Raúl Ruiz always had a funny bone and an affinity for parody. He started by riffing off the French New Wave in Three Sad Tigers (1968) and satirizing Chilean society as a whole, but eventually took aim at more specific social issues and artistic conventions. His two features from 1978, The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting and The Suspended Vocation, both upended the rules of European arthouse cinema upon release. The following year, Dog’s Dialogue saw him begin to poke fun at popular modes of storytelling with a macabre spin on the photo-roman (a progenitor of the telenovela). The Territory (1981) and On Top of the Whale (1982) are both social satires, but the latter doubles as a biting parody of anthropological filmmaking. His American films—Golden Boat (1991) and Shattered Image (1998)—approach the crime genre at such an angle it’s impossible to take them seriously. Even The Wandering Soap Opera (2017), which was completed by his wife and longtime editor Valeria Sarmiento following his death in 2011, toys with the conventions of the telenovela through a series of interlocking skits for the sake of a few good jokes. It should come as no surprise that Socialist Realism (2023)—an acerbic look at the final days of the Chilean Popular Unity coalition that was never finished until now because the US-backed coup of ‘73 interrupted its shooting—is also wickedly funny.
Socialist Realism joins a series of posthumous Ruiz releases completed by Sarmiento (a wonderful director in her own right whose sociological eye, technical prowess, and ribald streak merit more recognition) that are not forgotten masterpieces, but amusing footnotes by a filmmaker who was always committed to sketching out new ways of approaching his medium of choice. The curious thing about Socialist Realism is that it is a far colder film about leftist politics in Chile than anything made by Ruiz’s contemporaries. Although Salvador Allende’s short-lived presidency was certainly worth celebrating on-screen, which Patricio Guzmán famously did in The First Year (1972), Ruiz’s take on it suggests he had an ominous feeling Chile’s socialist project was doomed from the start. He was always transparent about his misgivings vis-à-vis political life: “All the time that I was film adviser to the Socialist Party, half a dozen painters, poets, and artists of all sorts would come every day to be told ‘the line.’ They didn’t want to write simple poems that might be unconnected with the political situation; they wanted ‘the line’ and they wanted to impose it absolutely on others,” he said in an interview with Afterimage. His deep anguish and frustration about seeing his country’s hard-earned progress dissolve in real time is on full display in Socialist Realism, as it was in the two films he made right before it—What Is to Be Done? (1972) and The Expropriation (1974)—and the bitter one he made upon relocating to Paris (Dialogues of the Exiles, 1975).
There is only one film I can think of with a kindred sense of disillusionment to the one in Socialist Realism. That’s Tomás Guitierrez Alea’s ennui-soaked Memories of Underdevelopment (1968). While that film pits one desolate petit bourgeois against Cuban society, Ruiz’s film follows a whole enclave of miserable petits bourgeois trying to figure out their own place in Chile’s new socialist reality. They try to do this through self-critique, which actually reveals itself as self-destruction, all the while ignoring a coalition of striking workers’ demands for food at an occupied factory. Eventually, they realize that there’s no role for them in Chile’s new reality, so they acquiesce with a suicide pact. If only it were that easy.
Socialist Realism screens tonight, May 10, at Anthology Film Archives as part of Prismatic Ground’s “Wave 2: Only Fascist Mummies Don’t Jump.”
