On Top of the Whale

This film is one of Ruiz's greatest. Once, I read, with his film Ruiz pay tribute to Jean Luc Godard's Le Mepris. So then, I asked Ruiz (Santiago, 2005)... You were influenced by this Godard's film... ? - which film ? - ... This film Le Mepris with Jack Palance and... your film features same kind of music (Georges Delerue's music is an actor in Le Mepris, and as far as I can feel Jorge Arriagada composed great music for Ruiz's film, but does not top Delerue's), (...) close atmosphere, and two languages... - more than two languages ! - (answered Ruiz). Yes, you are right (...), and then Ruiz goes : "Probably I took it from there". So, as far as art form and influence is concerned we are aware where inspiration is coming from. This being said, to fully understand visions, dreams, ideas we must try to relate to Ruiz background. Ruiz spent half his life in Chile, and the other half in France. Then he is American and European, extremely cultivated man, with socialist roots, being able to share a sophisticated humor. We may say this film is "Realismo Magico" at his best (allow me to describe it as 'dreaming in real time'...). Garcia Marquez, the Nobel Prize winner, developed the style in that great novel "Hundred years of Solitude", where he set the parameters to study America's fate and the Human Condition. All this; is, somewhere, in Ruiz mind. Therefore, in 1980-1982, nothing better than starting a film assuming hilariously that the Soviet Union expanded so much that finally it included Holland, nice joke, very Ruiz, but History proved he was wrong. The film stars here with comrades meeting in Holland. An anthropologist is introduced by his wife to this Chilean communist millionaire, a contradiction in terms, who invited them to his property in Patagonia where are living the two last Yachanes Indians, their ancestors decimated by colonialism and imperialism, the point where the film meet actual History. This is the reason why Ruiz was right, the film was shot in six different languages : English, French, German, Dutch, and the interesting Indian language. In Patagonia Ruiz counterpoints European culture with American culture, in particular with Indian culture, this is the climax of the film where contradictions, dreams, visions, frustrations, prejudices, barbarism, individualism, imperialism are exposed and denounced. The anthropologist left in confusion just to return and realized his wife, Eva (!) is in a relationship with Narcisso, the millionaire; while Adam and Eden (!), wasting not even a minute, have read Hegel; learned French and German; listened Mozart and Beethoven, and being able to develop theories about them all (!) becoming even opinionated... "Hegel was a nice guy", "I do not like Mozart, he was a reactionary, I like Beethoven", this scene is just truly amazing and brilliant, the sarcasms and message is : Europe is everything, we are nothing. Now, everything you have in mind, regardless of roots, etc. ; what it counts, is it coming from Europe. Ruiz takes distance, he smiles (he is ironic), the film is over, the idea is plain, self-evident... "No matter what, Chile will always be juice", said Ruiz in an interview. Culturally and linguistically, what is valid for Chile is valid for America as a whole, and Europe still is, somehow, far away, distant, rather cold, nihilist, attractive and one day, who knows, even Socialism will prevail over there... 9/10

I found this movie very difficult to watch and understand. Try to watch it together with someone who has enough background on the history and politics of South America, so that they can explain it to you. Otherwise, it will just be an interesting but weird movie.

Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities is quoted late in the film Some of the main cruxes of the novella are - everything has a deep schematic foundation that mirrors everything else - stages of life, stages of love, stages of enlightenment, stages of urban growth and decline, all the stages reflect cosmological schemata - the mirroring is metaphorical, the mirroring and metaphors are infinite in detail and variation, and memory like the sea shape shifts everything (especially time and thought and space) into something rich and strange - there are civilizations beneath civilizations beneath civilizations, layers beneath layers beneath layers, there are invisibles that define and condition and preserve the visible, there are invisibles for the visuals without which the visuals fail - memory is language - memory and all the schemata and all the mirroring and metaphors all spring from one source, a concrete experience, a cosmological epigram, a multi-layered condensed dream The way the Raul Ruiz's camera eye gliding connects everything (landscapes interiors people concepts) resonates with the layered structure of Marco Polo's descriptions The film also borrows from Tarkovsky's Stalker, and the visual framing of most of the scenes is straight out of Renaissance Dutch paintings, perfect because in Dutch painting, mirrors and lenses and camera obscura were heavily used to help create paintings, and were also painted into the paintings for symbolic purposes, mirrors and mirroring play a large role in Dutch paintings and in the film Ancestry, generations, survival, dreams, monuments, mirrors, sociometry, prophet dreams of Indian tribes Pyramids, sandscape, phase of moon, images engraved in mountains, mirages Hands in the black cloven earth, artifact of a wine cup, Eva, Adam, hand print, listening, thinking triangulation of the arrangement of scenery/people - vanishing point, infinite regression, child at the apex, religious symbolism, pictoral depth simulating temporal depth Standing like Charon over the river Lethe with his stick/oar, a silvery scepter lit by distant red fire glow set against a deep inpenetratable black backdrop (chiaroscuro), each tap of the stick a nudging of the bottom of the riverbed to propel the boat forwards or backwards, to propel the chain of thoughts forward and backwards, man pondering and exploring old relics that are novel to him - similar to Jan Van Eyck painting's showcasing people entranced with technological novelties and scientific discoveries Excavation of vanishing language Reincarnation, hunger, war, rain, summer, eclipse of the sun and moon, stars, sea, earth, mother, fatal conflicts between two tribes, death, river stones, light of the moon, sea of whales, woman, fire-water, sun, deaf, artillery fire, walking with no sense of direction, thirst, endless, G-d of the mountain, raw meat, evenings alone, strong emotion at sunset, sheep, explanation of the meaning of life, violin, thirty glasses of fire-water in the morning Digging but not finding anything But then an animal skeleton in the palm of a hand, a celestial panorama at sundown, a pearly white roaring ocean, right into a scene with character examining plants, ceramics, stones, windows, camera gliding across windows and doorways Adam and Eve buried all our mirrors, lashed then cried 60 root words responsible for 300,000 Yaghan words, biblically speaking, Adam and Eve responsible for generating billions times billions times billions of people Metaphors, double and triple metaphors, generations built everything up, no factories nor airports and now exploitation, I heard a baby cry then Adam and Eve laughed, Now I understand everything, Double, triple metaphors are no coincidence, they mean the intuition of 2 and 3 as spoken, they are incapable of more modern thought because conception of the singular eludes them, they are convinced that 1 is an even number, so regression is infinite (cosmological epigram...) Books, dancing, shadow, rippling water, they bury the mirrors again, crying sounds like the crying of whales Whaling/wailing Every word or saying tacitly contains others, tacit metaphors speak between spoken metaphors, silence means more said Every heartbeat has a name Every day they construct a different language, a Gothic Cathedral dreamed up at night, forgotten by morning, proof that too much culture leads to barbarism and hinders development Illusion, the Indians' language is non-existent, they are recessives, not pure Indians, nothing they do or say has meaning, the whole world deceives me I shall not return Be careful what you say because somebody will believe it and your metaphoric images will become a religion and religion is the opinion of the people Recitative (Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities) Kublai Khan had noticed that Marco Polo's cities resembled one another, as if the passage from one to another involved not a journey but a change of elements. Now, from each city Marco described to him, the Great Khan's mind set out on its own, and after dismantling the city piece by piece, he reconstructed it in other ways, substituting components, shifting them, inverting them. Marco, meanwhile, continued reporting his journey, but the emperor was no longer listening. Kublai interrupted him: "From now on I shall describe the cities and you will tell me if they exist and are as I have conceived them. I shall begin by asking you about a city of stairs, exposed to the sirocco, on a half-moon bay. Now I shall list some of the wonders it contains....." Movements like a swimming whale, conducting the ocean, conducting the sun, conducting the invisible Draped like a Roman Emperer, Where do I come from, where is my fatherland, I was searching, but you found a new world for me People of the world, loneliness...unbearable, your visit moves my soul, soul...moves A final judgment of the people will reveal I have returned, I forget everything when I step foot in the house Wailing, Whaling, walking backwards - regression, you have traveled widely, I am afraid, I am leaving Visitor versus inhabitant, home and unhomed, communication and incommunicability, language as symbol, language as process, borders and borderlessness, impression of landscape/city/space more important than structure

On Top of the Whale is a very strange film even by Ruiz standards. It's set in an alternate future in which Communist Republics have become the norm in Europe and they have places named after people like Malcolm X. A scholar meets a rich Communist who happens to know the last two people from an Indian tribe that is thought to have perished so he decides to study them and their language. It turns out that this language consists of about 50-60 words, each of which can be pronounced hundreds of different ways to change the meaning.

Trying to find meaning in a film like this one is a difficult thing. I look at it as a parody of anthropology and linguistics. The film isn't quite a comedy but it certainly has more humor than most art-house films. The scholar and his wife (who seems to be something of a scholar herself) seem to come to conclusions about the tribe that are somewhat dubious. Their methods often seem unscientific if not altogether absurd. For example, they seem to be think that their studies will have an influence on the things they are told by the Indians. When a young girl tells the female scholar that mirrors make women pregnant the scholar warns her not to repeat that because the Indians may incorporate this idea into their mythology. This is but one of many things that seems to mock the field of anthropology.

This film is made a bit harder to understand by the way language is used. Apparently the film is in six languages and the dialogue switches from one to another mid conversation fairly often. This isn't so bad when the language is one other than English but the source I got this from (VHS) didn't have subtitles for the English and everyone had accents that were hard to understand. Another odd thing about this film was Ruiz's choice to use a red filter about 50% of the time. I'm not sure what his purpose was with this but it didn't look great, especially with the already poor quality of the transfer. Still, Ruiz's usual flair for images was present in the non-filtered scenes and it wasn't bad looking overall.

On Top of the Whale is a challenging viewing experience and one that I believe it would take multiple viewings to really appreciate. As such, I didn't find it to be one of the most satisfying in his canon but it's still well worth checking out.