Raoul Ruiz

Jonathan Rosenbaum from Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons (2004), pp. 236-237:

Within my experience, Ruiz is the least neurotic of filmakers; he doesn’t even seem to care whether what he’s doing is good or not (and, as he’s aptly noted, bad work and good work generally entail the same amount of effort). No single film functions as the be-all or end-all of an evolving career but merely as part of an overall process. Example: the 1985 Régime sans pain — one of his films most influenced by his friend Jean Baudrillard, and perhaps the one that most calls to mind grade-Z SF — grew out of a commission to direct a music video. Ruiz offered a counterproposal that he direct several music videos rather than one; once this deal was made, he shot enough material to interconnect the various videos until he arrived at a feature.Read More »

Capsule by Jonathan Rosenbaum
From the Chicago Reader

Except for The Red Shoes, this shot-by-shot rethinking of a dance performance by the Emile Dubois Dance Group, choreographed by Jean-Claude Gallotta and directed by Raul Ruiz, could be the greatest dance film ever made. Running only 65 minutes, the 1986 film is as much a sensual workout as Ruiz’s Life Is a Dream is an intellectual one; its celebration of pure physicality and movement is as exciting for film lovers as it is for dance enthusiasts. Read More »

Quote:

After Calderón and Proust, Comédie de l’innocence is another literary adaptation, this time from the little-known Italian surrealist Massimo Bontempelli. Updated from the last fin de siècle to this more recent time of uncertainty, Comédie de l’innocence’s plot is small but perfectly formed. With Aristotelian rigour it moves from the opening conundrum (a child torn between two mothers), through the complication (the confrontation between the mothers and Ariane’s brother Serge), to a satisfying conclusion. Ruiz, who takes a co-credit as scriptwriter with Françoise Dumas, keeps up the tension, however, with laconic and enigmatic dialogue. When Ariane visits the empty flat of Isabella, a nosy neighbour remarks: ‘I really don’t want to know.’ Ariane replies: ‘There is nothing to know.’Read More »

“The film revolves around the concept of soap opera. Its structure is based on the assumption that Chilean reality does not exist, but rather is an ensemble of soap operas. There are four audiovisual provinces, and the threat of war is felt among the factions. The political and economic problems are immersed in a fictional jelly divided into evening episodes. The entire Chilean reality is viewed from the point of view of the soap opera, which acts as a revealing filter of this same reality”. (Raúl Ruiz)Read More »

Synopsis
An ambitious project of Chile-born, Paris-based Raul Ruiz, this psychological drama brings to the screen the famous classic of Marcel Proust with fidelity to its interior monologues and streams of consciousness. Proust (Marcello Mazzarella), on his deathbed in his small apartment on Rue Hamelin, is looking through old photos and remembering his life, as real characters intermingle with fictional ones from his novels. The period is 1914-18, when WWI is raging. Hidden in Paris, thanks to his asthma, Marcel Proust wanders into the night. He finds an aging courtesan in Café de la Paix, which is deserted by the curfew. Charlus, the seducer of young boys, is at the Palais des Felicites where he meets his lovers.Read More »

Ruiz, in an a propos to the film: ‘Above all this film should not be seen as a biography of the painter Gustav Klimt (what these days we call a ‘biopic’). It is indeed a fantasy or, if you prefer, a phantasmagoria, a fresco of real and imaginary characters revolving around a single point of focus: the painter Klimt. You see images in the film as if it were Klimt himself who is seeing them. Or rather who is dreaming them. Because this film will be a daydream: exuberance of colours, distortion of space, extreme complexity of camera movements. It would take too long to explain the processes I intend to use in order to record this era, one of the richest, most contradictory and most disturbing in the history of humanity.’Read More »

The drunken nights of several listless chancers in Chile’s capital city build inexorably to violence.

Review by Gonzalo San Martin @IMDb:
This movie is the best portrait of Chilean society. Ruiz show us like a group of little people with little problems, with a very special way of life. The strangest Spanish in all South American with the funniest accent too. This movie is like Martin Scorsese’s Mean Street but without the crime ingredient. You must see it if you wanna know what’s to be a Chilean, how you can feel believing that you’re in the center of the world but actually living in the end, almost hanging from the continent. Raul Ruiz right now is living in Paris and making the most bizarre but fascinating films of the french production. “Tres tristes tigres” is very difficult to find but if you can, i tell you that you’ll have a real gem.Read More »

Sir Paul, a distinguished author, blinded in a horrific accident, advertises for an amanuensis, an assistant to help him with his writing. He employs the amiable Jane Ryder to be his eyes as he revisits scenes from his past and works on what he intends to be his final opus. Jane appears to be ideal: attractive, intelligent, unruffled by her employer’s abrupt eccentricities. But, gradually, we come aware that Jane has another agenda. Incrementally, Sir Paul’s familiar surroundings are altered. Strange things happen around the house and he becomes increasingly dependent on his new assistant. Jane plays increasingly sadistic games until their relationship breaks down.Read More »

Raúl Ruiz is one of the great cinematic self-perpetuators, like Louis Feuillade and Jacques Rivette—a film like this gathers a motion and a rhythm that makes it feel like it could on and on, self-generating new stories and new characters ad infinitum. Based on the novel by Camilo Castelo Branco (whose writing has been the source for Oliveira’s similarly fatalistic romance, Doomed Love), Mysteries of Lisbon is, to paraphrase a line from one of its many characters used to describe a disastrous relationship he had, a game that turns into a bourgeois romantic drama, to which I would add, that turns into a game. It starts—as all stories must?—with an orphaned boy questioning his parentage and falling into a fever, and out of that starting point the film evolves less as a story than a cartography of characters crossing points in space and time.Read More »