Artist Research Project- Raul Ruiz

By Gabriel Almeida

Raul Ruiz is a Chilean filmmaker, born in Puerto Montt, in southern Chile. Ruiz
supposedly studied law, theology and theater, although as he always said, he
never finished anything. He directed more than 100 films, most of them during his
exile on France after the military coup d'tat led by the dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Ruiz and his fellow directors Miguel Littin, Aldo Francia and Helvio Soto made up
Chile's brief "new wave" during that creative period just before and during the
presidency of Salvador Allende. 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 behavior in Central Conflict
Theory."1 Ruiz films are a constant experimentation over the narrative
possibilities of film. His first long feature, Tres Tristes Tigres (Three Sad Tigers,
1968), follows a group of louche, lower-middle-class characters, who are
neither proletarian nor part of Chile's Europeanized bourgeoisie, in their wander
around disreputable bars, streets hotels on Santiago de Chile. The film highlights
the anarchism and the irony of the life in South America on those years.
According to Ruiz, the narrative structure of the film is based on the poems of
Nicanor Parra in which you have the character A which meet the character B,
then C, and go on, that way he created plenty of fragmented stories that are
created on their characters daily life. In this movie he also started his problem
with language i.e. representation and reality that is going to be an underlying
topic on all of his films.

The next film I want to talk about is called The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting
(1978). To talk about this film we have to highlight several points in which the life
of Ruiz had changed. He moved to Paris, as a political refugee and most
important, he met the artist and writer Pierre Klossowski. From Klossowski, Ruiz
learned more about an analytical consideration of the world, a meditation on
history, art, and the problem of representation, important topics that he will
develop throughout all his theories and films. Back in The Hypothesis of the
Stolen Painting, the film shows an art collector and an unnamed interviewer
dissecting a series of six 19th-century paintings. They, through the forgotten
technique of the tableau vivant, recreates each piece trying to find the secrets
behind what they are suppose to see. The collector argues that certain
imperfections in the artwork -- errors in perspective, anachronistic objects,
misplaced shadows -- are not in fact imperfections, but clues left by the artist. He
feels these are keys to a larger secret, one related to a grand historical
conspiracy. The film can be summarize by these words said by the collector
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. Its like the horizon: once you reach it, there is still the horizon.2
Finally, one of his most ambitious projects was Mistrios de Lisboa (Mysteries
of Lisbon, 2010), based on the episodic novel by the 19th-century Portuguese
writer Camilo Castelo Branco. The narrative turns and twists around three
generations of characters, allowing Ruiz to play with the story around not online
space, the film was made in at least five different countries, but also time and
reality. This four-and-a-half-hour film creates new expression for the medium,
new ideas of editing, scriptwriting and filming trying to capture the infinite of the
story.

At the time, Ruiz, who had been a heavy drinker and smoker for many years,
would never complete his magnum opus, but he was aided by an operation for
liver cancer. However, he just a few months later died in August 19
th
, 2011.

In short, my interest for Ruiz works comes from the fact that he challenges all the
pre-concepts that surround not only film, but also experimentation with film. He
was aware that always a Mystery, it means the inexplicable discover of a person
of his more deep motivation, creates Ministries or institutions that most of the
time just banalize its ideas. Also, Something that I really respect of Raul Ruiz is
his coherence between his life and artwork. He lived through film, its hard to track
when or how he started as a filmmaker there is a series of uncompleted films
and lost short movies before Three Sad Tigers- and on his last moments,
according to his producer, he had three o two projects prepared to be filmed. It is
clear that he really felt cinema as a necessity, as something which lack could
empty the meaning of his life.


Bibliography

1 Ruiz, A Poetics of Cinema, trans. by Brian Holmes, (Paris: Editions Di Voir, 1995); p. 11
2 Ral Ruiz in LHypothse du Tableau Vol/The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (Ruiz, 1979)