Of Great Events and Ordinary People (1980)

In 1978, Ruiz was commissioned to make a television documentary about the French elections from the viewpoint of a Chilean exile in Paris’ eleventh arrondissement. But, contrary to the producers’ expectation, the Left lost. Ruiz seized on this anti-climax to make a documentary about nothing except itself – a film whose central subject is forever lost in digression and ‘dispersal’, harking back to his Chilean experiments of the ‘60s. Its political content is deliberately left negligible: it’s hard to tell at the end who did actually win the election, let alone why.

Released Feb. 24, 1980 65 min None+

Genres: Documentary

Keywords: imdb.paris-france, imdb.cinema-verite, imdb.essay-film, imdb.reference-to-john-grierson, imdb.new-guinea, imdb.chilean-immigrant, imdb.ritual + 21 more, imdb.repetition, imdb.street-interview, imdb.cult-director, imdb.election, imdb.making-a-documentary, imdb.documentarian, imdb.pastiche, imdb.documentary-filmmaker, imdb.documentarist, imdb.vox-pop, imdb.deconstruction, imdb.man-on-the-street-interview, imdb.man-on-the-street-interviews, imdb.filmmaker-interview, imdb.self-reflexive, imdb.reflexive, imdb.voting, imdb.multiple-narrators, imdb.stock-footage, imdb.reference-to-montesquieu, imdb.documentary-filmmaking