In 1978, Ruiz was commissioned to make a television documentary about the French elections from the viewpoint of a Chilean exile in Paris’ eleventh arrondissement. But, contrary to the producers’ expectation, the Left lost. Ruiz seized on this anti-climax to make a documentary about nothing except itself – a film whose central subject is forever lost in digression and ‘dispersal’, harking back to his Chilean experiments of the ‘60s. Its political content is deliberately left negligible: it’s hard to tell at the end who did actually win the election, let alone why.

Great Events and Ordinary People is the best, and certainly the funniest, of self-reflexive deconstructions of the documentary form – and it remains astonishingly modern in an arena where the debates tend to turn very slowly around the same old couple of chestnuts: reality/fiction, objectivity/subjectivity, intervention/distance, essay-film/cinema-vérité ...

Ruiz’s special target here is television documentary. Ruiz drolly exaggerates every hare-brained convention of TV reportage, from shot/reverse shot ‘suture’ and talking-head experts to establishing shots and vox pops (narrator’s note to himself: ‘Include street interviews ad absurdum.’) Every fragment of reality (eg, polling booths on voting day) comes through the lens as a pre-fabricated televisual cliché (‘What we film, we have already filmed’). When an actual TV news clip is included – a crazily kitsch extract from the election coverage, complete with tacky graphics and the count down to a computed poll result – the effect is devastatingly hilarious. (It would be fascinating to see Ruiz’s re-edits, from this period, of TV-style debates.)

If one were to peg the film in its time and place, one could call it a film about simulacra – and indeed, uncredited on the soundtrack (according to Ruiz’s admission) lurks the voice of mirage-man Jean Baudrillard himself as one of the narrators. But Ruiz increasingly spices up this cubist lesson in documentary deconstruction with surreal elaborations – such as progressively shorter re-edits of the entire film, avant-garde decentrings of image and sound, and crazy runs of ‘secondary elements’ such as particular colours, angles, gestures and camera movements (collect all shots that pan to the right ...). The critical agenda tends to merrily lose itself – which is a mercy in our remorseless age of rigidly theory-driven essay-films. (Australian viewers will be especially diverted by the presence of expert witness Mike Rubbo – whose career has taken him from groundbreaking New Journalism-inspired documentaries and children’s features in Canada through to an intimate role in Chilean Marilu Mallet’s confessional classic Unfinished Diary and the high-flying TV series Race Around the World.)

But this drift of detail eventually winds into an arresting and rather unique structure. The first two-thirds of the film poses as a diary of sorts, a record of ten days in which the filmmaker collects random materials. But suddenly, halting this reconnaissance, there is an eruption of footage from other films, as if invading the diegesis of the one we have been watching and following. Then Ruiz begins winding back, in various ways and in various orders, over the previous material: so that, now, the in-process diary has become a provisionally completed object. This is a paradoxical, atemporal form we find also in Godard: the always-already-made film meets the unfolding film-in-process-of-making-itself which meets what Ruiz here calls the ‘future documentary’ or, in a 1997 short, The Film to Come ...

I cannot agree with those commentators who celebrate in Great Events a Bazinian residue of material reality amid the confusions of our spectacle-society – for there is not a single supposedly real moment that Ruiz does not mock, expose or save up for a switcheroo gag later. Take the category of local colour, for instance: when he is not nailing sociological clichés by duly reproducing them (such as interviewing his local newsagent, or a typical mum-with-kids), he matter-of-factly gives away the kinds of workaday, sleight-of-hand tricks that the media normally keep hidden – for instance, when his neighbourhood bar proves unavailable for filming, Ruiz simply substitutes a bar from somewhere else!

Or, more subtly, Ruiz engages in a formalist undermining of the material, bringing pieces back in the montage but with a disquietingly just-different take – of course, reality is not meant to have alternate versions or out-takes. The same goes for the film’s deadpan treatment of spontaneity, from a reflection on how many pauses are needed to create an ‘effect of the everyday’ to the riveting spectacle of Cahiers critic Pascal Bonitzer fumbling to light a match as the Michael Snow-style 360-degree pan implacably rolls past him and his monologue ...

In all this, Ruiz locates the wayward truth of documentary in its contradictory extremes: the only things that strike us as real within the realm of audio-visual spectacle are those moments either when nothing is happening (the ordinary) or history is inscribing itself hysterically (the event). Mediating those extremes is the eye of the filmmaker – but Ruiz does all he can here to detonate his burgeoning auteur status, right down to a strange, unreadable moment that admits to the ‘only autobiographical element’ in the piece. One is never less oneself, it seems, than when asked by the TV institution to perform oneself.

As an essay-film, Great Events contains many echoes – and a cheeky critique – of the sophisticated political filmmaking of Chris Marker. Where Marker’s Le Joli mai ended with a stirring left-humanist anthem along the lines of, ‘If one person is in jail, I am not free; if one person is rich, I am poor; if one person is sad, I am not happy’, Ruiz turns this sentiment around to a jaded reflection of modern complacency: ‘As long as one person is in jail, I am free; as long as there is one poor person, I am rich; as long as one person is sad, I am happy’ ... Which nicely shifts the critique of documentary cinema, for a change, onto the documentary spectator, forever taking in images of oppression and misery on the History Channel.