Mammame

Ruiz’s film of Jean-Claude Gallotta’s nine-person dance performance is a singular work within the Ruizian corpus insofar as it not only draws from dance rather than the usual literature, painting, or philosophy influences but it more or less faithfully reproduces Gallotta’s wordless experimental ballet, here performed by Gallotta and eight members of the Emile Dubois company. As Ruiz himself put it, the project concerns “a group of people who know each other, perhaps work together, [who] are cinematically transported to a spot halfway between a large tent on a science fiction desert and the ballroom of a submarine, in a film about doubt, full-fledged doubt.“ Cryptic, transfixing, and suffused with Ruiz’s signature play with space and time, Mammame is at once one of the director’s most abstract and accessible works. Print from the collection of the Cinémathèque française.