Of Great Events and Ordinary People

(1980)

★ 7.5 IMDb · 6 votes

Genres: Documentary

Year: 1980

Runtime: 65 мин

Country: France

Director: Raúl Ruiz

Plot

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.