Mammame is the only Ruiz film to be disciplined, rather than merely inspired or informed, by an external structure – a dance performance choreographed by Jean-Claude Gallotta and performed by him with eight other dancers (of the Émile Dubois troupe), four women and four men. The dance is an essentially plotless series of encounters, interactions and collective endeavours among and between the dancers, none of whom stands out as a protagonist or star. Ruiz treats the choreography as a found object, translating the material shot-by-shot and move-by-move into a dance that can exist only on film.

While it becomes impossible at many junctures to imagine what this choreography looked like in its original form – many of the unconventional angles and spatial transitions are unthinkable on stage, and Ruiz eventually shifts the dance to an outdoor location – it remains clear that Gallotta’s choreography has dictated Ruiz’s decisions every step of the way. Thanks to this discipline and structure, Mammame is not only the first incontestable masterpiece by Ruiz, it is also his most accessible work, needing not a single subtitle nor any form of specialised knowledge. It rivals The Red Shoes as the most intoxicating dance film ever made.

Although Ruiz can be compared to Godard as a phenomenon, the figures who have influenced him most as a thinker and filmmaker are probably Jorge Luis Borges (intellectually and conceptually, if not politically) and Orson Welles (visually and formally). Like certain other Borges-inspired practitioners of Latin American magical realism, Ruiz regards somewhat sceptically the conventional notions of what is real and what is imaginary (though the political orientation of his agnosticism is closer to Marxism than Borges’ conservatism). Ruiz also shares with Borges a taste for Victorian fantasy and adventure – Carroll, Stevenson, Chesterton – that is most apparent in his remarkable miniseries Manoel on the Island of Marvels; his cherished boy’s adventure motif of a model train traversing the screen on toy tracks, first introduced in Manoel, also makes dreamy reappearances in Life Is a Dream and Mammame.

As for the Welles influence, one can readily perceive it in the first shot of Mammame – an extreme low-angle and wide-angle shot, monumental in its feeling of weight and gravity, of dancers flying past the cameras in broad leaps. But it is equally evident in the deep focus, which creates cavernous distances and angular geometries between background and foreground figures; in the chiaroscuro lighting effects (including shadows and silhouettes, brilliantly realised by Acacio de Almeida’s camera); and in a magician’s sense of space and décor that plays constantly with our orientation, creating what Manny Farber has described (in reference to Welles) as space that is ‘prismatic and a quagmire at the same time’. In effect, this spatial ambiguity fits hand in glove with Borgesian doubts about reality, as is reflected in Ruiz’s own synopsis for Mammame: ‘A group who know each other, perhaps work together, 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 ...’

If Borges and Welles share both a notion of the labyrinth and a Scheherazade-like role as a teller of tales, it is worth noting that they are both also essayists, inside and outside their labyrinthine fictions: essays such as ‘A New Refutation of Time’, F for Fake and Filming Othello create fictional spaces, while overt fictions such as ‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’, Citizen Kane, and The Magnificent Ambersons develop essayistic conceits. Ruiz is very much involved in the same sort of enterprise. Whether his films are fiction (City of Pirates), non-fiction (Great Events and Ordinary People), or some inspired conflation of the two, as in Mammame, they invariably combine fantasy and reflection.

To the degree that one can speak of fictional and non-fictional configurations in dance, Jean-Claude Gallotta’s energetic choreography is similarly mixed. Encompassing ballet as well as modern dance movement, it can be described as abstract, yet it is anything but non-representational. An anthology of everyday human gestures and encounters, bursting with mini-dramas, it uses the dancers’ voices as frequently as their bodies – as an extension of their dance rather than as a mere accompaniment to it – although their utterances, which range from whispers and mumbles to chatterings and shouts, are all essentially nonverbal, closer at times to scat-singing than to speech. The film’s use of direct sound is fundamental to its sense of immediacy, enhancing the physicality of the dancers and the dance, but the various uses of pre-recorded, off-screen sound – including music, the sounds of water, and occasionally the dancers’ voices as well – are no less important, enhancing what might be called the metaphysicality of the performance.

The interplay between documentary and fiction erupts in a number of other ways. Because Ruiz is not only recording a dance performance, but collaborating with it and rethinking it on a shot-by-shot basis, making each shot an event in itself, the extent to which he is documenting or ‘fictionalising’ the original text of Gallotta’s choreography remains a perpetually open question. By beginning the film on an artificially controlled theatre stage – a veritable test-tube environment – and ending it in nature, on a spectacular seaside location where the dancers have to compete with a heavy wind and the sounds of bird cries and crashing waves, he raises the issue of which setting brings us closer to the reality of the dance, and which brings us closer to the fictional world that is generated in both settings.

To complicate the game, Ruiz intermittently shows us real water dripping and watery shadows onstage to go with the watery sound effects, and in one eerie shot he shows us the auditorium of empty seats behind the dancers, as if to remind us fleetingly of where we are. (The dancers nearest the seats take a bow at this point, and then the dance resumes.) And on the beach at the end, the dialectic between stylised and unstylised movement periodically vanishes: one couple interrupt their duet to look at the ocean, then continue the dance; off-screen music and various props (furniture, lemons on a table) figure in this brief final section as well.

No film I have ever seen, including those of Yasujiro Ozu and 2001: A Space Odyssey, makes me more aware of the floor than Mammame. Thanks to the endlessly mutable, overhead space manipulated by Ruiz, the floor becomes the spectator’s only anchor before the film finally breaks outdoors, and in disorienting high-angle shots, looking down on some of the dancers inside a cell-like enclosure onstage, it becomes the equivalent of a backdrop as well. There is no corresponding sense of ceilings; when Ruiz offers reverse-angles from the floor of the enclosure, and one sees, behind the towering dancers, the faces of other dancers high above them, looking down and muttering their non-verbal comments like spectators peering down a well, one perceives only darkness and open air behind them. In other places, Ruiz will accentuate the long stretch of the stage/floor by positioning objects – mushrooms on a wall, a telephone with a long, receding extension cord – in the extreme foreground. More generally, he seems to favour this literally grounded sense of space in order to highlight the freedom and effort of all the activity done in defiance of gravity, so that the floor inside functions rather like the wind outside – as a force of nature and reality against which all the other elements can be built and measured.

The costumes worn by the dancers are simple and uniform (Gallotta can be singled out by his white undershirt and clown-like white makeup), but their physiognomies are extremely varied, and the choreography tends to downplay sexual hierarchies. (The film’s title clearly carries a suggestion of the maternal, but unless I missed something, the dancers’ interactions don’t appear especially familial; perhaps Mother Nature is the desired connotation.)

Writing about Mammame in Cahiers du cinéma (no. 387, September 1986), Iannis Katsahnias argues that the pleasures of Ruiz’s cinema – his storytelling gifts, the enchanted nature of his special effects, and his rhythm – are personal and obsessive variations on what we expect from Hollywood movies. And while Ruiz displays none of the cinephile film references that we associate with his Nouvelle Vague colleagues – his applications of Welles are at once too extensive, too quirky and too integrated to qualify as hommages – his intricate uses of everyday objects in Mammame as props and décor, combined with the callisthenic energies of the dancers, gives this film some of the exhilaration that we find in the best American musicals.

These objects, to be sure, never attain the naturalistic context of Hollywood props. Not even the lemons that appear on the cliff register as found objects; and the appearances onstage of green vegetation, a mattress with rumpled sheets, clothes on a line, a ladder, and two parked cars never approximate Gene Kelly’s use of a lamppost in the title number of Singin’ in the Rain (1952). But the landscapes of these two films are similarly infectious in their dreamlike elation; and the dialectic of Mammame’s magical stage machinery is reminiscent of the musical’s number ‘You Were Meant for Me’, which lays bare the artifice of Hollywood on a studio soundstage, then snares us in the artifice all over again.

Perhaps the greatest tribute one can pay to Ruiz’s sense of invention in Mammame is to point out its power to transform the unexceptional. At one point we hear a fly buzzing around the stage; at another, Ruiz frames the dancers onstage in a conventional, symmetrical composition. Yet because of the creative deliberation that is felt everywhere in the film, both of these moments register as privileged and integral rather than as lapses or accidents. Whether arrived at by chance or design, that fly and that conventional camera setup are as essential to Mammame as all the stylised artifice surrounding them; and just as all the ideas in the film are subsumed in the physicality of the dance, these choreographic incursions register with the beauty of pure Idea.