Aires, and the militant documentary underground that produced Solanas and Getino's clandestine La hora de los hornos (1968).

Invasión belongs to neither and borrowed from both. It was produced through Proartel S.A., with Santiago himself carrying the producer credit, and shot in black-and-white 35mm at a running time — 123 minutes in the most commonly cited version — that no Argentine distributor was likely to reward.

The script came from an approach so audacious it has become the film's origin myth. In 1967 Santiago, who had made only short films, went to the National Library and asked Borges to write him a movie about a besieged city. Borges agreed, brought in Bioy Casares, and the two worked through that summer. The partnership was not smooth: Bioy complained in his diary about the difficulty of inventing on someone else's premise, and the pair eventually handed Santiago roughly ten pages rather than a screenplay. Bioy's account of the meeting is the most quoted line in the film's history — "I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is that we have finished the summary of the film and are making you a gift of it, to do with as you like. The bad news is that we won't write the script." Santiago took the treatment and wrote the screenplay himself, in continued consultation with Borges over some eight months.

The premiere was a rout. Bioy recorded that the audience "laughs at the tragic moments" and is otherwise bored at length; one spectator was overheard calling it the turkey of the year. Olga Zubarry, the film's female lead and a genuine star of Argentine cinema, later said she had not understood a single word of what they were doing. Borges blamed the plot's opacity; Bioy blamed the sententious dialogue.

Technology

There is no technology in Invasión in the science-fiction sense. That is the first thing to say about a film routinely filed under the genre. The invaders bring no devices; the most futuristic object on screen is a car. What the film has instead of hardware is an implacable procedure — the invasion is administrative, patient, already underway before the film begins, and impossible to locate in any single machine or agent. The genre label attaches to the film's logic, not its props.

Its one genuinely advanced technical department is sound. Edgardo Cantón is credited with both the music and the sound, and the electronic material he supplies comes out of the Buenos Aires electroacoustic milieu associated with the Di Tella institute — sustained tones, scrapes and pulses that sit uneasily between the world of the film and the space outside it. In 1969 this was avant-garde practice, and applying it to what looks like a thriller was an unusual bet.

The film's most consequential technological story, however, is about its material survival. In 1978, eight of the original negative's reels were taken from the Alex laboratory. Santiago rejected the explanation offered at the time — that the stock had been scrapped for silver recovery — and insisted it was an operation: "They came and they stole them." For two decades the film existed mainly as rumour and worn prints. A negative was reconstructed from surviving positive material with French support (Pierre-André Boutang and Arte are credited in most accounts), a restored version was shown at BAFICI in 2002, and a DVD edition in 2008 — accompanied by Aquilea: nueve pequeños films sobre "Invasión" — finally gave the film a general audience. Accounts differ on the precise sequence and dates of the recovery work, and the surviving image carries the generational loss of its reconstruction; this is a film whose texture is partly an artifact of its own persecution.

Technique

Cinematography

Ricardo Aronovich shot Invasión (Adelqui Camuso is also credited on camera), and it is among the strongest calling cards in a career that would take him to Louis Malle's Le Souffle au cœur, Alain Resnais's Providence and Costa-Gavras's Missing. The black-and-white is hard and graphic: deep blacks, blown highlights, chiaroscuro in stairwells and warehouses, and a persistent preference for wide, deep compositions in which the human figure is one element in a field of concrete, water and sky.

The photography's central operation is geographic falsification. Recognizable Buenos Aires appears — La Bombonera among the landmarks — but the film assembles these fragments into a topography that cannot exist, complete with mountains. Santiago described the effect as "an enormous violence we did to ourselves." The city is documented and disbelieved in the same shot, which is precisely the sensation the story requires: everything is familiar and nothing can be trusted.

Editing

Oscar Montauti cut the film. The method is elliptical to the point of hostility: scenes begin after their establishing information has passed, characters are introduced without identification, and long sequence shots will simply abandon the person they were following to attach themselves to someone else. The spectator is put in the position of the defenders — arriving late, inferring the shape of an operation from its residue. Where a conventional thriller uses cutting to distribute knowledge, Invasión uses it to withhold the premise while lavishing detail on procedure.

Mise-en-scène / staging

The staging is built on a single legible opposition — invaders in white, defenders in black — laid over a city whose map, seen at the outset, reads as a board. Critics have consistently taken the cue: this is chess, not history, and the pieces have functions rather than motives.

Within that scheme, Santiago's Bressonian training governs the blocking. Actor and camera are choreographed as equal parties in the event; a movement of the head is answered by a movement of the lens, so that the camera is not observing an occurrence but participating in it. Gestures are isolated and repeated — a hand on a weapon, a body crossing a threshold — with the ritual precision of men performing duties whose purpose they no longer question.

Sound

Cantón's electronic textures do the atmospheric work, but the film's emotional centre is a piece of vernacular music. Aníbal Troilo set Borges's "Milonga de Manuel Flores" — a lyric from the 1965 collection Para las seis cuerdas, in which a man about to be executed contemplates his own death — and it is recited by Roberto Villanueva to guitars played by Roberto Grela and Ubaldo De Lío. It arrives in a café scene of ordinary citizens that advances no plot whatever, and it is the moment where the film's abstraction opens onto something like grief. That Troilo, the great bandoneonist of the tango, appears in the same credit block as Di Tella electronics is a statement of the film's entire cultural position.

Performance

Lautaro Murúa plays Herrera, Olga Zubarry plays Irene, and Juan Carlos Paz — the twelve-tone composer, the fiercest Argentine modernist of his generation, not an actor — plays Don Porfirio. Martín Adjemián is Irala, the theatre director Roberto Villanueva is Silva, and Lito Cruz leads the young. The delivery is flattened and recitative, the dialogue formal to the point of oracle; Bioy thought it too sententious and the 1969 audience, trained on American naturalism, laughed. Read against Bresson rather than against Hollywood, the performances are exactly what the film's ritual conception of action requires: men who speak their duties rather than express their feelings.

Narrative & dramatic mode

Invasión begins in the middle and ends before the end. There is no first contact, no declaration, no negotiation; the resistance is already organized when we meet it, and its members gradually understand that the invasion preceded their own formation and cannot be defined, let alone stopped. Individual missions have thriller shapes — a warehouse, a rooftop, a stadium, a delivery — and they are executed with genre competence and then absorbed into a losing pattern.

Herrera is killed, and Irene's relation to the invaders is left unresolved in a way most readings take as betrayal. The coda hands the struggle to a group of young people; the leader's line — "Now it's our turn, but it will have to be another way" — closes the film on a transfer rather than a resolution. Borges's phrase covers it: the battle is infinite, and nobody in it knows that.

Genre & cycle

The science-fiction classification is inherited from catalogues rather than earned on screen, though it is not wrong in the River Plate sense, where the fantastic is a philosophical instrument rather than a special effect — the lineage of Bioy's La invención de Morel and Borges's Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, in which an invented order quietly replaces the real one. The film's surface genre is the policial: raincoats, guns, docks, informers, a nocturnal city. Structurally it is a siege film with the siege's terms deleted.

Its most illuminating generic neighbour is the film it refuses to be. La hora de los hornos, made the year before, is agitprop with a program. Invasión takes the same historical pressure — a country moving toward armed struggle — and abstracts it to pure form, which is why Argentine critics called it cold and hermetic, and why later criticism has read that coldness as its argument.

Authorship & method

Santiago is the rarest kind of first-time director: an apprentice of Robert Bresson, for whom he worked as an assistant across the years 1959–1966, arriving in Buenos Aires with a fully formed European modernist method and a Borgesian literary inheritance. He had studied literature, philosophy and music at the University of Buenos Aires, and he treated cinema as a system of knowledge requiring an active reader — a conception that explains both the film's difficulty and its durability.

The authorship is genuinely triangular. Borges and Bioy supplied the myth — the besieged city, the unheroic defenders, and the deliberate choice of 1957, a year Borges regarded as historically inert, precisely so the film would not be about anything current. Santiago supplied the politics that the coda makes explicit, along with everything cinematic. Aronovich supplied a photographic idea of Buenos Aires that no Argentine film had used before. Montauti's cutting enforces the withholding. Cantón, uniquely credited with music and sound together, makes the ambient world of Aquilea a single composed object. Troilo and Paz, imported from the opposite ends of Argentine musical life, function as casting arguments about what culture is being defended.

Movement / national cinema

The film sits at the junction of the Generación del 60 — Torre Nilsson, Antín, Kohon — the Di Tella avant-garde, and the militant cinema of Cine Liberación, without joining any of them. Its European affiliations are obvious and were held against it: this was a moment when Latin American filmmakers were expected to make Latin American cinema in a defined political register, and Santiago made an Argentine film out of Bresson, Borges and electroacoustics. Its national credentials are in fact deeper than its critics allowed — the milonga, the mythology of coraje, the arrabal transfigured — but they are Borges's Argentina, invented rather than reported.

Era / period

1969 in Argentina is the year of the Cordobazo, the Córdoba uprising that broke Onganía's authority and opened the decade of political violence; the ERP and the Montoneros would emerge within a year. Invasión precedes all of it and prefigures it uncannily: a city occupied by forces nobody can name, defenders who die in obscurity, a younger generation inheriting the fight and promising to conduct it "another way."

Its second period is the one it did not live through in public. When the 1976–83 dictatorship began disappearing people, the film's central conceit stopped being an abstraction, and then the film itself was disappeared — negative stolen in 1978, resurfacing only after the archive of that era began to be reconstructed. Few films have had their subject matter enacted upon their own materials so exactly.

Reception, canon & influence

Invasión opened the first Quinzaine des Réalisateurs at Cannes in 1969 and travelled to Locarno, Mannheim and Barcelona. French critics received it well; Jean-Louis Bory read the invasion as a figure for death, and admired the film's fusion of political and existential registers. At home the reception ranged from respectful bafflement to derision, and the box office was a disaster.

Its backward influences are unusually well documented. Bresson is in every gesture and every performance — the flattened voice, the fragment, the camera as participant. Borges and Bioy provide not only the story but the epistemology: the labyrinthine city, the traitor and the hero, courage as a rite without a cause. The policial and the American thriller provide the iconography that the film hollows out.

Forward, the clearest line is Santiago's own. He returned to the material with Borges and Bioy for Les Autres (1974), which competed at Cannes, and continued the Aquilea cycle in Las veredas de Saturno (mid-1980s), written with Juan José Saer, and El cielo del centauro (2015), his last film, generally treated as the trilogy's close. He died in Paris in 2018.

Beyond that, the honest position is that Invasión's influence was delayed by its own suppression. A film effectively unavailable from 1978 to the early 2000s cannot have shaped the Nuevo Cine Argentino of the 1990s in any direct way, and specific debts claimed on its behalf are seldom documented. What it has become instead is a founding text discovered late: the BAFICI-era rediscovery installed it as the great Argentine counter-model — proof that a national cinema could be political through form rather than declaration — and its story of a stolen negative made it a permanent emblem in Argentine debates about memory and the archive. Its authority now rests less on a chain of imitators than on the fact that a film made in 1969 about an unnameable occupation was itself occupied, vanished, and returned.