Colloque de chiens (1977) Online

It is hard to imagine a more radical fusion of form and content than what is on display in Dog's Dialogue (Colloque de chiens), among the earliest films the late, great Raúl Ruiz made in France after leaving Chile in 1973. Though inspired by Latin American photo-novels, this sensational tale of murder, lust, suicide and personal and sexual identity suggests nothing if not the most dramaturgically baroque of Fassbinder films (the effect, perhaps, is only heightened by the use of academy ratio and, well, authentic-looking stylings). Yet it is told primarily through (dry) narration over a slideshow of still images, as if Ruiz were paying homage to Chris Marker and La Jetée (1962), which utterly dissolves the inherent melodrama of the content, before reinstituting it with a modernist edge.

Only about twenty minutes long, the film opens with a few live shots of barking dogs—a visual motif along with similarly rendered shots of banal streetscapes, echoing the claustrophobic circularity of the narrative—before a still of a few girls in a school playground is accompanied by the narrator intoning, "The woman you call mum isn't your mother." A variation of this line will close the film, which also contains a number of textual and dramatic repetitions (Ruiz: "I cut out various phrases and made a new story in which the same phrases were repeated in relation to different events. It runs through several times but is always the same phrase that recurs. This is the whole trick"). Shot by future Assayas mainstay Denis Lenoir and featuring Ruiz's first collaboration with the Chilean-born composer Jorge Arriagada, this surprise winner of the French César for Best Short is one of the most rigorous yet satisfying Ruiz films I have seen to date.

I'll probably be ordering "Diálogos de exiliados" (1975), which just came out on video, soon, but in the meantime this 22-minute short from 1977 is the earliest film from the director that I've seen, and what a work it is. Like everything else I've seen of his work from the following decade, "Dog's Dialogue" finds Ruiz simultaneously in a dense, almost encyclopedic Borgesian mood, with facts and plot points following so quickly upon one another that I was amazed that so much got packed into such a short time span; oddly comedic and campy, despite the dark storyline; and surreal and unexplainable. Less than 2 days after watching it I am still at a loss to explain...dogs bark and periodically interrupt this story, told mostly in still pictures (think Chris Marker's "La Jetée", but in color) and narrated rapidfire, of a young provincial French woman and a chain of events involving her child, best friend, husband -- ultimately a transsexual -- prostitution, multiple murders... mind-boggling in it's details and the various repetitions that occur like variations on a theme, some of them inexplicably inaccurate or deliberately messed up (a bottle turns into a knife, and back, for no apparent reason)...this is experimental narrative cinema at a peak scaled by few, and comparable only to early Greenaway in both ambition and results. Rented on VHS, this is a supplement on the old tape of Ruiz' 1979 masterpiece "L'Hypothèse du tableau volé".

Although this film is clearly a short at twenty minutes, it packs in more plot than most feature films. It does this through exposition which is aided by the lack of moving images. The majority of this film consists of slideshow like stills explained by an unseen narrator. By limiting the action to these still shots, Ruiz manages to force the viewer to focus on his carefully arranged images while at the same time economically moving the plot along. It's hard to imagine a more efficient way of expressing a story while making a visual impact.

The film gets its name from the dogs which occasionally appear in brief interludes to the action: in some of the few scenes which feature moving images they can be seen struggling with one another and barking incessantly. Perhaps this barking is meant to complement the narration or maybe even suggest the pointlessness of telling such a fatalistic story: is the explanation of the film's narrator ultimately any more meaningful than the barking of a dog? The sense of pre-determined, static destiny one gets while watching implies that it is not.

The narrative features prostitution, suicide, murder, and gender confusion. While this subject matter is of course titillating the aspect that makes it most interesting is the symmetry. The parallels between the first part and the second part (with a linking event in the middle that implies duality) are impossible to ignore. Ultimately, the narrative consists of a cycle which is neither begun by birth nor ended by death. The continuation of this cycle is always logical but never predictable.

This film was quite unique and I have to say that it's ultimately a more powerful film than Chris Marker's similarly executed 1962 film La Jetee. For that matter, I would have to say it's the best short I've ever seen.

"Colloque de chiens" or "Dog Symposium" or "Dog's Dialogue" is a French 22-minute film from 1977, so next year it will have its 40th anniversary. The writer and director here is Raoul Ruiz, who is 5 years after his death still a somewhat famous filmmaker, at least in France. This work here is the one that won him his only César Award. Like I wrote in the title, most of this movie is photos that follow one after the other while a narrator tells us the story that goes with theme. There are also some parts with "real" live action though. Unfortunately, I cannot say I enjoyed this film a whole lot. The technique used here is not one I like and I guess there is a reason it is not used today anymore. I would even say that it also made me less interested in the story, which was mediocre at best too. I did not care for any of the characters. I wonder how this would have turned out as a "real" film with the actors talking and having conversations with each other. Maybe Ruiz should have made this one for purposes of comparison. Finally, the dog barking parts that are pretty important here, thus the reference in the title, also did not work too well with the story I must say. All in all, this is a forgettable film that does not make me curious about Ruiz' other works. Thumbs down.