In his section of A TV Dante (Cantos 9-14), Ruiz moves back and forth between four types of audio-visual syntax:

1. Classical Hollywood syntax, epitomised by shot/reverse shot exchanges with strong eyeline looks. Canto 9 begins with a long-held establishing shot that shows the relative positions and eyelines of a group of characters. When Virgil enters this space, he engages Dante’s gaze in the conventional manner. In the Ruizian system, such normality is a ruse, or more exactly a structure upon which all subsequent subversions will proceed.

2. Russian montage in the Eisenstein-Vertov tradition, especially the kind of purely graphic or pictorial matching between successive images that has long become part of the language of ads and rock video. The second major set of shots in Canto 9 make an impossible labyrinth of the space of the waiting room by foregrounding, each time, the head of a mock-classical statue.

3. French impressionism in the style of Man Ray’s or Jean Epstein’s film experiments of the ‘20s; this syntax proceeds via dreamy fades and superimpositions not strictly articulated in relation to an on-screen perceiver. Ruiz launches into impressionist passages intermittently in A TV Dante and often in Dark at Noon.

4. A free-associative grammar reminiscent especially of American avant-gardist Maya Deren (Meshes of the Afternoon). Here, a symbolist dream-editing links wildly discontinuous times and spaces on the basis of some thread – which can be (as in Deren) a continuous gesture carried across shots, or a play on gazes and matches. Ruiz often establishes (as in Canto 9) a classical eyeline syntax in which the actor’s look is ‘diverted’, suddenly introducing inserts that work as POV reverse shots but are clearly from some other space – or, indeed, a purely fantasticated, impossible space.

On a more general formal plane, the entirety of A TV Dante is a remarkably unstable mass on the level of its text-image relations. As in India Song, where Marguerite Duras intended the image and sound tracks to continually approach, touch one another and then take divergent paths, the global montage plan of Ruiz’s work, across all six cantos, resembles an elaborate game of hide-and-seek between fragments of Dante’s text and the images that nominally illustrate it. Ruiz orchestrates an audiovisual polyphony where, momentarily, an element of text will anchor an image, or vice versa; but, more often, there are many image-clusters and sound sources (such as two pieces of music at once, plus the spoken text) to contend with.

Ruiz describes his general method as the attempt to find a connection, in the course of creating a work, between ‘elements that are not evidently connected’ at the outset. This accounts for the instability of his form/content ensembles, and their volatile tendency to drift between extreme poles. The conceptual territory of A TV Dante is strung out between, at one end, its symbolist mise en scène of motifs from Dante (which Ruiz compares to the kitsch imagery of ‘50s horror movies) and, at the other end, almost cinema-vérité shots of Chilean street life and folklore (which he describes as a pastiche of ‘60s political documentary).

When Ruiz’s image/sound ensembles slip between syntaxes and commute between different diegetic worlds, a major casualty is usually the initially central protagonist or narrator. Many of Ruiz’s narrators end up disappearing into or getting absorbed by the worlds they recount – obliterating any posture of dispassionate objectivity or safe distance. Ruiz must have been attracted to the ethereal, allegorical situation of Dante’s characters, wandering through the many horrors of hell without once being threatened or scorched. The inferno that begins in Canto 9 as a fabulous projection out of the gaze of a wide-eyed poet quickly takes on a hallucinatory life of its own, ending in Canto 14 with the total evacuation from the image-track of the ghostly ciphers of Dante and Virgil.