Morelia International Film Festival

Likewise, there are many facets to Ruiz’s career. There are the lush films with the big stars like Mastroianni, Deneuve or Malkovich; the tiny films made for small audiences at filmmaking courses or for old-style patterns; there is his television work, the offshoots of his theater work, the strange documentaries or essays, the sketches which prove a theory, and the unusual horror films, children’s fantasies or detective thrillers…

For a long time, commentators identified a bi-cultural perspective in Ruiz’s career —formed at the intersection and the drift between the European and Latin American traditions. Swiftly, since the late 80’s, Ruiz has broadened his sphere of influence and investigation. He has felt especially drawn, through the contact with erudite and creative collaborators, to the traditions of Asia and the Arab world.

Yet Ruiz and his characters are fatherless in another, equally pressing sense. In his unruly world, personal identity is always continuously changing. His motley crew of heroes and heroines are forever in search of a home, a self, or any kind of resting point. The problem is that none of these charming, old-fashioned ideals seem to actually exist.

But if there is a territory that can be profitably inhabited, it is that shifting and partly phantasmagoric space formed at the intersection of many settings, stories and identities. If Ruiz found himself, at the end of the 1970’s, at the helm of a return to fiction within experimental narrative cinema, it was because of his open, shameless delight in spinning stories, conjuring imaginary worlds, and playing like a child with his building blocks.

Ruiz is one of the greatest storytellers of modern cinema; not of one story at a time, but of many suddenly overlapping and displacing each other. He feels attracted to physical places where stories seem to unfold everywhere, like in a perpetual cycle. And those multiple characters can easily jump, or be shunted, from one story to another, from one world to another. But perhaps, in the end, the story is not really what matters to Ruiz –at least not in a conventional way. The narrative is just a pretext or an excuse for him, a launching ground for tangents and digressions, a way of crossing a bridge into some other realm.

Some of Ruiz’s films resemble the B movies of yesteryear; the cheap decadent horror, fantasy, or pirate movies that he used to watch as a child in Chile. Ruiz loves obvious artifice. Until the late 80s his films used cheap special effects, typical of cinema’s earliest days. In more recent years he has begun to explore the possibilities of digital technology. His films have become, alternately, either slicker, moderately well-financed productions like Time Regained, or more off-the-cuff and spontaneous, as in his Chilean Rhapsody series. But, in each case, artifice still rules, never realism. “I am the only filmmaker in France,” he has recently declared, “who is anti-Bazinian —except for Alain Robbe-Grillet.”

Ruiz emphasizes the strangeness of the shots, the editing, and the scene transitions. His work is devoted to the mysteries —and miracles— of cinema as a multiform, stuttering language. “If you take two images and link them by superimposition, a simple enough device, the spectator finds himself in two places at the same time: a logical impossibility”. From such spider-like connections between shots, characters and events, Ruiz explores a particular metaphysics of cinema. He is undoubtedly a highly philosophical filmmaker, but his intellectualism is (as he has avowed) often of a “very sporty and funny” kind. For if Ruiz is seeking to create a rebus –a didactic illustration of abstract ideas– he pursues this through the intricate, material alchemy of images, sounds, environments and deeds. This translation of what is rational into what is sensory always results in a joyous betrayal of the original intention, a vertiginous transformation of what is given and the opening of a door onto the unknown, that which has not been considered or felt.

Ruiz is the poet laureate of cinematic excess. Many elements of his films appear adrift, hallucinated, surreal. He dreams of making a film in one continuous shot where all the elements would be utterly transformed from the beginning to the end; or conversely, where the characters and plot would be perfectly consistent but the film would “begin in the time of Ivanhoe and end as a Western.” And yet, while there is an abundant pleasure principle driving Ruiz’s creativity, there is also something more chaste and sobering: an attenuation of dramatic time, a suspension of meaning, a sometimes grim determination to find a unifying, poetic line through a film that does not depend first and last on characters, sentimental destinies, and central themes…

Reflecting on Eisenstein’s unusual laws of cinematic perspective, which Ruiz adopts as perverse axioms —the part is greater than the whole, the instant is longer than the day— Pascal Bonitzer once intuited the deep logic of the director’s poetics and politics. “If the smallest is greater than the largest, the order of the world is overthrown, inverted. The cinematic dream becomes a subversive enterprise, the subversion proper to humour.” And as his latest films evoke for us, all at once, current forms of global terror, an intimate sense of creeping mortality, and buried memories of that terrible Chile he once fled, we experience anew the beautiful, regenerating paradoxes of Raúl Ruiz’s cinema—its vertigo within the void, its dances of death, its laughter in the dark.

Adrian Martin

Source: Buenos Aires 6th International Independent Film Festival catalogue