Experimental

Experimental film which attempts to communicate in strictly cinematographic terms the emotions of a pregnant woman alone.
Music composed and played by Gavin Bryars.Read More »

This is the fourth in a series of seven projected video essays (four of which were completed) that Ruiz was commissioned to make in 2002-2003 for use among Chilean community organizations and broadcast on public television. Cofralandes, the head-title for each of the segments of Ruiz’s series, is taken from a song by Violeta Parra where it evokes the “land of milk and honey,” the “land of Cockayne,” the “green world” imagined by Gonzalo in The Tempest.Read More »

Moment (1969). This is shot in colour and shows the face of a girl called Tina Fraser framed on a pillow. The dominant colour is red and this gives the film a warm feel as Tina smokes and either masturbates or simulates this act. We see her face as she works herself up to orgasm, then afterwards in complete relaxation. As a consequence this feels very much like a heterosexual version of Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (1963). Perhaps Dwoskin felt his short Asleep had provided the template for Warhol’s Sleep (1963), and was calling in the debt. Moment was the most carefully composed of the Dwoskin shorts on show last night. That said, the top right side of the screen is a kind of dead space made up of nothing but reddish pillow, with Tina Fraser’s head on the left of the frame; presumably the shot was set up in this way, with a mild imperfection, to prevent viewers from responding to it simply on the level of visual aesthetics.” – Stewart HomeRead More »

This is the second in a series of seven projected video essays that Ruiz was commissioned to make in 2002-2003 for use among Chilean community organizations and broadcast on public television. Cofralandes, the head-title for each of the segments of Ruiz’s series, is taken from a song by Violeta Parra where it evokes the “land of milk and honey,” the “land of Cockayne,” the “green world” imagined by Gonzalo in The Tempest.Read More »

txt from Strictly Film School
(…)
“In Pain Is…, Dwoskin’s thoughtful rumination on the nature of pain, this intersection occurs in the conceptual mechanism of pain itself, in the way it surfaces amorphously, imprecisely, throughout the process and conduct of life, as well as in its insidious ability to create a subconscious shift in (sensorial) awareness – in essence, to reconfigure (if not transform) one’s immediate reality because of its existence. It is this untenable quality of pervasiveness and indefinability that Dwoskin articulates in an introductory analogy that sets the tone for the film’s organic (and inherently circular) exposition:Read More »

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For more than twenty years the films of Ruiz have led us into the fields of uninhibited delirium, free associations, and intricate games of collage. Ruiz, paying no heed to conventions, leads his audience into a labyrinth without a map, without warning and without an Ariadne allowed to help them retrace their steps. “Regulars only” seems to be the imperative which thrusts us into his creative world. However, it is a playful attitude that he proposes. Labyrinth, yes, but devouring monster, no — except the one we assemble ourselves from the fragments of mirrors that Ruiz has left scattered on the road. These fragments, their selection and random order, is indeed the art of Ruiz.Read More »

A film that seeks a balance between feature, form and lighting essay, with autobiographical elements and echoes of the primeval fairy tale Beauty and the Beast. By the former Film Maker in Focus Stephen Dwoskin.

‘The Sun and the Moon, a film fairy tale, is about two women’s terrifying encounter with ‘Otherness’ in the form of a man, abject and monstrous, and for them to either to witness, accept or partake in his annihilation. All are caught in their own isolation and are fearful of the menace that has to be met. Read More »

A man with no emotional ties, a survivor of a long journey, collects giddy images, scattered fragments of a splintered identity like the regions he crosses through. He wears himself out with the strangeness of signs, places, and unfathomable languages. There is no god or indulgence in his nights, but the acceptance that there is only flesh.
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Ruiz is no lover of documentary. But the opportunity to make an essay-film offering his ‘observations of Chile’ produced in him a mammoth work, recently shown in seven parts on Chilean television. Shooting with a digital camera, Ruiz refinds the mobility and mercuriality of his early Chilean work. But he is also able to explore anew the transmutation of reality into fiction: Chile becomes the imaginary country of Cofralandes, ‘a popular version of paradise, a folkloric paradise. In the beginning there is a song about a place where poor people can live without poverty, and they can eat everything – even the houses. The rivers are made of wine.’Read More »