Het dak van de walvis

Of all Ruiz’s films, this has the most pronounced ideological/political/polemical thrust. It deals brilliantly with the plight of an anthropologist trying to learn the language of an obscure Patagonian Indian tribe whose last surviving members he has discovered. Beautifully and inventively shot in colour by Henri Alekan, the film proceeds less as narrative or as drama than as a prodigious stream of visual, verbal, and conceptual ideas centring around this theme. The performances are either minimal to the point of indifference or deliberately curtailed. Despite periodic bursts of portentous music, suspense exists only on a purely formal level.At one level a parody of contemporary Western man’s remoteness from the pre-industrial Third World, the film is no less a comedy about the anthropological peculiarities of his own tribal customs, intellectual and otherwise. But this theme in turn is intermittently interrupted or at least complicated by purely visual explorations in colour, composition, perspective, texture and camera placement which pursue the language theme through formal metaphors. Putatively a science fiction film set in the future, the film is so blithely unconcerned with fulfilling any genre expectations in relation to this fact that yet another potential audience is summarily expelled, or at best ignored. -Jonathan Rosenbaum