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Summary Of Colloque De Chiens And Man With A Movie Camera

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Though emerging from disparate circumstances, styles, and techniques, Raúl Ruiz’s 1977 experimental short-film Colloque de Chiens and Dziga Vertov’s 1929 groundbreaking experimental documentary Man with a Movie Camera find common ground in their strategic use of motion and stasis. Ruiz’s Colloque de Chiens is a film that is the product of its circumstances. Made on an extremely low budget during a strike in the production of Ruiz’s 1978 film The Suspended Vocation, the film is an experiment in delivering a convoluted story through an extremely limited means—still images. Vertov’s Man with a Movie camera, in contrast, is an experiment in pushing film technology to its limits. Lacking a plot, the filmic techniques of the film are both a …show more content…

However, as delivered through still images, this atmosphere is amplified. The film’s disjointed, jarring presentation is reflective of the disjointed reality of its universe. In watching Colloque de Chiens, a spectator would typically not seek to identify with the characters in the film, given their immorality. Ruiz facilitates this deliberate lack of identification through the film’s stasis. The images are off-putting in their defiance of film’s primary convention—motion. By constricting motion, Ruiz denies the audience the connection via motion that is intrinsic to film, further distancing the spectator from the characters. According to Metz, “the objects and the characters we see in a film are apparently only effigies, but their motion is not the effigy of motion—it seems real” (8). Without the grounding reality of motion, the characters’ ability to appear as ‘real’ is limited.
This unreality is intentional, however. Rather than inhibiting the viewer’s ability to invest themselves into the events of the story, it enhances it. The cyclical, bizarre characters and events are foreign to the world of the viewer; however, in the off-kilter reality of still images, they appear almost normal. The viewer is on the outside, peering into a universe in which the unimaginable is plausible. The distance between the diegetic world of Colloque de Chiens and the world of the viewer serves another purpose. As

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