Het Dak van de walvis (Le Toit de la baleine) (1981) Raoul Ruiz

On the shores of the North Sea, an anthropologist and his wife meet a certain Narciso Campos, who invites them to his house in Patagonia where there are the last two Yagan Indians in the world. “This film is an extreme case. There was absolutely no story. I had only one idea: I wanted to make a documentary about the Indians of southern Chile. I started from a situation that a Greek ethnologist had explained to me. He wanted to demonstrate that the language of the Indians had undergone numerous Turkish influences. He told me that he worked with the Indians by recording them on a tape recorder, and he realized one day that, as soon as he left the room, the Indians would start speaking another language. They are so suspicious – rightly so, in fact – that they only speak their language among themselves, never in front of strangers. It was the only starting point for the film. Furthermore, I had purchased numerous photography and painting magazines on the Parisian quays. I cut out the photos and pasted them into a notebook that I showed to Alekan [the director of photography]. This is a case where fiction and the work of photography developed in parallel. I made random collages, no matter how. For example, I remember gluing a Turner upside down. And everything happened very quickly: preparation lasted ten days, filming two weeks. » (Raoul Ruiz)