Discerning Disjunctions in Raúl Ruiz’s A TV Dante

This paper revisits Raúl Ruiz’s portion of A TV Dante and asks us to rethink the disjunctive aesthetic strategies deployed by Ruiz. As a contribution to Tom Phillips and Peter Greenway’s A TV Dante project, Phillips’ English translation acts as a voice-over narrator in Ruiz’s piece. At the same time, Ruiz makes a radical break from the multimedia approach taken up by Phillips and Greenway; in his portion, Cantos IX-XIV are geographically resituated onto images of Santiago de Chile. In this de- and re-territorialization of the Inferno, then, these temporal and spatialdisjunctions create an audio-visual translation of these cantos in which sound and image often contradict each other, but the implications of these have yet to be drawn out. Unlike Phillips and Greenway’s portions, Ruiz ‘s contribution to the project not only remains the lesser studied but is also one of the least studied pieces within his oeuvre. Moreover, scholarship on Ruiz’s piece— from both Dante and Ruiz scholars—has viewed these disjunctions and/or contradictions pejoratively. In this paper, then, the foci of my argument are twofold: I argue that the disjunctions between the spoken text of the Inferno being read in off should be considered first in its original context and then in the context of the transposition onto stylized images of Chile. Second, I argue that Ruiz uses the Inferno and these disjunctions— both in the larger, broader thematical vicissitudes and between the more specific sound image contradictions—in order to create a visual re-inscription of the strangeness of the post-dictatorial nation during the early Chilean transition to democracy period, as portrayed by a returning exiled filmmaker such as Ruiz. This paper coincides not only with the 700th anniversary but also the rewriting of the Chilean constitution; a process of re-writing that is underway at this moment.