David O’Kane

Ireland

Words, words, words taken out of place and mutilated, words from other men – those were the alms left him by the hours and centuries.

— Jorge Luis Borges, The Immortal (1949)

Palabras (‘words’) is a film based on two short stories by Jorge Luis Borges entitled The Other and August 25 1983. These stories describe meetings between the writer and his ‘double’. The dialogue is in Spanish (Borges’ native tongue), with English subtitles. The script is composed entirely of quotations from Borges’ oeuvre. The actor, Oscar Hernandez Rodriguez, plays the character of Jorge Luis Borges engaging in conversation with his ‘double’, or doppelgänger. Towards the end of the conversation, the quotations get shorter until each character is only able to say single words and then, finally, there is silence. The dialogue starts again slowly, mirroring the conversation but with the ‘double’ now saying what the Borges character said in the last conversation, building up from isolated words to full quotations.

If this morning and this encounter are dreams … then each of us does have to think that he alone is the dreamer. Perhaps our dream will end, perhaps it won’t. Meanwhile, our clear obligation is to accept the dream, as we have accepted the universe and our having been brought into it and the fact that we see with our eyes and that we breathe.

— Jorge Luis Borges, The Other (1975)

(Text: reading the city catalogue, 2009)