Showing posts with label Jorge Luis Borges. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jorge Luis Borges. Show all posts

Monday 28 October 2019

The Shining (1980) : The #UCFF Tweets

The Shining (1980) : The #UCFF Tweets

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


28 October (one added, 16 December)


The Shining (1980) : The #UCFF Tweets










Post-script :







Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Tuesday 26 September 2017

'I do it, because I must. His hand on mine.'

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


This is a place-holder for a review of the world premiere of Sally Beamish and David Harsent's The Judas Passion, as performed at Saffron Hall, Saffron Walden, Essex, on Sunday 24 September (after broadcaster Tom Service had hosted a pre-concert talk with them from 7.30 p.m.)

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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Wednesday 8 June 2016

Was director Ciro Guerra just being coy ? : A report on the @CamPicturehouse Q&A for Embrace of the Serpent (2015)

The @CamPicturehouse Q&A, with director Ciro Guerra, for Embrace of the Serpent

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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8 June


An accreting report on the Q&A at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, with director Ciro Guerra, for Embrace of the Serpent (2015) on Tuesday 7 June 2016, following its preview screening at 6.00 p.m.





Fitzcarraldo (1982) no more is, or purports to be, a biography of some aspects of the real-life Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (whose name has been corrupted to ‘Fitzcarraldo’ in Peru) than Embrace of the Serpent (2015) can said to be one of the last days of Theodor Koch-Grünberg :

Director Ciro Guerra does not make a claim for that type of historical or anthropological depiction in Serpent - since the plants and Amazonian peoples have been fictionalized - but, when the question of film-references, and of Fitzcarraldo in particular, was raised, he ignored that Werner Herzog had his own directorial or writerly fantasies, and started criticizing Fitzgerald the man (and put Koch-Grünberg in relief against him - or vice versa, to make the analogy more accurate).



The question, in the title of this posting, about the possibility of Guerra’s coyness fits together with these observations in this way :


(1) One could quite clearly hear the strength of Guerra’s antipathy to Fitzgerald, when he started talking about the latter’s activity as a rubber baron¹ (such activity, and its effects on the indigenous peoples, is, of course, one strand in Guerra’s film).


(2) However, when brought back to the question whether one would fail to think that he is referencing Fitzcarraldo, in Serpent, by having a gramophone as an item of the luggage that Theo (Jan Bijvoet) has with him (amongst all this baggage, which Karamakate (Nilbio Torres) scorns), Guerra was quick to cite the fact that - as shown in the film² - the historical Koch-Grünberg actually played Haydn's Die Schöpfung (The Creation, Hob. XXI : 2) in the jungle in this way, and liked to do so.



(3) Probably so (but so what ?). For, all of this begged the following question, which Guerra saying that he here relied on fact seeks to dislodge one from posing :

For other reasons as well (there are other parallels³), both Apocalypse Now (1979) and Fitzcarraldo are the obvious film references that an audience is likely to import (with all that doing so means).

Since that is so, why include (and want to justify including ?) this eccentricity of Theo’s, just because it actually happened – because does that then imply that no detail is imagined, none there to flesh out [a version of] a story ?


(4) The starting question had been about making film references in Embrace of the Serpent : could there have been more such (apparent) references, if they had not been excised ?

The coyness is there in that the film eventually erupts in striking visuals – as, say, Enter the Void (2009) does – and which are partly dependent on a contrast with (near-)monochrome. Implying that the gramophone is in the film not because of Fitzcarraldo or Apocalypse Now, but almost despite them, feels tenuously contrived.

Yet it did manage to disarm the impulse to look at this film, with Guerra’s help, in a worldwide cinematic context, and instead expected us to consider it in solely its own terms…


* * * *




A few film-references :

* Burden of Dreams (1982) [about the making of Fitzcarraldo (1982)]

* Cave of Forgotten Dreams ~ Werner Herzog

* Enter the Void (2009)

* Fitzcarraldo (1982) ~ Herzog

* Ivan’s Childhood

* On the Road (2012)

* Post Tenebras Lux (2012)

* The Hunter (2011)

* The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

* The White Diamond (2004) ~ Herzog

* While We're Young (2014)

* Zelig (1983)


In important respects, Apocalypse Now does not much resemble Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, and we would feel, if at all, that Embrace of the Serpent is referencing the film treatment.

More pressing written parallels (or origins ?) are Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception (1954), and Borges, in the collection Doctor Brodie's Report (1970) (especially 'The Gospel According to Mark').





On the level of film and film-stock, we heard [from Jack Toye (@Jackabuss), hosting the Q&A as the marketing manager of The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge (@CamPicturehouse)] that Ciro Guerra had shot on film : a remarkable piece of information, because one had formed the view, during the film, that it was unlikely that Guerra had done other than shoot in colour (and not a monochrome digital filming-mode), and then stripped out the colour – except only to leave a quality, at times, of the spectral, but mostly one that gave a grey-green tinge to the largely river-located foliage.

Various reasons suggested themselves as to why Guerra might have rendered his footage into near-monochrome, some to do with suspecting that not every moving image had been shot by his team, and that some of them, rather, were taken from stock-footage (thus disguised). The likely reason being that – as with a very different film such as Zelig (1983) – one’s matching of images from possibly very differing origins then has the potential of being done much more easily (not least if one may have had to process further), by virtue of not having the additional aspect of (very many) dimensions of colour.


Other reasons more obviously relate to the sort of distancing - although, at the same time, perhaps oddly sharpening ? - the effect of what Guerra chose to show to us (if only at the emotional level of pure, non-technical viewing) : for, the Amazon river³, in full swell, is going to look so much more dramatic, if one gives it the more-refined contours and gradients of monochrome.

To process in the image of the canoe and its three passengers is also likely to be more straightforward – for we must assuredly be gulled by the works of post-production, if we are to believe that the actors were ever trusted to the spate in and on which, for some twenty seconds (maybe thirty ?), we see them tracked. (Do we even detect how they appear to have been separately located, in their vessel, in a quiet stream that lies behind the foregrounded, wilder waters ?)



Yet maybe this is all guesswork, based on little actual knowledge of how the film went into production, and what happened afterwards...

To some extent, so is the film itself, in elaborating the rather basic message, if no more satisfying for that, given by Willem Dafoe, as the title-character Martin, in - and at the close of - The Hunter (2011) ?




End-notes :

¹ Likewise, Guerra is reported - by the BFI (@BFI / British Film Institute) - as saying this to Ben Nicholson (@BRNicholson) :

'For example, Fitzcarraldo (1982), when you find out what that real story was, you find out that he was a genocidal maniac and a bloodthirsty rubber baron and you realise that the story has only been told from one point of view.' As such, the cinematic influences that had served Guerra as his compass previously were no longer going to be useful. 'I thought this was okay because recently I feel that films tend to be too much about cinema; it’s like a dog chasing its tale in many instances. I think cinema also needs to take its inspiration more and more from life. Even though film history is invaluable, it is sometimes also necessary to depart from it.'


² The recording that we see is not playing at 78rpm, though, as it would have had to do for its time ?

³ Apart from the clear question of indigenous people of a land and those desiring to occupy and exploit that land, we also have, though not with a huge ship, the canoe being transported, across land, from one stretch of water to another. (In Scotland, such isthmuses, and the like practice of conveying a boat overland, give rise to a fair few spots called Tarbe[r]t.)

⁴ Even so, we mainly spend time on tributaries, and have the temporal illusion - which cinema can create in terms of screen-time by both what is not shown and what is shown – that we are much on this mighty stretch of water, broad and long.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Sunday 24 January 2016

The questioner hadn't seen Peter Greenaway's film (but Greenaway didn't listen to the questions anyway)

When Peter Greenaway came as a guest, with Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015)…

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


24 January

When Peter Greenaway was a guest, and his film Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015) was his platform…

For Rocketina - a kind and thoughtful editor, and supreme encourager - in fondest memory of Charlie


Some propositions :

1. It is ‘possible’ that Peter Greenaway (‘PG’) spoke at some length, when introducing Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015) ('EiG')

2. Possibly, at such length that the screening that followed EiG had to be delayed by around thirty minutes

3. The questioner (so called for reasons that one may guess at) (‘AJD’) could be known to the present writer (@THEAGENTAPSLEY)

4. It is conceivable that AJD may not have watched any significant part of EiG, other than, say, the last ten minutes (less significant, one might imagine, without the rest of it ?)

5. During the ensuing Q&A (hosted by Bill Lawrence (‘BL’ / @Billlawrence)), it might have seemed that PG was, again, talking at those who (with the possible exception of AJD) had just seen EiG - apparently simultaneously inciting, and condescending to, those who had chosen to be there by saying (in the manner of these propositions) that they might have seen his film The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) ?

6. Some might assert that, whereas PG could have seemed, just before AJD's engagement in the Q&A, to bait his audience for not embracing a revolutionary form of cinema that employed more than the field of view occupied by the screen¹, and for not doing more than sitting immobile in front of it, EiG itself was, even by PG’s unusual standards of - and approaches to - story-telling and marshalling of cinematic material, a largely conventional film

7. When, at around this point, BL noticed AJD’s hand raised, he could have interpreted it as someone who was rising to the invitation that he had put out for people to respond to PG’s directly challenging words to those there - as to whether the time for watching films in this way had passed, and they should be embracing the type of new cinema that PG was strenuously urging on them

8. AJD may well have apologized to BL, clarifying that he had not been intending to offer such a response, but, if so, simply wished to ask who would come to such a cinema (to which, perhaps, no one else added anything - even if that might not have implied tacit assent ?)

9. If so, well knowing where he was (some guests, being much in demand and often tired from travel, do not immediately recall the present location), PG indicated that, for that reason, he had expected more of the people there - this, maybe, in several minutes further of urging for his thesis ?

10. At this time, it is likely that AJD took the opportunity to put his substantive question to PG, probably :

Q1 If, as one suspects, you are having a conversation with Mark Cousins², in this film, what is the nature or content of that conversation ?

11. When he started, PG seemed to be replying, for he immediately agreed, and without reservation, that he was having a conversation with Mark Cousins : yet, since he apparently turned this locution into a list of people (including Borges³) with whom he was ‘having a conversation’, and (in a long answer) never went near the question again, AJD would rapidly have had to draw the conclusion that PG either chose not to address what had been put to him, or did not even comprehend the reason for being asked it²

12. Despite perhaps not having seen very much of EiG, would AJD not have been intrigued by this mention of Borges³, a writer whom AJD much respected, and would he have been able to resist testing whether there was any substance behind PG's mentioning Borges' name ? :

Q2 Since you mentioned Borges, are you willing to tell us in what way his work informs your film, and so how it should be part of our understanding of it ?

13. One could possibly reinterpret proposition 11 (above) to guess what answer anyone present derived, to this new enquiry, from what PG went on lengthily to assert - and whether AJD, renouncing the struggle⁴, collapsed in despair…


End-notes

¹ PG repeatedly referred to a specific angle of view as that in front of the spectator : was it 110 degrees ? (If so, the residual angle, to make a complete rotation, is 250 degrees.)

² In 2012, Mark Cousins (@markcousinsfilm) had given a Q&A after his film What is This Film Called Love ? (2012), made by Cousins on the spur of the moment (and with the resources available) in homage to Sergei Eisenstein (and his time in Mexico), when unexpectedly in Mexico City for a few extra days.

³ Jorge Luis Borges (24 August 1899 to 14 June 1986) is an Argentinian author, poet, literary critic, editor, and translator. He writes in Spanish, and, from 1955 to 1973, served as Director of The National Library of The Argentine Republic (Biblioteca Nacional de la República Argentina).

⁴ A phrase that always brings Kafka much to mind : 'Beschreibung eines Kampfes' ('Description of a Struggle') was one of the few works published in his life-time (in Betrachtung (1912)).




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Tuesday 19 August 2014

Inside his mind : Iago in the midst

This is a review of Othello (Otel.lo) (2012)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


19 August (corrected 20 August)


This is a review of Othello (Otel.lo) (2012)

Chances to see during Cambridge Film Festival (#CamFF) 2014:

Only one screening presently scheduled (please see the note on screenings below), at 1.00 p.m. on Sunday 7 September (Screen 2)


The Moor is of a free and open nature
That thinks men honest that but seem to be so;
And will as tenderly be led by th’nose
As asses are.



Act I, Scene iii, 390–393


Sometimes the strength of a film lies in the resonance with which it reminds you of your other viewing – and reading.

The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, composing a story, in essay form, that touches on the life of the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes (Pierre Menard, ‘Author of the Quixote’ (‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’)), imagined how someone (in this case, the fictional Pierre Menard) becomes as Cervantes, partly, at first, by living in exactly the same circumstances as Cervantes and then ends up recreating, word for word, parts of his most famous oeuvre (so, maybe, Borges mocking - amongst literary and intellectual fashions and factions - the Laplacean theory of determinism (as well as the writer(s) whom academics consider the model(s) for Menard) ?) :

In a similar way, this film invites us to consider whether Othello is a flawed tragic character, distant from our lives as a character in a play by Shakespeare (whose fictionality is celebratedly emphasized by claims that it relies too heavily on a stolen handkerchief*) – or whether the pressures that cause Othello to believe Desdemona unfaithful (and kill her) can be made to act on a Moroccan amateur actor (Youcef), who has been cast in that role for the film that we see being shot (though nothing explains the manner of the direction).

Yet it is no mere framing device, nor no piece of Brechtian alienation technique (Verfremdungseffekt, in the original German), to have cast and crew alike visible to us, but, rather, something that enables us to feel inside the depths of the Shakespeare story : seeing what happens to Ann (Desdemona) and Youcef, a real-life couple for two years, as they play the lead roles is enhanced by seeing how constructed film is as a medium, where, say, the people who hold the sound-booms must also play their part, and this approach is at the centre of why the film has been made. (Otherwise, it would be a much longer Othello, shot on the black, curtained stage-set, and looking like a filmed play (please see below).)

The direction that we see of Youcef, Ann and Kike (as Michael Cassio) on camera may not exactly be Peter Brook (or the play’s adaptation that of Steven Berkoff, or Charles Marowitz), but it is experimenting with the actors and their performances, seeking the life in the latter, trying to find engagement with the text (a word that we see so often in the sub-titles, signifying Action !) : unlike this dynamic process (which is also at the much lighter heart of another Catalan film shown at Cambridge Film Festival, V.O.S. (2009)), we are also reminded that, when we watch a film, it is a finished, duplicated artefact, which will be the same to-morrow as next week (if we choose to watch it again after this evening’s screening).

Otel.lo is, at times, painful to watch, because it goes beyond the stories that we hear about how directors get the take that they want (such as were circulating about the love-scenes had been shot in Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013)) and into the immoral manipulation and lies of Dangerous Liaisons (1988), yet it is worth doing so because of how immensely it enriches our sense of the operation of jealousy, flirtation, attraction – as real, living feelings and behaviours.

However, as the film develops, and the cast is being put upon, one is in mind of Gloucester, sightless on the heath in King Lear, saying ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport’ (Act IV, Scene i)**. Or of Samuel Beckettt’s ironic mimes Act Without Words I and II, with their characters being prompted from without, as well as tempted, seduced, and disappointed.

Linking with texts such as these, and entering into the world of the film, actually widens our appreciation of what happens on screen : scenes with the actors in character become as real as, or more real than, when Ann and Youcef talk singly to camera, with the director asking them questions. Here, unlike the effect of Polanski’s Venus in Furs (2013) (whose ‘staginess’ seemed to negate one’s interest, and to make one question the purpose of the film over the original play), laying bare the artifice heightens the drama.


It may be, as the title’s rendering suggests, a low-budget production that is depicted (for it is a modest team), but, as those who experiment with their cinema- or theatre-going will know, a big budget is not a guarantee of greater satisfaction. For example, another Catalan film that screened at last year’s Cambridge Film Festival, The Redemption of the Fish (La redempció dels peixos) (2013), was made on almost no budget, but the film is beautiful, using natural light wherever possible, and without no compromise over quality.

Though running at just over an hour, Otel.lo is complete in itself and not (unlike last year’s micro-budget film The Cherry Orchard (2013)) one that shows preparation for a performance that we do not see : performance and the production are integrated, at all levels, and one simply could not desire the intensity of Otel.lo for longer. As has been suggested, it is meta-textual in a way that is highly thoughtful, and it is sure both to arouse interest, and to provoke differences of opinions about what its core-values are.


Othello :
Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil
Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body ?



Iago :
Demand me nothing. What you know, you know.
From this time forth I never will speak word.



Act V, Scene ii, 297–300



This is just one of six Catalan films (Camera Catalonia) that can be seen at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) - Thursday 28 August to Sunday 7 September (both inclusive). Three others are reviewed here, and What is Catalan cinema ? is also about the Catalan strand at the Festivals in 2012 and 2013...



Note on screenings, etc. :

NB The allocation of films between the three screens at Festival Central can always change (as can, if one is coming from a distance for a specific film, the programme as a whole) : if the audience for a film scheduled for Screen 3 (the smallest screen, around half the capacity of the largest, Screen 1) proves greater than expected, it may end up being swapped, so there could be a change in the exact time of the screening, too

In the programme (for which that is a link to the where the PDF file can be downloaded - printed copies are available at Festival Central and all good local outlets), some slots are also marked 'TBC', and popular screenings may be repeated : announcements are on Cambridge Film Festival 2014's (@camfilmfest's) web-site (please see link, above), as they are of alterations to the programme or the allocation between screens



End-notes

* E.g. Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (1693).

** Yet, later in the play, Edgar (who had providentially met Gloucester) feigns other identities to lead his father to what the other thinks is the edge of the cliffs at Dover – Gloucester is persuaded to believe that he has survived pushing himself off the edge, and that his life thus has a meaning.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Saturday 10 May 2014

From the #UCFF archive : The Lottery Ticket (submitted to @BBCRadio3 as a competition entry)

The Lottery Ticket :

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


11 May

The Lottery Ticket :
Six Numbers


[In homage to Stravinky’s Jeu de Cartes
(and, necessarily, Walter Mitty)
]

To Svetlana



Alex frowned.

He had become captivated (again) by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, and now he just didn’t know how to go on… In particular, he found the story ‘The Lottery in Babylon’ perplexing, and his equilibrium upset. (This was, of course, before technology would render his musings virtually redundant, but at the impossibly high cost of re-creating another Borgesian fantasy, that of a library without end or catalogue, or even meaning.)

Despite the clear reference to another of this century’s great writers in the name of ‘the sacred latrine’, which – maybe? – threatened to undermine the whole edifice as artifice, was there ironic plausibility in the claim that ‘A slave stole a crimson ticket; the drawing determined that that ticket entitled the bearer to have his tongue burned out’? After all, hadn’t he heard that the same writer, in his A Universal History of Infamy, had plundered – or rather dismembered – the Encyclopaedia Britannica in search of tales of ‘Widow Ching, Lady Pirate’ and of ‘The Tichborne Claimant’?

That being so, why shouldn’t there be a grain of truth in a lottery in an ancient land decreeing ‘that a sapphire from Taprobana be thrown into the waters of the Euphrates’, or giving rise to a world where it could be said that ‘Like all the men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave’?

He cursed Borges under his breath at the notion that, in the simple frustration that he just couldn’t know the answer, there lay the beauty of the text, and, in search of sleep, turned over once more.
13

* * * * *


Christy woke him – too early! – the following morning, with a shake. ‘Wassamatter?’, he raged incoherently. ‘Your mother is here’, came the stark answer that brought him unerringly into the wakefulness that he sought to avoid. Christy had a knack for doing that, and for being to hand as the (logically necessary) messenger-boy in the first place.

Alex threw on some clothes, and descended into the farmhouse kitchen. There, indeed, she was, brandishing a pale pink oblong of paper. ‘Now I’ll be rid of the lot of you!’, she shrieked; ‘And you all told me, over and over till I nearly was, that I was out of my mind!’. He had no idea what she was talking about, but there was no chance to find out, because she had metamorphosed into Science Officer Spock, complete with tricorder, blue top, and those ever so slightly kinky boots, and started flying around the room.

He jerked himself awake, regretting that the act of emergence meant that, the revels being, though thankfully, ended, he would have to face the day.

And who the hell was Christy?, he railed to himself. (Or was that, as he surmised as soon as he’d said it, an unbidden consequence of listening to Beckettt’s All That Fall…?)
8

* * * * *


Across the heath, he spotted a shape on the horizon. Not having the patience for it to materialize in a long shot, like Peter O’Toole on horseback, he busied himself with some papers: if, whether or not bearing scythe, it was for him, it would be there soon enough. But where were his notes from the other evening?!

When the knock came at the door, he descended. He half-expected Maria Andreevna – although she was no horsewoman – and accordingly started puzzling at why that term conjured up a satyr-type hybrid for him, whereas the word ‘horseman’ didn’t.

In fact, it was Dr Wassimiter, ever darkly cloaked against the wind. As usual, in the six or more hours that he was with Alex, he drank tea, kvaas and vodka to excess, and consumed copious pickled beetroot and herring, but, most importantly, he had brought the love-note that was so long awaited.

Alex waved him on his way, and fell to opening it.
19

* * * * *


Her carriage came crisply for him at ten, glistening with frost. At first, he was disappointed at the thought that it had been sent to him empty after all, but the pallor of her unveiled face gave her away, when she tried to sneak a further look.

Ably helped, amidst a cloud of powder, he climbed the steps that the footmen let down for him, but, losing his balance at the summit, almost fell into the furs on top of her! Scarcely a fit way to greet your queen when she condescends to call you to have your future read – a horoscope likely cast whilst the Englishman improvised a fantasia or two, and that other saucy fellow embellished further the record of his sexual conquests!
7

* * * * *


All at once, she was Leni to his Josef K., betraying the advocate with her passion, toppling and crushing the piles of paperwork over and over under her willing back.

Or Frieda, bringing the odour of the slops and swill into Klamm’s private rooms at the Herrenhof, into which K. and she had penetrated to avoid the tiresome attention of the assistants – and now found themselves alone, as never before since his arrival in the village, with the luxury to enjoy (rather than snatch at) sex.

He came close behind her, nuzzling the side of her neck and covering it with kisses, as he crossed his hands under and embraced her breasts.

Yes, to-night was the night!
29


* * * * *


As he drove her home the next morning, she caught him unawares, just after he had taken the gentle S-bend by the church.

‘What are you looking like that for, like you’ve won the lottery?’, she said, slyly.

46


31 January

Copyright ® Belston Night Works 2010




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Monday 26 September 2011

Dimensions and Borges: The Garden of Forking Paths

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


26 September

Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges liked a good paradox (and wrote an essay about Zeno and the apparent impossibility of motion) - it remains to be seen whether this is one, but here goes:


Background
Theory says that, under certain conditions laid down concerning physical laws and arrived at by mathematical calculation, every possible universe, in which every possible way that I could have written this sentence, exists.


Premise
Some say that travel between those universes and / or between what it is convenient to call different points in time in the same or another universe may be possible.


Attempt at a paradox

Step 1 If it is, then clearly it does not matter whether I believe in such travel, because someone could send me on such a journey against my will (or in my sleep).

Step 2 Unless I am very persuasive, and I can demonstrate what I say, if people do not believe in such travel, they will not listen to me (but, in some universes, they will, of course, believe in it as soon as I mention it - every event and possible sequence of events must exist, therefore a universe will exist where (to follow Borges) they crucify me, or regard me as God and worship me - or both))

Step 3 If I were sent in my sleep, I would, if sent into another universe at the same 'moment', still not believe in such travel, but I might come to realize what has happened, and want to go back from where I came from.

Step 4 So, perhaps, people with the same skill, knowledge and understanding develop the necessary technology, and seek to send me on that return journey?

Step 5 But won't there necessarily be the possibility - which may happen to obtain where I am - that one of the immutable facts about that universe is that, because of its physical laws, such travel is not possible? (So how did I get there?)


Conclusion?
For if it is always possible to jouney from that universe to another, then there is one thing wrong about that universe: it does not accord with the notion that there is a universe in which every possibility is replicated.
Oder?, as the Germans say.