Eleven years since the publication of Poetics of Cinema, Raúl Ruiz continues his articulate, erudite, and insightful rumination in Poetics of Cinema 2, a lithe and infectious, yet densely referential, cross-pollinated exposition on the art and nature of image-making in an age of an overexposed cinema that, in its aesthetic democratization and crass commercialization, has […]
Structured as a tale within a tale, Raoul Ruiz’s fractured, defiantly illogical Nucingen House returns to the territory of On Top of the Whale and its otherworldly, tongue in cheek sense of foreboding in its hermetic construction of polyglot characters, suspended time, and inescapable limbo. Unfolding as a reconstructed memory told by an American gambler, […]
Recalling the whimsical, organic transections between past and present, dream and reality, literature and real-life of Raoul Ruiz’s earlier films Memory of Appearances and Time Regained, The Lost Domain is a more somber and pensive, yet still vibrant, impassioned, and intelligently constructed exposition on the process of maturation, the demystification of a childhood hero, and […]
Continuing his preoccupation with the interpenetration of time and memory, fiction and reality of Time Regained (that would be further explored in the subsequent film The Lost Domain), Days in the Country marks Raoul Ruiz’s first Chilean feature film in thirty years. Perhaps inspired by the curious radio news broadcast of his own death, an […]
Auspiciously set in the nebulous and indeterminate milieu of “Switzerland, in the near future”, Raoul Ruiz’s eccentric, surreal fable opens to the shot of an abstracted and dotty young woman named Livia (Elsa Zylberstein) sitting on a park bench overlooking a fog obscured dirt road that is curiously located near the entrance of the San […]
Raoul Ruiz’s Love Torn in Dream is an inscrutably hypnotic, painterly, structurally organic, and logically impenetrable film that lyrically and visually conflates a series of historical periods, role-swapping character actors, and states of consciousness into a fanciful – albeit distended and maddeningly opaque – tale of love, fate, and destiny. Similar to Time Regained in […]