Colloque de chiens (1977)

Directed by

Raúl Ruiz

Genre

crime, drama

Country

France

Runtime

22 min

Rating

6.4 of 10 from 30 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A girl is told her mother is not her real mother. She leaves her small town, grows up, and looks for love in bad places. The story is told with still images and off-screen narration, cut with footage of a city and barking dogs.

surrealexperimentalparodicstaticfragmentaryironicdisorientingunsettling

What happens

Dog's Dialogue (French: Colloque de chiens) is a 1977 French is a surrealist short crime film directed by Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz. The film contains popular conventions of the photo-romance but also can be viewed as a parody of the Brazilian telenovela or melodrama and pop culture stereotypes. The story, told almost entirely in still images, revolves around a young girl who is told her mother is not her real mother. The girl leaves her small town, grows into a beautiful woman, and starts searching for love and fulfillment in undesirable places. The story is narrated off-screen, and the stills are intercut with film footage of a city landscape and dogs barking. The film deals with topics of gender, sexuality, murder, prostitution, and gender/identity alterations. The motifs of gender subversion, still images, and dispersed bodies are seen in this film along with many other of Ruiz's films. A main subject of this film is the relationship between stillness and movement and the repetitions of images, gestures and statements that are ironic yet believable. The film stars Eva Simonet and Silke Humel and is narrated by Robert Darmel in the French version and Michael Graham in the English version. Ruiz made the film while taking a hiatus from making The Suspended Vocation (1978) during an actors' strike. The film won a César Award even though it was not seen by a wide audience. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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