Acceso usuarios
Ignacio López Vicuña
Raúl Ruiz (1941-2011), an exiled Chilean filmmaker working in Europe, created in the film On Top of the Whale (1982) a postcolonial parody that is also a Borgesian experiment in verbal and filmic languages. A European anthropologist interviews the last survivors of the Yaghan people of Patagonia (victims of colonial genocide), only to be drawn into a philosophical game of linguistic meanings and postcolonial mirroring that decenters hegemonic understandings of cultural identity. Ruiz creates a space of play that erases borders, celebrates multilingualism, questions hierarchies of knowledge, and invites reflection on cultural adaptability. The article discusses the historical background with which Ruiz establishes a dialogue, arguing that the film’s playful imagery alludes to histories of colonialism and exposes the colonial roots of Chile’s modernity
