Argentinian director whose films drew heavily on the stories of Jorge Luis Borges
Although the Argentinian director and screenwriter Eduardo de Gregorio, who has died aged 70, had lived in Paris since 1970, his work was always identifiably South American. This can be attributed to the overpowering influence of the labyrinthine stories of Jorge Luis Borges on a generation of South American artists.
De Gregorio brought this Borgesian aura to bear on the five features he directed, and on the screenplays he wrote with Jacques Rivette and Bernardo Bertolucci. In fact, for the latter's The Spider's Stratagem (1970), De Gregorio adapted the Borges story Theme of the Traitor and the Hero, smoothly transposing it from Ireland to Italy. It was an elaborate piece of Oedipal plotting in which, revisiting the village in the Po valley where his father was murdered in 1936, a young man discovers that his father was not a hero, but a traitor.
It was a theme taken up again in De Gregorio's second film as a director, Short Memory (La Mémoire Courte, 1979), a Jamesian political thriller which harks back to the time when Nazis took refuge in South America after the second world war. It was inevitable that De Gregorio's films often made reference to the writings of Henry James, whose short stories Borges much admired. De Gregorio's screenplay for Rivette's Céline and Julie Go Boating (Céline et Julie Vont en Bateau, 1974) was suggested by two James stories, but his most direct homage was Aspern (1985). The James novella The Aspern Papers was relocated from 19th-century Venice to present-day Lisbon, mainly because the film, which De Gregorio directed, was made with Portuguese money and was cheaper to shoot there.
Money, or the lack of it, was a dominant feature in the conversations of South American exiles in Paris in the early 70s. Argentinean directors, among them De Gregorio, Edgardo Cozarinsky and Hugo Santiago, as well as the Chilean Raúl Ruiz, battled to get financing for their films. I recall the days when De Gregorio, and our mutual friend, the future author Gilbert Adair, would come round to my small flat on the Île Saint-Louis to watch films on my television, as neither of them could afford to buy or rent one. We would also all meet frequently at the Cinémathèque Française, where De Gregorio expressed his enthusiasm for the movies of Fritz Lang, another influence on his work. He was able to earn a living by lecturing at the Sorbonne and La Fémis, the leading film school in Paris, from 1986.
De Gregorio was born in Buenos Aires, where he studied philosophy and literature. Immediately after the coup d'etat in 1966, he left for Europe, principally because of the stifling moral order imposed by the military dictatorship. In Italy he met Michael Graham, an American writer with whom he lived in a tempestuous relationship for many years, and with whom he would write his first feature, Sérail (Surreal Estate, 1976), and Aspern.
While living in Rome, De Gregorio wrote his first script, The Visionaries (I Visionari, 1968). After making The Spider's Stratagem with Bertolucci, he settled in Paris, mainly because he wished to work with members of the French New Wave. This dream was realised when he started filming with Rivette on Céline and Julie Go Boating.
A brilliantly allusive comic meditation on the nature of fantasy, the film manages to take in Lewis Carroll, Jean Cocteau, Borges, Kafka, Proust, cartoons and Hollywood movies of the 1950s along the way. It concerns two young women, a magician (Juliet Berto) and a librarian (Dominique Labourier) who get involved in an endless theatrical melodrama being played out by two women (Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier) in an old suburban house. According to Rivette, "There never really was a written script. I like having someone by my side, anyway, as a kind of referee, not an arbitrator but someone who has other ideas. So Eduardo was there almost from the start. But I didn't ask him to come as a scriptwriter. I asked him just to come and talk with us on the same level, and he was present during all the shooting."
In 1976, Rivette and De Gregorio made Duelle, a film noir, and Noroît, a pirate adventure, back to back. These were part of an ambitious four-part project with a running sub-plot involving a mythical war between goddesses of the sun (Ogier) and the moon (Berto), fighting for possession of a mysterious jewel. When the project fell through, De Gregorio decided to direct a feature film himself. Sérail had Ogier and Pisier as occupants of a large spooky house into which a novelist (Corin Redgrave) stumbles. In a way, the elliptical style raised the question of how much De Gregorio owed to Rivette or vice versa.
De Gregorio's last collaboration with Rivette, Merry-Go-Round (1981), was dogged by troubles, and it showed. Maria Schneider, the female lead, quit the film before the end of shooting; the actor Joe Dallesandro was taking large amounts of drugs; and Rivette was teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
Meanwhile, De Gregorio managed to direct Aspern and Corps Perdus (Lost Bodies, 1989), the latter marking a brief return to his birthplace. Shot in Buenos Aires, it followed an art restorer into an old, dark house (a favourite locus of the director) where he is to restore a weird painting but is drawn into a mysterious and dangerous past. According to the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, the film was an interesting way of representing Buenos Aires in absentia, "dialectically shutting out most evidence of the city while actually filming there".
De Gregorio's last film was Stolen Tangos (Tangos Volés, 2002), set in Buenos Aires at the end of the 1930s but shot in studios in France and Spain. A playful and tuneful evocation of "tangomania", it managed to reach a wider audience than any of his previous films.
He is survived by his long-time companion, Pierre Bayle d'Autrange.
• Eduardo de Gregorio, film director and screenwriter, born 12 September 1942; died 13 October 2012