Colloque de chiens

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.

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.