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Of Great Events and Ordinary People
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In 1978, Raúl Ruiz was commissioned to make a television documentary
about the French elections from the viewpoint of a Chilean exile in the 11th
arrondissement of Paris. But, contrary to the producers’ expectation, the Left
lost. Ruiz seized on this anti-climax to make a documentary about nothing
except itself – a film whose central subject is forever lost in digression and
dispersal, harking back to his Chilean experiments of the ‘60s.
The film’s political content is deliberately left
negligible: it’s hard to tell at the end, without external knowledge, who did
actually win the election, let alone why.
Of Great Events and Ordinary People is the best, and certainly the funniest, of reflexive
deconstructions of the documentary form – and it remains astonishingly modern
in an arena where the debates tend to turn very slowly around the same old
chestnuts: reality/fiction, objectivity/subjectivity, intervention/distance,
essay-film/cinéma-vérité ...
Ruiz’s special target here is television documentary.
Ruiz drolly exaggerates every hare-brained convention of TV reportage, from
shot/reverse shot suture and the use of talking-head experts, to establishing
shots and vox pops (narrator’s note to himself: “Include street interviews ad
absurdum”.) Every fragment of reality (eg., polling booths on voting day)
comes through the lens as a prefabricated televisual cliché (“What we film, we
have already filmed”).
When a genuine TV news clip is included – a crazily
kitsch extract from the election coverage, complete with tacky graphics and the
countdown to a computed poll result – the effect is devastatingly hilarious.
(It would be fascinating to compare Ruiz’s re-edit, from this same period, of typical
tele-discussion footage in Images de debats [1979].)
If we were to peg Of Great Events and Ordinary People in its time and place, we could call it a film about simulacra –
and indeed, uncredited on the soundtrack (according to Ruiz’s admission) lurks
the voice of mirage-man Jean Baudrillard as one of the narrators (their
friendship would later fray, as we learn from Ruiz’s diaries, when Jean B.
leaned ever more to the political right).
But Ruiz increasingly spices up this Cubist lesson in
documentary deconstruction with surreal elaborations – such as progressively
shorter re-edits of the entire film, avant-garde decentrings of image and
sound, and crazy runs of secondary elements such as particular colours, angles,
gestures and camera movements (collect all shots that pan to the right … ).
The critical agenda tends to merrily lose itself in such
diversions – which is a mercy in our relentless 21st century age of
rigidly theory-driven essay-films. Some cinephile viewers will be especially
diverted by the presence of expert witness Michael Rubbo – whose directorial career has
taken him from groundbreaking New Journalism-inspired documentaries and
features for children in 1960s Canada through to an intimate role in Chilean
Marilú Mallet’s confessional classic Unfinished Diary (1982), and production
of the high-flying Australian TV series Race Around the World (1997-1998) – on which I myself briefly appeared as a judge.
But this drift of detail in Of Great Events eventually
winds itself into an arresting and rather unique structure. The first
two-thirds poses as a diary of sorts, a record of ten days in which the
filmmaker collects random materials. But suddenly, halting this reconnaissance,
there is an eruption of footage from other films, as if invading the diegesis
of the one we have been watching and following.
Then Ruiz begins winding back, in various ways and in
various orders, over the previous material: so that, now, the in-process diary
has become a provisionally completed object. This is a paradoxical, atemporal
form we find also in Godard: the always-already-made film meets the unfolding
film-in-process-of-making-itself, which then meets what Ruiz here calls the “future
documentary” or, as in the title of his 1997 short, the film to come.
I cannot agree with those commentators who celebrate
in Of Great Events a Bazinian residue of material reality amid the
confusions of our spectacle-society – for there is not a single supposedly real
moment that Ruiz does not mock, expose or save up for a switcheroo gag later.
Take the category of “local colour” (or whimsical,
suburban detail), for instance: when Ruiz is not nailing sociological clichés
by duly reproducing them (such as interviewing the local newsagent, or a
typical mum-with-kids), he matter-of-factly gives away the kinds of workaday,
sleight-of-hand tricks that the media normally keep hidden – for instance, when
the neighbourhood bar proves unavailable for filming, he simply substitutes a
bar from somewhere else!
Or, more subtly, Ruiz engages in a formalist
undermining of the material, bringing pieces back in the montage but with a
disquietingly just-slightly-different take – for reality is not meant to have
alternate versions or out-takes!
The same goes for the deadpan treatment of spontaneity – supposedly the sovereign province of documentary – from a reflection on how
many pauses are needed to create an “effect of the everyday”, to the riveting
spectacle of Cahiers du cinéma critic Pascal Bonitzer (later an
important script collaborator for Ruiz) fumbling to light a match as the
Michael Snow-style 360-degree pan implacably rolls past him and his monologue …
In all this, Ruiz locates the wayward truth of
documentary in its contradictory extremes: the only things that strike us as
real within the realm of audio-visual spectacle are those moments when either nothing
is happening (the banal ordinary) or history is inscribing itself hysterically
(an event).
Mediating those extremes is the eye (and ear) of the
filmmaker – but Ruiz does all he can here to detonate his burgeoning auteur
status, right down to a strange, unreadable moment that admits to the “only
autobiographical element” in the piece. But one is never less oneself, it
seems, than when asked by the institution of television to perform oneself.
As an essay-film, Of Great Events contains many
echoes – and a cheeky critique – of the sophisticated political filmmaking of
Chris Marker and his comrades (in reality, Marker and Ruiz were friends and
deeply respected each other). Where Marker’s & Pierre Lhomme’s Le Joli
mai (1963) ends with a stirring left-humanist anthem – “As long as poverty exists, you are
not rich; as long as despair exists, you are not happy; as long as prisons
exist, you are not free” – Ruiz turns this sentiment around to a jaded
reflection of modern complacency: “As long as poverty exists, I am rich; as long as despair exists, I am
happy; as long as prisons exist, I am free”...
This nicely shifts the critique of documentary cinema,
for a change, onto the documentary spectator – forever comfortably taking in
images of oppression and misery on the History Channel.
MORE Ruiz: Dark at Noon, That Day, Three Lives and Only One Death, Time Regained, Three Crowns of the Sailor, Shattered Image, The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror, Mysteries of Lisbon, La noche de enfrente © Adrian Martin January 2004 |
