I've seen Nadie Dijo Nada (Nobody Said Nothing) in a special show devoted to Raúl Ruiz, made by amateurs in Santiago, Chile. The film was never commercially released and nobody saw it since 1971. Nadie Dijo Nada was a total revelation, not just because its filming form but it unveiled a country, a Chile we didn't know and at the same time, we were shocked by the overwhelming imagination of the young Ruiz, able to find magic and absurd in any everyday situation. Like "Tres Tristes Tigres", this film follows a group of bohemian characters wandering in an almost already extinct city of Santiago, a city where human relations were under another code of behaviour, another moral and ethics, vanished with the neo-liberal economic system ruling this country since a couple of decades. Maybe the relation is pretentious, but I think Ruiz is close to Fellini in the way the imagination of both directors overflows in such a level because the wide range of freedom of their vision, and the way of how both of them use the local, the national as material to work their personal worlds. (In fact, i think there are similitude between this Ruiz' movie and Fellini's "I Vitelloni"). In this movie you feel the alcohol, the staying overnight and some of middle-class boredom and sleepiness, hard to describe but so typical of "being Chilean" that only people who lived here could understand. The actors are again Luis Alarcón, Jaime Vadell and Shenda Román, but there is also the good Carlos Solanos, a character in himself, and, of course, the great Nelson Villagra playing a role of anthology. Briefly, Ruiz and his gang, having fun and making "the big mess" of this movie. No film made after this in Chilean cinematography has a comparable level of madness, imagination, freedom and cheek that has Nadie Dijo Nada. It must be showed urgently in order to be known.
