Enter the Aleph
Interview
Enter the Aleph
Aleph (2021)
Interview
BY
Elianna kan
An interview with Iva Radivojević.
Aleph plays in theater from October 28 at Metrograph, as part of our series Dans Le Labyrinthe, and streams exclusively at Metrograph At Home.
Iva Radivojević was born in Belgrade, and grew up in Yugoslavia until the Yugoslav War forced her family to emigrate to Cyprus. Her work, in one way or another, revolves around places dropped out of time. Her debut feature, the documentary Evaporating Borders (2014), screened in over 70 festivals and was met with critical acclaim. Her latest film, Aleph (2021), based on Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’s classic short story of the same name, is an ambitious and vibrant adaptation of an utterly surreal tale. The Aleph at the story’s center refers to a place? an image? a portal? through which the viewer can simultaneously see visions of all that ever was, and all that will be—flowers, landscapes, sunsets, faces, objects, all the imagination could ever conjure and hope to hold. It’s a source of awe-inspiring wonder, whose magnitude makes the viewer feel both omnipotent and insignificant all at once. In short: a source of endless possibility for adaptation and a herculean task that Radivojević undertook by filming in 10 different locations around the globe, each offering an associative bridge into the next. The result is a kaleidoscopic film that invites us to see the world anew.
ELIANNA KAN: Since Aleph was released, you’ve mentioned that poets seem to respond to the film. Why do you think that is?
IVA RADIVOJEVIĆ: There’s a certain freedom in poetry, for experimentation, juxtaposition, playfulness of language and being, which is evident in the film.
EK: I like this idea of a poet’s film. You’ve also used the phrase “dream logic” to describe the way it moves. What does that mean to you?
IR: I’ll tell you what it means in the context of something I recently read by the Croatian writer Dubravka Ugrešić, who writes about post-war Yugoslavia. When I started reading her books, I felt for the first time that I could see myself pertaining to a people who had a shared experience. She writes about exile, something we’re seeing all around us—Russians escaping because they don’t want to be drafted, or people who are literally escaping bullets in Ukraine, Afghanistan—any myriad of reasons for leaving a place. Ugrešić writes:
The exile feels that the state of exile has the structure of a dream. All at once, as in a dream, faces appear which (s)he had forgotten, or perhaps, had never met, places which (s)he is undoubtedly seeing for the first time, but that (s)he feels knows from somewhere. The dream is a magnetic field which attracts images from the past, present and the future. The exile suddenly sees in reality faces, events, and images, drawn by the magnetic field of the dream […] the exile begins to decipher the signs, crosses and knots and all at once seems as though (s)he were beginning to read in it all a secret harmony, a round logic of symbols.
I left my country at 11, at the peak of a civil war, and moved from country to country, language to language, identity to identity; it was a fragmented, non-linear existence. That’s what Aleph is for me. When you move around that much, life starts to become this dreamscape, transpiring in multiple realities. That’s what dream logic means to me—associating things in a way that has a different kind of logic.
Aleph (2021)
"I left my country at 11, at the peak of a civil war, and moved from country to country, language to language, identity to identity... When you move around that much, life starts to become this dreamscape, transpiring in multiple realities."
EK: The word “dream” generally emphasizes what is real vs. imagined, an either/or scenario, whereas what I’m hearing emphasized in the Ugrešić passage you quoted is actually more true to what Aleph, both your movie and Borges’s story on which it’s based, explore: what dreams do, how they collapse time and space, and what labyrinths do. It has everything to do with simultaneity of experience. Instead of focusing on chronology, all time is happening at once. It’s not about an either/or, it’s an and. It’s a kind of queer space.
IR: It’s queer space and dream space that’s also reality space, and everything all at once.
EK: The film is being screened at Metrograph under this over-arching theme of the labyrinth. If you think about a labyrinth, there can be something maddening about the realization that there is only this one, inescapable reality. But if you accept that as truth, there’s something potentially expansive about the idea.
IR: I like that word “maddening.” The poet Corina Copp said something similar: the structure of this film is crazy, or maddening, labyrinthine—no clear beginning or end. Another friend Priscilla Dobler, who is of Mayan descent, told me that for the Maya, the mouth is sort of the beginning of everything, an entrance. So the mouth at the end of the film is this chaos that in turn becomes the world. That madness is what people tend to struggle with, because we crave order, need things to be precise, expected, to know where we’re going. Once you take that away, it becomes disorienting.
Aleph (2021)
EK: One thing that stood out to me when I re-read Borges’s Aleph—to summarize, we have this sort of preposterous poet who wants to write a poem that will capture everything in the universe, and his friend thinks he’s ridiculous. The poet calls his friend one day in a panic about his house being torn down. He can’t possibly have his house torn down because in the cellar there is the Aleph, a vision of sorts which has allowed him to see or imagine all of the world and thus, allowed him to write. We’re dealing with an artist who is in a panic that he’s not going to be able to create. He invites his skeptical friend to go down to the basement to see the Aleph for himself, and there’s this wonderful line that I feel like you should print on business cards and hand out to anyone who comes to see your film. He says to him: “Of course, if you don’t see it, your incapacity will not invalidate what I have experienced.”
IR: Exactly.
EK: I love that because it’s ultimately a story about imaginative possibility.
IR: Yes, yes.
EK: And that one person’s incapacity or limitations does not negate another’s possibility.
IR: It’s also about perception, about individual “I”s. Eyes as in eyes and I’s as in I. It’s about ways of seeing, ways of being. What interested me in Aleph is depicting a multitude of ways of being, giving that as an offering. Look at all these ways of being.
EK: Some people might think you’re crazy to take a story that even on the page is so abundant in its imaginative possibilities and try putting it to screen, but where did you begin imagining that transposition, that translation, of a written story on the page into the language of film? What was your beginning?
IR: The beginning was always Borges. I dove deep into almost everything he’s ever written, what other people wrote about him. I followed his walks around Buenos Aires. So in the film, we start with Borges in Argentina. But more than anything, we start with the idea of experimentation. I wanted to try things. I get bored when somebody gives me a formula—that’s not exciting nor creative to me.
I was thinking about its structure as one labyrinthine structure, but also the idea of the spiral of a story within a story within a story within a story. I was reading André Breton’s Nadja at the time, which uses these fantastic footnotes throughout, every footnote goes into a new story. So you’re constantly detouring from the main narrative into a smaller story. It is such a beautiful way to segue, through this labyrinth of different stories.
Aleph (2021)
EK: The labyrinth of different stories also meant filming in different places, right?
IR: Yes, one thing that helps me creatively is constraints. I had to give myself parameters. The parameters would be that I don’t know where I’m going. I’m starting in Argentina. This is where Borges saw the Aleph. And from that place, we’ll figure out where to go next. The same way that he was pointed to the Aleph, someone will point us in the next direction.
That was one of the constraints of taking this story to the screen. And then, of course, I will have a limited time in each place to figure out what the story is, to film it and so on. To help us through what this forward movement would be, it would be connected to people’s dreams. So each person’s dream would carry us to the next place and the next.
EK: And that was totally up to chance?
IR: That was totally up to chance.
EK: What I find so remarkable re-watching the film now are all the symbols. As a writer, Borges never wrote a realist story but he believed in allegories, in the power of signs to allude to things larger than ourselves. Given how individually focused our lives became during the pandemic, any talk in universal or collective terms risks ringing false, or offensive. I found it remarkable that your film offers us a sense of interconnectivity without forcing the idea. There’s a great line in the Borges story where the narrator’s describing what he actually sees when he sees the Aleph. He says, “I saw the sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal.” It’s like he’s putting into words the way images, colors, natural phenomenon harken to each other without trying to insist on any universal experience, that there are some things and places that might allude to each other and be a source of consolation.
IR: The way I wanted the film to read is not as a universe but as a pluriverse. The idea was to present a multitude of experiences and ways of being.
"The way I wanted the film to read is not as a universe but as a pluriverse."
EK: We see this best reflected in one of the final scenes, where you have what appear to be twins (both played by Desire Marea), asking one another questions. They say one thing, but their facial expressions and the ways they embody this scene are so coquettish and playful. It’s brilliant. It undoes any possibility of the spoken language being overly didactic. Where did the idea for this scene come from?
IR: A book by John Cage called Silence. In it, there’s an essay inspired by a lecture he had given composed entirely of questions. He’s not actually giving a lecture, he’s just asking questions, which give rise to other questions. It’s almost like a practice in meditation or consciousness. I was so taken by this way of inquiring that I decided that I’m going to use this as a structure for that segment. So I sent a bunch of questions to Desire, and then Desire’s answers were posed as questions, fueling further questions.
EK: Let’s speak a bit more about the film’s structure.
IR: As I was obsessively reading about Borges, I learned that one of his favorite texts was Arabian Nights. Some of his stories take on a similar structure: Scheherazade tells story after story, each one opens up into the next, until on the 600th night or something she goes back to the beginning of the story, but inverted.
I thought, let’s do the same thing. And so in Nepal, in the middle of the film, the story mirrors the beginning—only now, instead of the character not having any feelings she has too many. It was such a pleasurable way to create. To follow somebody’s footsteps, Borges’s own storytelling obsessions, but then figure out how to make it your own. To make a game out of it.
EK: You’re a voracious reader and you write poetry, too. What is it about poetry and written text that matters for you as a filmmaker?
IR: Poetry just unlocks certain things in my mind. It explodes any rational way of being and thinking. I don’t know how you can make things without reading and being influenced by other artforms. But also, I speak four languages, none of them perfectly. So there is something about creating a language that’s outside of language that perhaps is the language of cinema for me—my own language. Because I don’t have a perfect language, I’m not fluent in any language and I’m speaking to you now with an accent. I get into this space where I’m trying to create something that’s a way of speaking for me. I guess reading is part of inventing, but poetry specifically is a dream world to me. It’s the dreamscape, an automatic field of possibility.
EK: That is so palpable in my experience of the film, which was the first film I saw in a theater after lockdown. I found myself crying when it was over because I felt like it had awakened me to a world of color and possibility that had felt so out of reach. Its vulnerability, its intimacy, and its maximalism in how expanding it was in worlds, it reminded me that the world could be a place of wonder, even as it overwhelms us.
IR: I love that. When I was thinking about my first film, Evaporating Borders, the end references this quote by [W. E. B.] DuBois which says, “Who shall let this world be beautiful?” And that’s the migrant film, right? With this film I was thinking, well, how do we let the world be beautiful, or how do we make the world beautiful? That was an underlying question for Aleph—the how became the pluriverse, in which we all exist, and we are all welcome, and beautiful, and thriving.
Elianna Kan is a Mexico City and NYC–based literary agent, writer, and translator from Spanish. Like Borges, she thinks paradise is a library without clocks.
Aleph (2021)