Of Great Events and Ordinary People (France, 1979)
Sunday, April 8, 1990, 8:00 pm
EARLY RAUL RUIZ: TWO VIEWS
A prodigious storyteller, Raul Ruiz is also a prolific manufacturer of moving images (nearly 60 films made since 1967). This Chilean expatriate has molded his films through a deeply personal concern with representation and the nature of cinematic discourse. The Penal Colony (Chile, 1971, 68 min.) is loosely based on Kafka’s story about a perfect execution machine, but transferred to a Latin American island; Of Great Events and Ordinary People (France, 1979, 63 min.) was commissioned by French TV as a ‘personal view’ of the 1978 elections. What they got was never televised. “Of Great Events maintains a running debate with the precepts of John Grierson as well as an analysis of the rhetoric of cinema verité.” (Hoberman, Village Voice)