artist research project-ruiz

8/10/2019 Artist Research Project-Ruiz

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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'tatled 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


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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


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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


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clear that he really felt cinema as a necessity, as something which lack could

empty the meaning of his life.

Bibliography

1Ruiz,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)
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