October 3 - October 17
IMMORTAL STORIES: THE LIVING CINEMA OF RAÚL RUIZ
Raúl Ruiz (1941-2011) is one of the great inventors of the cinema. As Jonathan Rosenbaum has argued, each of his works across a vast & rich contribution to cinema & television “seems to combine some aspect of the laboratory & the playpen, usually redefining what we mean by ‘serious’ & ‘unserious’ in the process”.
Ruiz is both a fabulist & a maximalist, a spinner of tales whose immense output stretches to well over 100 films across a variety of formats & that presents often extraordinary adaptations of such varied writers as Proust, Shakespeare, Stevenson, Kafka, Racine, & Camilo Castelo Branco (the source of his majestic Mysteries of Lisbon). His always cinematic work shows influences of the great South American writers Borges, Reyes & Márquez, as well as such key cinematic touchstones as Orson Welles, Roger Corman & the Hollywood B-picture (Ruiz was also an important film theorist). Ruiz’s prolific career started in avant-garde theatre where he wrote dozens of plays by the time he reached his early 20s. He emerged as a filmmaker with his 1st feature, the unique Tres tristes tigres, in 1968.
Committed to the Marxist government of Salvador Allende, Ruiz fled into exile in Paris after the 1973 military coup. Ruiz rose to prominence on the international stage in the late 1970s & early 1980s with a series of works that still define much of his critical reputation: The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting, City of Pirates & Three Crowns of the Sailor.
This tribute season offers key highlights of Ruiz’s impossible-to-encapsulate career, presenting major works of the late 1970s & early 1980s & several of the most important & slyly playful of his later films, including Genealogies of a Crime, Three Lives & Only One Death & Time Regained.
Presented in conjunction with:
October 3
7:00 – THE COMEDY OF INNOCENCE
Raúl Ruiz (2000) 100 mins
Shortly after his 9th birthday, Camille, a sweet-but-strange little boy born of haut-bourgeois refinement, begins to insist that his name is Paul & that his elegant mother is in fact not his mother at all, because he has another – across town. With this as his starting point, Ruiz weaves a stylishly confounding tale of epistemological intrigue, cleverly playing with his characters & interiors to glean as much mystery as possible from this (possibly) supernatural tale. Isabelle Huppert & Jeanne Balibar play Camille’s “mothers”.
Preceded by
Dog’s Dialogue
Raúl Ruiz (1977) 22 mins
Phrases from a lurid tale found in a popular crime magazine are recombined to illustrate different events in Ruiz’s slyly modernist, César Award-winning short.
35mm prints courtesy of L’Institut Français.
9:15 - THREE CROWNS OF THE SAILOR
Raúl Ruiz (1983) 117 mins
Over the course of a booze-soaked evening, a sailor (Jean-Bernard Guillard) begins to tell fellow wanderer (Philippe Deplanche) a hazy tale of life at sea, & zeros in on a romantically chilling story that is as confused & wistful as its drunken narrator. Thus, the audience is drawn into this muddled imaginary landscape which Ruiz fills with signs, symbols, letters, forms of currency, impenetrable aphorisms & confoundingly beautiful imagery, inviting us to succumb to the whims of this poetic hallucination. Exquisitely shot by Sacha Vierny.
35mm print courtesy of L’Institut Français.
October 10
7:00 – THE HYPOTHESIS OF THE STOLEN PAINTING
Raúl Ruiz (1979) 66 mins
An art collector guides an unseen interviewer around 6 paintings attempting to solve the mystery of the disappearance of the 7th. A metaphorical game of hide & seek in which Ruiz, in characteristic Borgesian & Wellesian fashion, playfully deconstructs the art documentary & the limits of pictorial cinema. What emerges in this labyrinthine series of tableaux vivants is a profoundly playful exploration of the relationship between painting, photography & cinema. Luminously shot by Sacha Vierny.
Print courtesy of the National Film & Sound Archive of Australia.
8:15 – TIME REGAINED
Raúl Ruiz (1999) 158 mins
Ruiz’s breathtaking reimagining of the final, almost unfilmable volume of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is one of the great cinematic adaptations. The director’s free-floating & often oneiric style is brilliantly wedded to Proust’s time-shifting & memory-fuelled prose as the bedridden author freely ranges over the incidents & figures of his life. Alongside his recent Mysteries of Lisbon, this is one of Ruiz’s richest & most sumptuous adaptations, featuring a star-studded cast including Emmanuelle Béart, Catherine Deneuve, John Malkovich, Vincent Perez, Marie-France Pisier & Edith Scob.
35mm print courtesy of L’Institut Français.
October 17
7:00 – THREE LIVES & ONLY ONE DEATH
Raúl Ruiz (1996) 123 mins
The wonderful Marcello Mastroianni plays not one but all 4 characters of the film’s title in his penultimate & arguably most enchanting performance. Through the magnificent slipperiness of Ruiz’s storytelling, the 4 distinct tales begin to enter into each other’s histories, histories that are themselves laced with their own fantasies & surrealist circumstance as we become increasingly unsure of whom is who or if indeed they are all the one person. Also featuring Mastroianni’s daughter, Chiara. Co-written by Ruiz & Pascale Bonitzer. With Marisa Paredes.
9:15 – GENEALOGIES OF A CRIME
Raúl Ruiz (1997) 113 mins
Solange (Catherine Deneuve), a notoriously unsuccessful lawyer, finds herself defending a young man charged with murdering Jeanne (also Deneuve), a famous psychoanalyst. Delving into Jeanne’s journals, Solange becomes lost in the intertwining stories & perspectives surrounding the murder. Full of probing formal & dramatic experiments, this constantly shifting & digressive murder mystery is also an audacious & satirical deconstruction of film noir, & a philosophically playful affront to the driving forces of convemtional narrative, character & plot that prevail in classical Hollywood cinema. With Michel Piccoli & Bernadette Lafont.
Backdrops:
Raul Ruiz on set
TIME REGAINED
THE COMEDY OF INNOCENCE
THREE LIVES AND ONLY ONE DEATH
GENEALOGIES OF A CRIME
HYPOTHESIS OF A STOLEN PAINTING