On Top of the Whale
| On Top of the Whale | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Raúl Ruiz |
| Produced by |
Kees Kasander Monica Tegelaar |
| Written by | Raúl Ruiz |
| Starring | Willeke van Ammelrooy |
| Music by | Jorge Arriagada, performed by members of the Rotterdam Philharmonische Orkest |
| Cinematography | Henri Alekan |
| Edited by | Valeria Sarmiento |
| Distributed by | Rotterdam international film festival |
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Release date
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Running time
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90 minutes |
| Country | Netherlands |
| Language | Dutch, French, English, Spanish and German |
On Top of the Whale (Dutch: Het dak van de walvis) is a 1982 Dutch surreal and magic-realistic fantasy film directed by Chilean Raúl Ruiz (director) while he was on exile and "...is one of his most delirious and ambitious hoax-like fictions".
The film employs the use of six different languages, including an invented one. The story follows a Dutch anthropologist and his wife and child who are invited to the house of a communist millionaire in Patagonia (an area located in Chile and Argentina) to study the last two surviving Yachanes Indians.
The film unfolds as an ethnography and starts in the Netherlands at the beach, where Jean (a Dutch anthropologist) and his wife Eva meet a communist millionaire (Narciso), who later invites them over to his house in Patagonia to study the last two surviving Yachanes Indians. They accept the invitation and bring along their daughter Anita. Jean focuses his research on interpreting the language of the Indians, which has so far denied interpretation. At first they make a childish impression on the anthropologist, seeming to speak a language that consists of only one word: "yamascuma". A scene is shown where the anthropologist picks up several items, asking the Indians what their word is for each item. Every time they pronounce the word "yamacuma" in a different way, each enunciation having roughly 100 different inflections. The language seems to be reinvented daily and Jean struggles with his apprehension of it, reading its structure in a complex mathematical sense. Later, it is revealed that this in fact is a fake language when Jean accidentally leaves his tape recorder on in the presence of the Indians, recording a language that they do not use in front of anyone else.
Other subplots in the story involve a love triangle between Jean, Eva and Narciso and the addressing of fluid gender identity of Anita, who is clearly struggling whether they should identify as male or female. This is illustrated in the scene of 01.00.45-01.02.51 where Anita looks in the mirror and tells Eva that everything reflected in the mirror is the opposite and thus changes gender.
Ruiz on On Top of the Whale:
"It has become kind of an impressionistic film about the experiences of different characters who get in contact with the two Indians. My earlier fils dealt with borderline cases as well, but at the moment I reflect more upon problems to do with cinematic machinery. What is that mirror in which the image remains captured, what is that mirror that conjures up new confrontations again and again? What are these phantoms, this stereotypes that are produced by film? In my earlier films I have tried to avoid these stereotypes. In this film, however, I have chosen for a linear structure. After two minutes the plot has become entirely clear. Then I show various situations, by using cinematic techniques, us applied by French avant-garde directors in the 1920s and 1930s. That is to say, I used slow-motion, different lenses and similar techniques. Notwithstanding the narrative structure, one can say that it deals with a dream, a nightmare. The film deals with the imaginary, a kind of fear. Maybe not a collective fear, but my personal fear, as someone born in a Latin-American country. This is a personal film, because it has to do with my memories".
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Wikipedia