The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, November 9-15
On Top of the Whale (1982)
Directed by Raúl Ruiz
Ruiz never truly left Chile, though he was exiled after the 1973 coup: On Top of the Whale, made in the Netherlands, demonstrates not only the filmmaker’s obsession with his native land, but also his point of view on the country, and more specifically, the Chilean way of speaking Spanish. The film follows married European anthropologists as they travel to Patagonia, where they are guests of two Chileans who constantly place wagers with dismemberment as the stakes. The anthropologists investigate the strange language of two indigene natives of the Patagonia, the last survivors of their race, who seem to change the meaning of words every other day. The Chilean characters speak an exaggerated Chilean Spanish, exposing the ridiculous way they talk, at the same time as the whole film riffs on the pointless nature of social sciences… because they aren’t real sciences. Jaime Grijalba (November 13, 9pm at Anthology Film Archives’s “Memorable Fantasies” Jorge Luis Borges & Adolfo Bioy Casares on Film”)