Even more than most of Ruiz’s work, The Penal Colony stands in a perversely oblique relationship to its ostensible script and subject. It is certainly doubtful whether the innocent spectator would deduce from a single viewing that the basic industry of the Latin American island of Captiva is the manufacture of news on behalf of international press agencies. Yet only this realisation lends coherence and satirical point to the otherwise erratic sequence of events and encounters that constitute the main body of the film. It explains the ambiguity of the scenes of torture and execution, which appear both playful and savage, and the range of stereotyped attitudes struck by the President (Luis Alarcon) for the benefit of the visiting journalist, a declared ‘specialist in underdeveloped countries’.

The sequence of the night-time prison visit, where some form of torture seems to be in progress (off-screen), ends with an enquiry as to whether thejournalist is impressed, which is probably only comprehensible if one already appreciates that she is in search of the quintessential Latin American news stories of repression and atrocity. One deduces that the solider to whom she complains about the plagiarised Captiva news must be a correspondent with some responsibility for ‘producing’ the island’s staple export. But then the convention takes a more precisely ironic turn when the journalist claims to have just witnessed a scene straight out of one of the soldier’s novels; to which he replies that this is just what ‘Garcia Marquez and that other lad Fuentes did’. Magic realism indeed!

The general strategy of The Penal Colony is in fact common to all of Ruiz’s Chilean films: deceptively casual reportage of the fantastic seen in everyday terms. Here the starting point was Kafka’s parable about a famous explorer called upon to witness a model execution in a remote settlement, which ends with the condemned man escaping and the officer in charge destroyed by his own execution machine. Ruiz displaces Kafka’s central irony of the ‘perfect execution’ into a more complex ironic commentary on Latin America’s strenuous efforts to conform to the stereotypes by which it is commonly represented abroad.

Ruiz has since reflected that his concern at this time with torture and military dictatorship now seems something of a presentiment of what was soon to happen in Chile and other Latin American countries. The Penal Colony can also be seen to foreshadow the deadpan irony and play of stereotypes in his European films, while many of its more bizarre and mysterious details – the rattling of sabres, a swordfight reflected in a window, the President singing for his guest – recall Ruiz’s beginnings as one of Chile’s first playwrights of the Absurd.