On the Top of the Whale

It was long ago I read every Gabriel García Marquez novel that I could get my hands on and miss that excitement and joy of those books. The feeling of Marquez's The Very Old Man with Wings and his spider woman, woman with a body of spider and a human head is present in the movie I want to talk about today.

Het Dak van de Walvis, or On the Top of the Whale by a Chilean expatriate, Parisian director and writer Raul Ruiz is the most surreal work I have ever encountered. Today, word 'surreal' is being used to describe something unexpected, joyous even, but what I am talking about is the true meaning of the word; not natural, above nature, apart from the nature.

The film is a parody of anthropology, linguistics, cultural imperialism and political beliefs and it has more ideas in its two minutes than the Hollywood production in a decade. It is deliberately set to be done in six languages, English, Dutch, Spanish, French, German and a one specifically designed for the purposes of the film in order to make it more pleasantly sounding, in order to have a feeling as if the whole conversation is a one big and extremely funny and sophisticated poem.

Being made in 1982, its story is set in an imaginary future where the whole world becomes communist, where Marx's dream becomes a reality, where the worker's revolution succeeded.

In Holland, couple of anthropologists organize a trip to Patagonia, to study a strange tribe, two people of a strange customs and with a dying language. The culture that they studying is magnificent, it is consisted of a language, constantly revisited, changing on a daily basis, language of sixty words, where words lose meanings as you put more and more of them together. Its sixty words are actualy derivations of a single word, pronounced 'yasoukah' and one derivation means menstruation and romantic walk on the beach with your loved one in as the sun is falling out of sight and a raw meat.

Two natives that are being studied are named by anthropologists by the closeness of their names to the Dutch Adam and Eden. They interchange their names on a daily basis, making them always a derivation of the name of the other one.

The anthropologists are also strange, Narcisso Cambos is a multi-millioner but also a Communist Party executive, at some point he states that he joined The Party because of its viciousness, because he was able to be a part of the controlling force, almost explaining everything capitalism holds dear. Eva brings her little 8-9 year old daughter to Patagonia and

Go To Page: 1 2

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic