Raoul Ruiz – Querelle de jardins (1982)
From Charles Tesson, Cahiers du cinema 333 (March 1982):
Raul Ruiz filmed the gardens of the Château de Versailles. The first one, French, focuses on the King’s Square (a space where everything is arranged in order to be seen). The other one, English, is the exact opposite, because from any point within it, one falls out of view. Within these two constructions, the labyrinth and the concentric circles, Ruiz conceives a ‘photo-roman’ plot: a husband and his mistress rendez-vous in the English garden (one understands why) and, through a series of accidents and afraid of being seen, he relocates to the other garden. There he runs into his wife who is with her own lover, into the ex-husband of his wife who is with his new mistress, and into the new lover of his ex-wife…. We never see this husband. It’s the camera that creates the fiction. It oscillates between the desire of being at the center of the scene, well in view and filming (viewing) without being seen. In Ruiz, when the camera “marries” the point of view of a character many “divorces” come into perspective. Between the two elements (‘les deux lieux (communs)’), between the picture (the gardens of Versailles) and the plot (the voice-over), the camera is the object and the subject of continuous quarrels.
From the translation in the special issue of Rouge devoted to Ruiz of Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s “The Baroque Eye of the Camera,” which originally appeared in French in Raoul Ruiz, pp. 12-13:
In the cinema of Raúl Ruiz, effects – technical artifices, hyperbolic exaggerations of seeing, filmic citations refilmed – permanently generate affects and ambiguous beings, to the point where the spectator-in-exile slides from narrative to narrative and into the resulting form of an archipelago, maze or spiral, where a cinema lives, practising as its own visual syntax the great baroque rhetorical figures derived from Gracián or Tesauro. For this baroque eye of the camera, a mechanical and artificia1 eye, always places us in the redundant, deceitful perplexity of a multi-faceted vision that is multiple, double, anamorphic, reflective. Like the two intercut stories in Suspended Vocation, each with their own method of filming (alternately black and white then colour), which end up as only one story – but which one? …
Or like, conversely, the prosaic tale of a young cuckolded husband, unfolding in two places and two different cinemas, arousing a veritable Quarrel of Gardens. The Versailles of the woman and the lover, in its cold operatic pomposity, its noble contemplative style, its large frontal shots of clearly arranged gardens à la française. And then the other garden, the husband’s, this time an English garden, with its secrets and shadowy areas, its exploratory camera, its slow and then fast panning shots. A story, a voice-off, but two cinematic styles, in a game of hiding and revealing which reconstructs the love quarrel.
Querelle de jardins.mpeg
General
Container: MPEG-PS
Runtime: 13mn 53s
Size: 115 MiB
Video
Codec: MPEG-2
Resolution: 352x288
Aspect ratio: 1.222
Frame rate: 25.000 fps
Bit rate: 1 041 Kbps
Audio
2.0ch MP2 @ 96.0 Kbps
https://nitro.download/view/7A8386C5A008800/Querelle_de_jardins.mpeg
https://nitro.download/view/F879592EB72DDC3/Querelle_de_Jardins_KG.srt
https://nitro.download/view/B94A4C7197A32DA/Querelle_de_jardins.srt
Language(s):French
Subtitles:English, Spanish
