Raoul Ruiz

A small group of well-to-do vacationers go on a hiking trip into the woods. Foolishly unprepared to deal with Mother Nature and their situation, they wander around lost for days and weeks, becoming more and more fatigued, hungry, and desperate. A brief encounter with a pair of epicureans on a bridge fails to garner them any of the gluttons’ feast due to a language barrier. Eventually their party begins to die, and the survivors ration their meat among them, attaching a religious-type ritual to its dispensation.Read More »

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This film is one of Ruiz’s greatest. Once, I read, with his film Ruiz pay tribute to Jean Luc Godard’s Le Mepris. So then, I asked Ruiz (Santiago, 2005)… You were influenced by this Godard’s film… ? – which film ? – … This film Le Mepris with Jack Palance and… your film features same kind of music (Georges Delerue’s music is an actor in Le Mepris, and as far as I can feel Jorge Arriagada composed great music for Ruiz’s film, but does not top Delerue’s), (…) close atmosphere, and two languages… – more than two languages ! – (answered Ruiz). Yes, you are right (…), and then Ruiz goes : “Probably I took it from there”. So, as far as art form and influence is concerned we are aware where inspiration is coming from. Read More »

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A relic of the Popular Unity period where we find a teacher talking to himself about the horror of the education system; the hard heartedness of the far right; the frivolity of the left; and a legion of the downtrodden. It is a film about verbal violence; life as a soap opera; and such dreams as mediocre movies are made on. Indecipherable to the world, but a Rosetta Stone for Chilean hieroglyphs.Read More »

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Written adroitly by Duane Pool, “Shattered Image” has one of those stories about which it is all but impossible to say anything with any degree of certainty. It does seem clear that Parillaud’s Jessie and Baldwin’s Brian are an exceptionally attractive Seattle couple honeymooning at a posh Jamaican resort and that Jessie is deeply disturbed. She apparently has endured a rape and its trauma has been compounded by the death of her wealthy father. She has vivid dreams in which she sees herself as an ultra-cool hired assassin–and her latest assignment is to knock off none other than Brian or a man who is his twin. As for Brian, is he the solicitous husband he seems to be? Or is it the cold-blooded assassin who is real, and Jessie but a figment of her dreams?Read More »

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This three part French TV serial for children (alternate versions exist as a feature, Manoel’s Destinies, and a 4 part Portuguese TV serial, Adventure in Madeira) is the favourite of many devotees of Raúl Ruiz. This is because it ties the enchantment and mystery of Lewis Carroll, Carlo Collodi and the Brothers Grimm to the filmmaker’s experiments with narrative strategies and what he calls the pentaludic model of storytelling (where characters are thrown dice-like into combinations and situations governed by the play of Chance and Destiny).Read More »

“With this film I returned to the world of Tres tristes tigres, to some people, in this case writers, who live in their own reality and believe that it is, in fact, Chile.” Raul RuizRead More »

After his father’s death, a Parisian medical researcher returns to a region of Portugal to deal with part of the family legacy – a prosthesis factory owned by an old family friend. He finds the factory owner and his wife “possessed” by the local Marquis and finds himself constantly accosted by all sorts of supernatural manifestations.Read More »

La maleta is a 1963 Chilean short film directed by Raúl Ruiz. It was Ruiz’s first film as a director.
This Expressionist short film was presumed lost for many years. When the rough footage was found in 2008, Ruiz agreed to edit it again. The new version was premiered at the Valdivia Film Festival 2008.Read More »

“Ostensibly a faithful adaptation of Pierre Klossowski’s autobiographical novel about the struggle between rival doctrinal factions with the Catholic Church, THE SUSPENDED VOCATION illustrates Ruiz’s belief that institutions, in order to survive, must treat all forms of dissidence as treason. In 1942, a film entitled The Suspended Vocation was begun by a group of monks; running out of money, they abandoned the project. Twenty years later, a religious order hires a professional director to again take up this film project; the director, having examined the earlier footage, concludes that it is unusable. He decides to use professional actors, at which point the church authorities, fearful of the escalating costs, withdraw their support. Read More »