Invasion · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

They arrive in ordinary cars. Light suits, ordinary guns, no flag, no insignia, no statement of what they want. The men who go out to stop them wear dark suits and are mostly in their fifties. You spend two hours waiting for the film to say who the invaders are and why this city, and it never says. It gives you everything else: the routes, the handoffs, the timing, a hand laid on a weapon, a body crossing a threshold, a man waiting on a corner for another man who is late.

Hugo Santiago was twenty-nine. He had walked into the National Library in 1967 and asked Borges for a story about a besieged city; Borges brought in Bioy Casares, they worked a summer, and they handed him roughly ten pages and a refusal to write the screenplay. Santiago wrote it himself. What he made is a thriller with a complete grammar and no premise, and the withholding goes all the way down to the cut. Oscar Montauti's editing starts scenes after their explanatory information has gone by. Characters appear without being named. A long take will follow someone across a room, then let him go and attach itself to a stranger. You are put exactly where the defenders are: arriving late, reading an operation off its residue. Deleuze's terms for that condition — a dispersive situation of many weakly-linked figures, held together by weak links, slackened causality, elliptical cuts — describe the film's method before they describe its plot.

Here is why the lens earns its place. Deleuze's account of classical cinema is simple: for fifty years the movies ran on a circuit he called the action-image. A character perceives a situation, the situation presses on him, he acts, the act changes the situation. The cutting, the score, the shape of the story all exist to carry that arc. After the war, he argues, the circuit starts failing. People find themselves inside situations too large or too diffuse to be acted upon, and cinema has to invent something to do with a character who perceives clearly and cannot respond. That failure is the crisis of the action-image.

Most films that register the crisis show it as slackening. Characters drift, plots thin, the journey changes nothing. Invasión takes the harder road: it keeps the competence. Aquilea's defenders are very good at this. They move like the crew in Rififi, which is where the iconography comes from — trenchcoated professionals executing a long wordless operation. Santiago keeps the operation and removes the safe.

Deleuze, borrowing from Peirce, has terms for what that removal does. A mark is an object that means something by habit: you see the coat, the synchronized watches, the floor plan, and you know what comes next, because every film of its kind has laid the chain down for you. A demark is what you get when the chain snaps and the object stands there still charged, meaning nothing in particular, demanding to be read. Invasión is two hours of marks turned into demarks. That is why the Buenos Aires premiere went so badly. Bioy recorded that the audience laughed at the tragic moments; Olga Zubarry, a genuine star of Argentine cinema, said afterwards that she had not understood a word of what they were doing.

The enemy is built on the same subtraction. Deleuze noticed that in the late action-image the villain's scheme stops having a head — it becomes a plot behind the plot, dispersed through procedure, with no room where the decision gets made. He called it the condemnation of the plot, and the description of Aquilea's invasion is exact: administrative, patient, already underway before the film begins, impossible to locate in any single machine or agent. There is no technology in this science-fiction film. The most advanced object on screen is a car. The genre label attaches to the logic.

So where is the invasion? Deleuze separates two kinds of off-screen. There is the relative kind, the room next door, the street the character is walking into, which the camera could show and simply hasn't yet. And there is the absolute out-of-field: a presence the frame opens onto that has no location, that no pan could ever reach. The invaders are visible constantly. The invasion is only ever absolute. Santiago took the method from A Man Escaped, where the occupying force exists as off-screen sound and the soundtrack, not the frame, carries the siege. Edgardo Cantón, out of the Di Tella electroacoustic milieu, supplies sustained tones, scrapes and pulses that sit between the world of the film and the room you're watching it in. Not quite score. Not quite in the building.

Then the city. Ricardo Aronovich shoots hard and graphic: deep blacks, blown highlights, chiaroscuro in stairwells, the human figure as one element in a field of concrete and water and sky. Real landmarks are there, La Bombonera among them. And Aquilea has mountains, which Buenos Aires does not. The film documents a city and disbelieves it in the same shot. Santiago called this "an enormous violence we did to ourselves." Deleuze's name for such a place is the any-space-whatever, a space whose parts have lost their determined connections so that linkage becomes something the film decides rather than something geography supplies. His examples come from rubble, deserts, emptied rooms. Santiago builds one out of monuments. Last Year at Marienbad is the precedent for treating a real architecture as an unplaceable mental map, and Aronovich had already rehearsed the light on Circe in 1964. Here the technique acquires a charge those films didn't have, because a citizen of Buenos Aires watches his own streets get assembled into somewhere that cannot exist.

Inside that space, bodies. Santiago apprenticed with Bresson from 1959 to 1966, on Pickpocket among others, and the debt is at the level of blocking: actor and camera choreographed as equal parties, a turn of a head answered by a move of the lens, so the camera takes part in the event instead of covering it. Gestures are isolated and repeated. A hand on a weapon. A body crossing a threshold. Deleuze calls a posture that makes a social relation visible without anyone explaining it a gest, and what these gests expose is functionaries — men convened by an elderly strategist, Don Porfirio, carrying out assignments whose purpose they have stopped asking about. The ritual precision is the tell. The Trial of Joan of Arc supplied the vocal equivalent: text recited flat, performance forbidden to supply the emotion the situation implies. Bioy thought the dialogue sententious. Heard as recitation rather than conversation, the flatness is load-bearing.

The film's best scene does nothing at all. A café, ordinary citizens, and a milonga: Aníbal Troilo's setting of Borges's "Milonga de Manuel Flores," a man on the eve of his execution thinking about his own death, recited by Roberto Villanueva over the guitars of Roberto Grela and Ubaldo De Lío. No plot moves. Deleuze would call this dead time, a stretch where the everyday is held open and the story is made to wait — and it is the one moment where these men are handed something the war cannot give them, a story about dying that has a shape. Fabulation is Deleuze's word for that: the act of legending, a people composing the story it does not yet have. Borges used the same word in the synopsis he wrote when the film opened the first Quinzaine at Cannes: "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."

Which is the film's real subject. Deleuze, taking a line from Klee, says modern political cinema begins from the fact that the people are missing — that a filmmaker can no longer address a constituted people and has to work in the gap where one should be. In Buenos Aires in 1968, the other answer to that problem was Solanas and Getino's clandestine La hora de los hornos, made to call a people into existence. Santiago, shooting the next year under the same Onganía government, made the negative print of that film. Aquilea's defenders have no nation named, no ideology, no cause stated, and nobody behind them except the drinkers in the café. A few men and a map. Whether the battle is infinite because the enemy is inexhaustible, or because a defense with nothing behind it can never arrive at a state where it's over, the film declines to say.

Then history rhymed, uglily. In 1978, eight reels of the original negative were taken from the Alex laboratory. Santiago never accepted the story that the stock had been scrapped for silver: "They came and they stole them." For two decades the film survived as rumour and worn prints, until a negative was reconstructed from positives with French support and shown at BAFICI in 2002. The image you can see now carries the generational loss of that rescue. A film about an invasion that leaves no evidence was itself partly erased, and comes down to us as a copy of a copy.

That theft is also why its lineage runs backward more clearly than forward. Invasión should have been a founding document for a certain kind of political abstraction, and it went missing at precisely the moment it might have been inherited; what it transmitted directly was Aronovich's light, which he carried to Resnais's Providence and Costa-Gavras's Missing. The retrospectives came later — Cinémathèque française, MoMA, the New York Film Festival — by which time the world had arrived at the film's premise on its own.

Watch it once for the story and you'll be as irritated as the 1969 audience. Watch the hands instead. Watch what men do with their bodies when nobody will tell them anything, and listen for the tone that isn't coming from the room. It isn't a puzzle keeping a secret it will surrender on a second viewing. It's a form of life — competent, ceremonial, unwinnable — that a great many people in that city were about to be living for real.