Siesta Nightmares And Cannibalistic Daydreams: Desexilio and Raúl Ruiz’s A TV Dante

This article adds to the critical discourses surrounding Raúl Ruiz (1941–2011) and his films of return after exile, or desexilio, by analysing his portion of A TV Dante (1992). In this Ruizian transmedia experimentation of Dante’s Inferno, there is a radical de- and re-territorialisation of the text: on the one hand, from text to film, and, on the other, spatially and temporally by transposing the text onto images of contemporary Chile. This paper reads the film, then, as a Ruizian re-encounter with Chile after exile during the early years of the period transition to democracy and looks to the implications of these disjunctions and displacements – both in the broader thematic vicissitudes and in more specific contradictions between sound and image – when re-worked in terms of spatial (Santiago de Chile) and temporal (post-dictatorship) conditions. In doing so, it turns to the Brazilian concept of anthropophagy as an analytical framework and tool. As such, this paper argues that approaching the film through the lens of anthropophagy not only helps us to read the discursive strategies deployed in the film, but also highlights how cannibalism works as both a formal structuring feature and as part of the film’s content.