The Library Lover: The Films of Raúl Ruiz

Description

“Baroque imagery, bizarre humor and labyrinthine plots made his elusive and allusive oeuvre unlike anything else in contemporary cinema. Although most of his films were made while he was an exile in France, his work was part of the fabulist tradition that runs through much Latin American literature.”—Ronald Bergan, The Guardian

The Return of a Library Lover is the title of an autobiographical short by Chilean director Raúl Ruiz and, looking over his remarkable filmography, it’s easy to see why: adaptations of Dante, Kafka, Proust, Calderón, Pierre Klossowski, Camilo Castelo Branco, the Iranian novelist Sadegh Hedayat, and Enrique Lafourcade (among many others) dot his career, while a list of citations could include Jorges Luis Borges, Lacan, Le petit prince, Qing Dynasty–era theories of portraiture, Lewis Carroll, and nineteenth-century Catholic thought—often in the same film. Intensely cerebral, his films are also highly entertaining, often hilarious, and always surprising. “The world of his movies — as experienced by the characters and the audience alike — is at once soothingly, elegantly familiar and booby-trapped with surprises,” wrote A. O. Scott in the New York Times Magazine. “There are sudden disappearances, long-buried secrets coming to light, supernatural happenings and bizarre coincidences. In his universe, improbability is the rule.”

Born in Chile in 1941, Ruiz studied law and theology before attending film school in Argentina. Returning to Chile, he completed a handful of works—including the seminal The Penal Colony—before the 1973 military coup forced him into exile in France, where he began a nearly forty-year career spanning several continents, countries, funding sources, and formats. A stint as codirector of the Maison de la Culture of Le Havre gave him the artistic latitude required for his dizzying narrative experiments, philosophical provocations, and surrealist touches, as did the relative largesse of European television funding in the 1980s. The success of later works like City of Pirates (1983) led to bigger budgets and bigger stars (and a brief shedding of his “Ulmer of the European Art Film” tag); by the mid-1990s Ruiz was able to work with such international stars as John Malkovich (Time Regained), Catherine Deneuve (Geneologies of a Crime), and Marcello Mastroianni (Three Lives and Only One Death).

Ruiz passed away in August of 2011, having completed one last film in his native Chile after the international success of his Mysteries of Lisbon, regarded by many as the encapsulation of his career. Whether well funded or barely funded, made for film or television, in France, Portugal, Chile, or the U.S., his films embraced a “logic governed by miracles,” as he wrote, a “poetics of cinema” (to borrow the title of his book on theory) that remains unmatched in its freedom.

Jason Sanders, Film Notes Writer


Friday, March 2, 2012
7:00 p.m. Mysteries of Lisbon
Raúl Ruiz (Portugal/France, 2010). The noble and the damned are interchangeable in this magisterial gambit on the art of storytelling, based on a nineteenth-century Portuguese novel yet more radical than any contemporary tale. A young Lisbon orphan wonders who he is, but soon every possible identity comes into question. (272 mins)

Saturday, March 3, 2012
8:30 p.m. Three Lives and Only One Death
Raúl Ruiz (France/Portugal, 1996). In his second-to-last role, Marcello Mastroianni stars as a husband, a professor, a butler, and a businessman in Ruiz’s light-hearted, Borgesian salute to fantasy life and the telling of tales. “A brilliant comedy . . . sexy . . . elegantly surreal” (New York Times). (123 mins)

Sunday, March 18, 2012
6:00 p.m. Time Regained
Raúl Ruiz (France/Italy/Portugal, 1999). Introduced by Larry Bensky, executive producer of the website radioproust.org. Ruiz's adaptation of the final volume of In Search of Lost Time is a film at once wholly faithful to Proust and to the distinctive vision of its director. With Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Béart, Vincent Perez, and John Malkovich. (162 mins)

Friday, March 23, 2012
6:45 p.m. The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting
Raúl Ruiz (France, 1979). A satire on the urge to define and thus control art, The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting follows a doddering art collector as he pontificates on several paintings by a great artist that he’s recreated in human form in the rooms of his monstrous estate. With Ruiz’s delightful short, Dog’s Dialogue (1977). (84 mins)

Wednesday, April 4, 2012
7:00 p.m. The Penal Colony
Raúl Ruiz (Chile, 1971). Loosely adapting a Kafka story, Ruiz creates a satirical power allegory worthy of Jonathan Swift and Eduardo Galeano. An impoverished Latin American country has nothing left to export except the only thing the First World expects from it: atrocity, or at least the news of it. With A TV Dante: Cantos 9–14, which Ruiz set in Santiago. (133 mins)

Saturday, April 14, 2012
6:00 p.m. Tres Tristes Tigres
Raúl Ruiz (Chile, 1968). Ruiz’s debut feature adapts a popular play involving a seedy older brother who prostitutes his younger sister. Positioned in opposition to then-popular Mexican melodramas, the film pointedly disregards their overly dramatic aesthetics and creates instead a hyper-realist, Cassavettes-like style more concerned with everyday realities. (100 mins)

Sunday, April 15, 2012
4:00 p.m. The Suspended Vocation
Raúl Ruiz (France, 1977). Three different “films” about rival Catholic factions are combined in Ruiz’s dry investigation of institutional frameworks, whether religious or cinematic, photographed by Sacha Vierny (Last Year at Marienbad). (107 mins)

Theater Admission Prices

Single Feature
$5.50 BAM/PFA Members, UC Berkeley Students
$9.50 Adults (18-64)
$6.50 UC Berkeley faculty, staff, and retirees
Non-UC Berkeley students
Senior citizens (65 & over)
Disabled persons
Youth (17 & under
Additional Feature $4.00 All Patrons

More Info

Link

http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/filmseries/ruiz

Call

(510) 642-1412

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