Film and Video: Reflections on The Roof of the Whale (Raúl Ruiz) and The Laughing Alligator (Juan Downey) to Problematize Alterity in Images

Abstract

This article establishes a dialogue between Raúl Ruiz’s film The Roof of the Whale (1982) and Juan Downey’s video art piece The Laughing Alligator (1979), bringing together two aesthetic expressions commonly dissociated. Both works are addressed as experimental apparatuses that question hegemonic representations of alterity. Through an analysis of technological appropriation and the break with documentary realism, it is argued that these authors deploy a visual and symbolic anthropophagy that subverts the colonial dynamics of the ethnographic encounter. The text explores how, facing the collapse of the grand political narratives of the 1970s in Latin America, an ironic and fragmented subjectivity emerges. Finally, it examines the tension between Western rationalist logic and the discontinuity of alterity, unraveling how these image-machines phagocytize and reconfigure cultural identity.