The Territory (1981)

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Director: Raul Ruiz

Screenplay: Gilbert Adair and Raul Ruiz

Cast: Geoffrey Carey as Peter; John Paul Getty III as Ron the guide; Jeffrey Kime as Jim; Camila Mora-Scheihing as Annie; Rebecca Pauly as Barbara; Ethan Stone as Ron; Isabelle Weingarten as Françoise; Shila Turna as Linda; José Nascimento as Joe

[Some Spoilers Throughout]

Synopsis: Going to the French woodlands for a walking expedition, a group of American tourists find themselves lost. Time passes and, desperate, they start to resort to cannibalism.

The Territory, despite being set in France when a group of Americans, two children (one male and one female) and a French woman are stuck in the woods and can seemingly not escape, is a Portuguese co-production shot in Portuguese woodland, an apt metaphor for Raul Ruiz's career especially when you enter his feverish eighties era. That and all the strange little details surrounding said film in production that feels like one of his films itself - Roger Corman having a brief and vague financial involvement, John Paul Getty III (infamously the member of the Getty family who was kidnapped as a young boy) as a cast member, and Wim Wenders "borrowing" (depending on who you ask) cast members for The State of Things (1982) mid production of The Territory.

It's from an era of puzzles, half drawn concepts, music videos inexplicably turning into full sci-fi features and a true labyrinth just in acquiring and seeing it all. Funnily enough, in lieu of this context The Territory is straight forward as a film by itself, if Luis Buñuel hadn't realised only after making The Exterminating Angel (1962) he could've ended it with the guests resorting to cannibalism to survive. Ruiz, an entirely different island of cinema completely to Buñuel, stretches out this inevitable conclusion but has little interest in bourgeois satire but as if a dark joke about the decline of mankind's general manners in general, all in the midst of his take on a horror movie.

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In woodland that they cannot leave, the urbanites cannot escape their pettiness as much as they completely disregard their environment as they trample over the grassy undertow, Ruiz's inner cartographer seen as, if the most obvious of warnings, the woodland heritage site itself is in the shape of a human head. The further joke is that civilisation is constantly nearby despite them becoming lost for weeks and longer - the nearby road, the two older French men dining by a damn, the authorities finding the survivors with ease - as if their trapped vortex in said forest is a subconscious one. One where the only constant is a "Kilroy was here" marked on a tree's side, a case of pop culture referencing or Raul Ruiz being an unexpected fan of Styx.

Much can be made of the act of cannibalism being deliberately staged as the Eucharist - flesh is literal flesh - but unlike Darren Aronofsky blundering into insulting metaphorical comparisons in mother! (2017) on said subject, the bigger satire on display in The Territory is once cannibalism is an excepted means of nourishment, everyone left plays out a home of communal bliss in the middle of nowhere with skulls decorating around the tents and a form of Stockholm Syndrome where it's not seen as polite to not eat the meat. Only the influence of the young boy and his French speaking mother, offer the last vestige of civilisation, changes this in the end alongside a mystical idiot savant who appears later on, repeating everything spoken to him and merely a background character for a long period of time. Even once civilisation is found again, it leads to a more cynical comment that one can get a celebrity interview or two from it, and the saner person (still guilty of murder) returns back to those woods again out of longing for it.

From https://bmtr.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/ruiz1.jpg?w=450&h=335

So, just from the descriptions, a hazy dream and this was the tone for Ruiz during his legendary eighties output, a period where he worked so much and became as prolific then alone to match Godard, Miike and Jess Franco for production, a specific decade of his career special in itself for Ruiz disciples even against the rest of his output. It's also unfortunately an underserved period where old VHS tape rips online are inevitable, a man famous for his stark use of bright coloured lighting and atmosphere even for his lowest budgeted sketches from the era not helped by the handicap of licensing or lack of access to getting proper restorations to these films. This era is seen as the most delirious of the Chilean director's entire career, the cultish of it all but, unfortunately, to match that aura you're stuck with an underserved filmography too.

However through a flicker of muddy pixalisation and much welcomed fan subtitles, the most narratively straight-ahead of his career still emphasises how idiosyncratic his style was. Unfortunately, in VHS rip form, one of the biggest comparisons to Orson Welles' and his interest deep focus shot scenes is harder to gauge in the oneiric fuzz, but in a film that plays out with cast mostly in the woods it's nonetheless soaked in a detailed atmosphere. Arguably The Territory can be openly simplistic in its narrative progression, the wait until the food supplies run out and someone gets an infection on their leg leading to a conclusion a long one, but it still succeeds because that endless woodland canopy and his heightened aesthetic is meant to pill you into a stupor with a sickly sense of dread.

From http://deeperintomovies.net/journal/image14/territory2.jpg

Because of all these factors, The Territory is a perfect entry point into Raul Ruiz's career but paradoxically isn't, another appropriately Ruizian state close to asking whether a glass is both half empty and half full because arguably the more difficult and stranger films of this era like City of Pirates (1984) are closer to his trademark but takes a brave plunge into the deep end of the water or a prologue beforehand to consider watching such a production. So that also makes The Territory (a work never anything but his own work too) appropriately a beginner's viewing choice if not the entire spectrum of one of his eras, let alone any other.

Abstract Spectrum: Eerie/Grotesque/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Personal Opinion:

Calling The Territory unique is a little ridiculous when Raul Ruiz's entire filmography is that unique over many productions, so instead the better choice of words is one of his fascinating travels into what he called a "b movie", one with a morbidness to the proceedings which takes it time to seep in but once it appears keeps you engaged.

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The Wolf House (2018)

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Directors: Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León

Screenplay: Alejandra Moffat, Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León

Cast: Amalia Kassai as María; Rainer Krause as the Wolf

Synopsis: Presented as a propaganda film of "the Colony", this stop motion story presents a fairy tale of a girl who flees the commune only for her to learn of the error of her ways when, is closing herself in an abandoned house and helping two pigs become human, they start to turn on her.

[Major Spoiler Warnings]

[Trigger Warnings]

The Wolf House, the co-creation of Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León with script collaboration by Alejandra Moffat, does have a historical context which might be missed if only established in the presentation. Many Nazis, after World War II, fled to South America, the discomforting parallels in symbolism found through the film's world. The Wolf House also evokes another historical context that is Colonia Dignidad, an infamous real life commune in Chile that, under the figure of German exile Paul Schäfer, was not only tied to the rise of the Pinochet dictatorship within the country and Nazi war criminals but was a place of abuse, child molestation and various horrifying actions that Schäfer was only arrested for 2005 after fleeing authorities in 1997.

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Even without this full context, The Wolf House's prologue immediately puts you on edge, the directors' willingly playing along as fictional collaborators on a restoration of one of the "Colony's" propaganda films as the voice over (the film juggling German and Spanish) is entirely bias to the commune and against any slander to its reputation, a disarmingly creepy children's chorus in the score like the ghosts of the dead.

Even without the real, horrifying history context the exploration of this dark and potentially unknown history to the outside world from Chile means the creators already set up, using archive footage of idyllic country life with blond haired children and honey as the images, the perfect tone to set up a dank underbelly that presides over all the images without become overbearing. And The Wolf House, part of a tradition of stop motion animation, can proudly stand out among the likes of Jan Svankmajer and the Quay Brothers as a truly radical, painstakingly executed animation with hard earned artistry, in which Cociña and León to best describe the style starts in bookends with chalk drawn animation when the protagonist Maria (voiced by Amalia Kassai) flees the Colony and enters the titular house, only for the place to be a living and breathing animation itself. As a wolf stalks outside (speaking in German) becomes the sinister menace of the Colony in his sense of superiority and an underlying sexual nature to his comments of his beloved "little bird", the animation inside the home takes place in one giant set which is constantly built and deconstructed, the tape used to keep paper-mâché figures up and in poses sometimes visible, all whilst the film openly records as much the work to construct and tear down each sequence as part of scene transitions as it is the story. Some of the animation as well is painted on the walls and floors, to be erased after in such a way. The jerky motion of all is something that adds to the sense of ill-ease alongside the uncanny nature of the entire artificiality living world.

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It is the equivalent of taken an abandoned building, and using the content of its garage and second hand furniture to make a film, a lot of paper-mâché and paint used for the production. I view all cinema, with this in mind, as hard work worth praising, even if it can be utterly wasted on bad films, but animation or work that visibly looked like hard work is to be more admired for its laborious, difficult craft especially as it has an innate tactility that is inherently (yet ignored) in the medium of cinema especially now in the digital camera age. It fits the material in terms of story here too as Maria finds two pigs and encourages them to transform into human beings, the characters both existing as figures but also painted only the walls and floors, sometimes using props like picture frames to depict them in extreme close-up. It's inherently skittish and fragmented as a film scene per scene, the animation as mentioned already creepy before you see it move in this fragmented movement.

Following Svankmajer's skill of animating life in an everyday objects, whilst The Wolf House doesn't follow the Czech animator's transgressive details like animating actual meat does have the same nightmarish quality to the material which plays into the story they are used for. The film reaches a moment of idealism for Maria and her pig children, briefly reaching a respite, but even before the Wolf's mocking affection is unnerving and one witnesses sights like pigs with human hands for feet or a papier-mâché boy on a toilet being terrorised and covered in bugs. After, as food is becoming scare and the pig children decide to eat Maria, the film without any direct transgression, aside when the children are accidentally burned by a candle falling on the table cloth and having to recover from their injuries, is riddled in a darkened fairytale mood.

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The back story of what The Wolf House is eluding, if known, makes it more unsettling. The children, beginning as pigs, become children with dark features only for honey, the produce famous from the Colony, turns them into angelic children with blonde hair and blue eyes. The wolf, symbolically evokes Nationalist use of pagan symbols, and its entire bias to the wolf saving Maria in the end after she regrets rebelling against the Colony whilst in lieu to the film being a fake propaganda work is even more disturbing when her monologues clearly evoke hints of abuse, even sexually, and being forced into a collective beforehand. The animation's beauty doesn't stop its coarse and textual style from adding to all of this subtext and, with this in mind, I will be cautious in terms of recommending the film due to how disturbing it is to see. Nonetheless, it's an incredible piece of art that, if you are prepared for that challenging nature, is worthy to witness.

Abstract Spectrum: Handmade/Insidious/Lo-Fi/Nightmarish

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

Personal Opinion

As a film premiering in 2018, The Wolf House deserves to be seen as an incredible cinematic achievement, more worthy of attention than more publicised films. Whether, baring temporary screening on MUBI, a film this important can avoid being lost in the film festival circuit may be as much entirely helped by a tiny little blog like this bring attention to this fascinating, artistically rewarding animation as much as a proper film critic. In terms of animation as a medium, Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León have already shown a unique style in-between them that deserves to be explored further in short and long form filmmaking.

From http://etiudaandanima.pl/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Dom-wilka.jpg