¡Viva Raúl Ruiz!

Video essay-tribute by Catherine Grant

The above is a very short study of a sequence from Diálogos de exiliados/Dialogues of Exiles (France, 1974/5), an extremely low-budget film written and directed in Paris by the late and much lamented Raúl Ruiz. Diálogos was the first film to be made by that filmmaker in exile from Chile, with many of his countrymen and women, after Augusto Pinochet's 1973 coup d'état against the legally elected Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende. Controversially, at the time, it wasn't exactly the most conventional, or, despite its satire, the most crowd-pleasing 'exile' or 'solidarity' film that could have been made in those circumstances. And yet, as Zuzana Pick wrote of it, "[Diálogos] can fulfill the function that Ruiz intended for it by provoking dialogue. With its clear and evocative title, this first work of Chile’s cinema of resistance inserts itself into the struggle against fascism."

A few weeks back, Film Studies For Free published a sincerely felt tribute to the recently deceased Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz. The tribute took the customary, if somewhat impersonal, form for this blog: a long list of links to openly-accessible scholarly and critical writing on Ruiz's work.

Shortly after that list appeared, though, FSFF's author was asked for a more personal response to the work of one of her favourite film artists: to contribute some thoughts on a beloved moment in Ruiz's films to a wonderful collection of such thoughts -- by critics, academics, and people who knew the Chilean filmmaker -- currently being published in serial form at the MUBI Notebook.

This was how the above, little video tribute came into being. The links to all the contributions are being added below as they, also, appear online.

Many thanks to David Phelps for his wonderful work of commissioning and curation. It was a real pleasure, albeit quite a poignant one, to take part, and an honour to have one's work published in such excellent, international company.

• Chilean Memories by Jeronimo Rodriguez (En español, coming soon)
• Don Raúl's Ruizness by Gonzalo Maza (En español, coming soon)
• La maleta (1963/2008) by T.C. Smith 
• Diálogos de exiliados (Dialogue of Exiles, 1975) by Catherine Grant (video essay)
• Colloque de chiens (Dog’s Dialogue, 1977) by Maxim Pozdorovkin
• On Top of the Whale (1981) by James Quandt
• City of Pirates (La ville des pirates, 1983) by Ignatiy Vishnavetsky
• Point de fuite (1984) by Gina Telaroli
• Mammame (1986) by Joe McElhaney
• Brise-glace (1989) by Luc Moullet (in English and French / en anglais et français)

COMING SOON

• The Golden Boat (1990) by C. Mason Wells
• Poetics of Cinema (1994/2005) by Matthew Flanagan
• Shattered Image (1998) by Zach Campbell
• “Los dos caminos” / “The Two Paths” by Cristián Sánchez Garfias
• Time Regained (Le temps retrouvé, 1999) by David Pendleton
• Cofralandes, Chilean Rhapsody (2002) by Quintín
• Klimt (2006) by Adrian Martin
• A Closed Book (2010) by David Phelps
• Mysteries of Lisbon (2010) by Carlos Losilla

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Double Vision: Links in Memory of Raúl Ruiz, a Filmmaking Legend

Updated Sunday August 21, 2011

The late Raúl Ruiz in conversation with Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli at the University of Aberdeen in 2007. One of the most prolific directors of the last 50 years, having written over 100 plays before starting in the cinema, Ruiz films have been characterized as ironic, surrealistic and deeply experimental.

Here is my own theoretical fiction: in the waking dream that is our receiving the film, there is a counterpart; we start projecting another film on the film. I have said to project and that seems apt. Images that leave me and are superimposed on the film itself, such that the double film - as in the double vision of Breton traditions - becomes protean, filled with palpitations, as if breathing. [Raúl Ruiz, 'The Face of the Sea (In Place of an Epilogue)', Poetics of Cinema 2]

Every time that a general theory or a fiction is elaborated I have the impression that ... there is a painting stolen, a part of the story or puzzle missing. The final explanation is no more than a conventional means of tying together all the paintings. It’s like the horizon: once you reach it, there is still the horizon.  [Raúl Ruiz in L’Hypothèse du Tableau Volé/The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (Ruiz, 1979)]

... Raul Ruiz's comments on filmmaking outside metropolitan centres are revealing. He tells us how, when he was studying theater and film in Santiago with the aid of American textbooks, he was surprised to find "that the films we loved the most were badly made" - because they were not made according to the set of assumptions about action and behaviour in Central Conflict Theory." This led him to strategise that "every film is always the bearer of another, a secret film" and that "the strong points [of the inexplicit film] are found in the weak points of the apparent one." This argument seems to be not just about how fascination presents itself in film; it also suggests that fascination (Ruiz calls it "the gift of double vision that we all possess") is not just an aesthetic project: It is, above all, a social and political project. [MA Abbas, 'Dialectic of Deception', Public Culture, 1999, v. 11 n. 2, p. 347-363, p. 360 citing Ruiz, A Poetics of Cinema, trans. by Brian Holmes, (Paris: Editions Di Voir, 1995); p. 11, 111, and 109 respectively:]

Film Studies For Free is very sad to pass on news of the death of Chilean film director Raúl Ruiz in Paris after a long illness. 

Film critic Dave Kehr points to the report in Le Monde in which Ruiz's producer, François Margolin, informed the French newspaper that the director "was in the midst of finishing the editing of a film he has shot on his childhood in Chile ... And he was preparing another film in Portugal, on a famous Napoleonic battle.”  Perhaps we will get to see the first of these tantalising projects. FSFF very much hopes so.

Below is this blog's sincerely felt tribute to the brilliant Ruiz, one of the most memorable and talented of prolific filmmakers (and one of the most prolific of filmmakers against the odds): a list of links to online studies of the director's work, as well as to interviews with him, and writing by him. Further links will continue to be added here in the days and weeks to come.

Links to posthumous tributes to Ruiz, along with other material about his films, are being gathered by David Hudson at the Mubi Notebook.

Update (August 21, 2011): The list below was expanded with many additional entries, including, at the foot of the post, a number of documentaries about (and/or recordings of) Ruiz. Of particular note is the documentary Exiles: Raoul Ruiz Chilean Film Director (BBC, 1988, directed by Jill Evans), which contains many marvellous excerpts from Ruiz's films. 

Also see Jonathan Rosenbaum's marvellous tribute to Ruiz, 'Ruiz Hopping and Buried Treasures: Twelve Selected Global Sites'.

You can watch Ruiz's Three Crowns of a Sailor (1983, circa 117 mins) online at present for free, too!

And Girish Shambu has just posted "A Ghost at Noon",  a remarkable and very personal tribute to Ruiz by Adrian Martin (author or editor of many of the essays below).

• Raúl Ruiz, 'Three Thrusts at Excalibur', Screening the Past, Issue 26: Special Issue: Early Europe, 2009 


• Raúl Ruiz, 'Palomita Blanca (Little White Dove, Chile, 1973)', Rouge, 2, 2004 


• Raúl Ruiz, 'El Realismo Socialista (Considerádo Commo Una de las Bellas artes) (Socialist Realism [Considered as One of the Fine Arts], Chile, 1973), Rouge, 2, 2004


• Raúl Ruiz, 'The Comedy of Shadows (La Comédie des ombres): Fragments of a Screenplay', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Raúl Ruiz, 'Las Soledades (The Solitudes, UK, 1992)', Rouge, 2, 2004 


• Raúl Ruiz, 'The Golden Boat (USA, 1990)', Rouge, 2, 2004 


• Raúl Ruiz, 'Handbook of French History (Petit manuel d’histoire de France, 2 part TV series, France, 1979)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Raúl Ruiz, 'Suspended Vocation (La Vocation suspendue, France, 1977)', Rouge, 2, 2004

• Acquarello on Raúl Ruiz at Strictly Film School


• Barthélemy Amengual, 'The Expropriation (La Expropriacíon, Chile, 1971)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Michael J. Anderson, 'Three Crowns of the Sailor: A Resurfaced Masterpiece from Cinema's Forgotten Decade', Tativille, May 17, 2006


• BBC Radio Movie Café with Raul Ruiz and Alan Marcus Interviewed by Janice Forsyth (29 November 2007) (mp3) 


• Cyril Béghin, 'Time Regained (Le Temps retrouvé, France, 1999)', Rouge, 2, 2004 


• Cyril Béghin, 'Treasure Island (L'île au trésor, France, 1986, released 1991)', Rouge, 2, 2004 


• Patrick Blaine, 'Reconstructing Resistant Memory in the Chilean Social Documentary: Guzmán and Ruiz', 2010 LASA Congress, Toronto, October 6-­9, 2010


• Christine Buci-Glucksmann, 'La Querelle de jardins (Quarrel of Gardens, short, France, 1982)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Christine Buci-Glucksmann, 'Le Borgne (The One-Eyed Man, 4 episodes, France, 1980)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Christine Buci-Glucksmann, 'Les Divisions de la nature: Un homme, un château, ‘Chambord’ (The Divisions of Nature: A Man, a Castle, ‘Chambord’, short, France, 1978)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Maximilian Le Cain, 'Genealogies of a Crime (Génealogies d’un crime, France, 1997)', Rouge, 2, 2004
  


• Robert Castle, 'Proust Regained: On Raul Ruiz's Time Regained and Filming the Unfilmable' Bright Lights Film Journal, 51, 2006


• Michael Chanan, 'New Cinemas in Latin America 1960-1995', from The Oxford History of World Cinema, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, OUP, 1996; Section 3, The Modern Cinema 1960-1995, pp.427-435


• Michael Chanan, 'Documentary film: Latin America', from Ian Aitken, ed., Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, Routledge, 2006


• Ian Christie, 'Los Tres Tristes Tigres (Three Sad Tigers, Chile, 1968), Rouge, 2, 2004


• Ian Christie, 'The Penal Colony (La Colonia Penal, Chile, 1970)', Rouge, 2, 2004 


• Ian Christie, 'Dans un miroir (In a Mirror, short feature, France, 1984)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Ian Christie, 'The Real Presence (La Présence réelle, France, 1983)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Olivier Curchod, 'Bérénice (France, 1983)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Fergus Daly, 'Wind Water (aka Feng Shui, short, UK, 1996)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Fergus Daly, 'Manoel on the Island of Marvels (3 part TV series, France, 1985)', Rouge, 2, 2004
  


• Thomas Elsaesser, 'Raoul Ruiz’s L’Hypothèse du Tableau Vole', European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam University Press, 2005 - scroll down in PDF to p. 251)


• Thomas Elsaesser, 'The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (L’Hypothese du tableau volé, France, 1978)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Filipe Furtado, 'That Day (Ce jour-là, France, 2003)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Michael Goddard, 'Towards a Perverse Neo-Baroque Cinematic Aesthetic: Raúl Ruiz's Poetics of Cinema', Senses of Cinema, 30, 2004  
  


• Michael Goddard, 'Hypothesis of the Stolen Aesthetics', Contretemps, July 2002


• Eleanor Kaufman, 'Deleuze, Klossowski, Cinema, Immobility: A Response to Stephen Arnott', Film-Philosophy, 5, 33, 2001


• Andreea Marinescu, Dialoguing across catasptrophes: Chilean Post-Coup and Post-Dictatorship Cultural Production in the works of Roberto Bolaño and Raúl Ruiz, PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2010
  


• Jonathan Marlow, 'Raúl Ruiz and the Poetics of Cinema', GreenCine Daily, September 26, 2006


• Adrian Martin, 'A Place Among the Living (aka A Taste for Murder, Une place parmi les vivants, France/Rumania, 2003', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Adrian Martin, 'Responso: Homage to Huub Baals (video, work-in-progress, 2004)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Adrian Martin, 'Three Lives and Only One Death (Trois vies et une seule mort, France, 1996)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Adrian Martin, 'Dark at Noon or Eyes and Lies (L'œil qui ment, France, 1992)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Adrian Martin, 'A TV Dante (UK, 1989)', Rouge, 2, 2004 


• Adrian Martin, 'The Territory (Portugal/USA, 1981)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Adrian Martin, 'Great Events and Ordinary People (Des grands événements et des gens ordinaires: Les Élections, short feature, France, 1979)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Gonzalo Masa, 'Ruiz and the Devils: La recta provincia', Rouge, 11, 2007


• Abdelwahab Meddeb, 'Mirror of Tunisia/Tunisia, the Trance and the Stone (Miroir de Tunis/Tunis, la transe et la Pierre, Tunisia/France, 1993)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Jean Miotte, 'Miotte vu par Ruiz (Miotte by Ruiz, France, 2001)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Rouge #2, an annotated filmography of the work of Raúl Ruiz as a director, Rouge, 2, 2004 


• Luc Moullet, 'The Blind Owl (La Chouette Aveugle, France/Switzerland, 1987)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Zuzana M. Pick, 'Chilean cinema: ten years of exile (1973-83)', from Jump Cut, no. 32, April 1987, pp. 66-70  


• Zuzana Mirjam Pick, 'Dialogue of Exiles (Diálogo de exilados, France 1974)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Maxime Renaudin, 'Días de campo (Journées à la campagne, Days in the Country, Chile/France, 2004)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Michael Renov, 'History And/As Autobiography: The Essayistic in Film and Video', Framework, 2,3, 1989


• Bérénice Reynaud, 'Three Crowns of the Sailor (Les Trois couronnes du matelot, France, 1982)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'Ruiz Hopping and Buried Treasures: Twelve Selected Global Sites', JonathanRosenbaum.com, August 19, 2011


• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'Mapping the Territory of Raúl Ruiz', JonathanRosenbaum.com, October 13, 1990


• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'Trying To Catch Up With Raúl Ruiz: A Conversation with Jonathan Rosenbaum', Cinema Scope no. 11 (summer 2002)


• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'Mammame (France, 1985)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'The Roof of the Whale aka On Top of the Whale (Hek dak van de Valvis/Le Toit de la baleine, Netherlands/France, 1981)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'Snakes and Ladders (Le Jeu de l’Oie: La Cartographie, short, France, 1980)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'Dogs’ Dialogue (Colloque de chiens, short, France, 1977)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Guy Scarpetta, 'Love Torn in Dream (Combat d’amour en songe, France/Portugal/Chile, 2000)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• A.O. Scott, 'A Mild Mannered Maniac: Interview with Raoul Ruiz', New York Times, July 31, 2011


• Clemente Sobourin, 'Cofralandes: Chilean Rhapsody (Cofralandes: Rapsodia Chilena, Chile/France, 2002)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Lesley Stern, 'Life is a Dream (Mémoire des apparences, France, 1986)', Rouge, 2, 2004 


• Charles Tesson, 'Letter from a Filmmaker, or The Return of a Library Lover (Lettre d’un cinéaste ou Le Retour d’un amateur de bibliothèques, short, France, 1983)', Rouge, 2, 2004


• Antonio Traverso, 'Contemporary Chilean Cinema and Traumatic Memory: Andrés Wood's Machuca and Raúl Ruiz's Le domaine Perdu', IMA, 2008
   

Centre for Modern Thought, University of Aberdeen: Tuesday 13th June 2006, Mr Raoul Ruiz, the distinguished film director spoke to us in broad terms about his work in film (he has directed almost 100 films) and film theory (he is the author of a multi-volume book entitled "The Poetics of Cinema").

More about → Double Vision: Links in Memory of Raúl Ruiz, a Filmmaking Legend

Obstinate Battles for Documentary Memory: Patricio Guzmán Resources Online

Regular readers will know, hopefully, that Film Studies For Free issues forth only on the topics that take its fancy. It receives no commercial or other patronage, and it does not respond to 'prompts' for its hypertextual-utterances: nor does it want any! It loves and supports free online culture, and it prefers to make its own reading, viewing and blogging choices. Sometimes, though, it does get independently inspired by commercially-available film releases or new offline publications of a very worthwhile kind, as was the case today. And the result is a little bit of unsolicited free advertising...

FSFF was so HAPPY to hear that Chilean documentarist Patricio Guzmán's films The Battle of Chile (1975-1978), The Pinochet Case (2001) and a particular personal favourite, Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997 - see the opening sequences above) have been released on a new DVD by a great and longstanding supporter of Latin American film culture -- Icarus Films -- that it decided to mark this very auspicious occasion with a related scholarly links-list in honour, and warm appreciation, of Guzmán's hugely important films.

• Articles on Guzmán's website:

• MOVIES THAT MARKED ME FOREVER
• When I was about eight or nine years old (I really don’t remember exactly)...
• THE DOCUMENTARY EXPLOSION
• THE LOST IMAGES
• PIECES OF LIFE
• STAINS ON THE NEGATIVE
• OBLIVION AS A CENTRAL THEME
• THE CHILEAN DOCUMENTARY, A PANORAMIC LOOK

• Pat Aufderheide, 'Interview with Patricio Guzmán', Center for Social Media, Oct. 25, 2002

• Pamela Biénzobas, 'Patricio Guzmán's Salvador Allende: The Personal Painting of a Universal Myth', Senses of Cinema, Issue 34, January 2005

• Katherine Bliss, 'Review of Chile, Obstinate Memory/Battle of Chile', The Public Historian, Vol. 21, No. 1, Winter 1999

• Judy Branfman, 'Poking in the wound or reclaiming history? Documentary Films as Gendered Historical Memory in Post-Dictatorship Chile and Spain', CSW Update, October 2007
  

• Michael Chanan, 'The Changing Geography of Third Cinema, originally published in Screen Special Latin American Issue (edited by Catherine Grant and Jackie Stacey), Volume 38 number 4 Winter 1997

• Michael Chanan, 'The economic condition of cinema in Latin America ', Third World Affairs 1985, London: Third World Foundation, pp.379-389

• Michael Chanan, 'Latin American Cinema in the 90s. Representational Space in Recent Latin American Cinema', E.I.A.L. ESTUDIOS INTERDISCIPLINARIOS DE AMERICA LATINA Y EL CARIBE, Vol. 9, No. 1, enero-junio 1998 (Cultura visual en América Latina, Editor invitado: John Mraz)

• Michael Chanan, New Cinemas in Latin America (1960-1995), from The Oxford History of World Cinema, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, OUP, 1996

• Hugo Chaparro Valderrama, 'Patricio Guzmán according to Jorge Ruffinelli', El ojo que piensa, 2002
  

• First Run/Icarus Films Presskit for THE BATTLE OF CHILE (1975-1978), CHILE, OBSTINATE MEMORY (1997), THE PINOCHET CASE (2001), Films by Patricio Guzmán
  

• First Run/Icarus Films Presskit for SALVADOR ALLENDE (2004), Film by Patricio Guzmán

• Jim Hillier, 'The Battle of Chile/La batalla de Chile, Patricio Guzmán, 1975–9', 100 Documentary Films (London: BFI/Palgrave, BFI Film Guides, 2009 (scroll down to Ch. 14))
  

• Sarah Kessler, 'An Imperfect Cinema', The Brooklyn Rail, September 2009
  

• Nicola Marzano, 'Third Cinema Today', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 6, 2009
  

• Nicola Marzano, 'The Art of Hunger: re-defining Third Cinema', 16:9, November 2009 - 7. årgang - nummer 34

• Zuzana M. Pick, 'Chilean cinema: ten years of exile (1973-83)', from Jump Cut, no. 32, April 1987, pp. 66-70
  

• Margaret Power, 'Chile, Obstinate Memory', H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. September, 1998
  

• Margaret Power, 'The Battle of Chile', H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. August, 1998
  

• Juan Carlos Rodríguez, The Postdictatorial Documentaries of Patricio Guzmán: Chile, Obstinate Memory, The Pinochet Case, and Island of Robinson Crusoe, PhD Thesis, Duke University 2007
  

• Antonio Traverso, 'Unsettled Screens: The Cinema of Latin America', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 9 No. 12, March 2005
  

• And a very special bonus for French or Spanish speakers: … à Valparaiso (1963 France/Chile 29 mins, directed by Joris Ivens, with a script by Chris Marker and assistance from Patricio Guzmán). See Adrian Danks' Senses of Cinema article on this film here.

More about → Obstinate Battles for Documentary Memory: Patricio Guzmán Resources Online