Raoul Ruiz

A surreal travel drama, shot on Sicility with Italian actors. Il Viaggio Clandestino is a film about saints and sinners. Whether you are blessed or doomed is often dependent on someone’s soul that on whether they pray or suffer. The kindred spirit of San Gil! the Holy Gil! is Ciccio Bavaria who, unlike the former, continues to seek sin. For Bavaria sin is liberating and dynamic. The film tells the story of the journey made by these two protagonists; a journey that leads to the demise of San Gil, while Bavaria is reincarnated as Buddha. There is another traveler, a clandestine traveler. Christ, always fleeing the angels. This Christ does not help humanity with miracles, but by keeping himself alive as best he can giving weather forecasts. In this strange sanity story, Ruiz allowed himself to be inspired by apocryphal books about saints of flesh and blood.Read More »

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….Read More »

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Jim Hawkins only dreamed of one thing: to go on a treasure hunt. After long listening to the accounts of an old boat captain, he decides to embark on the adventure.Read More »

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Ombres chinoises was produced for the French TV magazine Juste une Image, a monthly show which in its almost three years of production cataloged all kinds of visual experimentations: from Muybridge to the latest computer animation of the New York Institute of Technology. I.N.A. asked for Ruiz’s participation for the April 1982 show. He decided to produce Ombres Chinoises (probably a project that was wandering in his mind long before), a catalog of dramatic situations acted out by Chinese shadows with voice-over narrations (depositio: actually, as Torrent notes below, these are only voiceovers in the technical sense. The “tragic situations” are represented through shadow, puppetry, and dialog not narration). Nothing comes closer to the Ruizian aesthetics. After the first dramatic situation, titled “enigma,” a panel reads:Read More »

wikipedia:
Litoral is a four-part 2008 Chilean TV miniseries written and directed by Raúl Ruiz. Originally subtitled “Tales of the Sea”, it is thematically similar to the director’s film Three Crowns of the Sailor (1983) and is the second of the oneiric folklore-themed miniseries’ he made for TVN, following on from La Recta Provincia (2007).Read More »

Synopsis
“The filmmakers tell a story on three time planes of two men of different nationalities and fates who are connected by a love of flying. At the beginning of the film, the younger, Chilean-born Max is already 50 when he hears gunfire: soldiers have risen up against Salvador Allende’s attempt to institute democracy. The event awakens memories of another war. Back then, as a military pilot, he had taken off from London to join the fight against the German Luftwaffe. When he returned to the base he almost didn’t realize that the new instructor, a Frenchman named Antoine, is the one who taught him to fly years earlier. Read More »

The narrator, an Arab immigrant of about 35, H., is a projectionist in an old cinema. One day, attracted by the music, he looks through the skylight and is fascinated by what he sees: the dancer in the film seems to be staring straight at him. He falls in love with her, but the vision lasts only a moment and the young woman never appears again. Shortly afterwards, an old man bursts into the cabin claiming to be his uncle. H. wants to prepare a meal for him and grabs a bottle of oil. On the label he finds the image of the dancer. A free adaptation of The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat and The Condemned for Lack of Faith by Tirso de Molina.Read More »

Raoul Ruiz’s rare version of Shakespeare’s “Richard III”.
Richard of Gloucester uses murder and manipulation to claim England’s throne.

“My mise-en-scène focused on the object: it’s about King Richard III and his vertiginous power. More than on a character, I was focusing on a mechanism: the play of power — with a bias, this time approaching caricature — I wanted to develop all of the parodic forms surrounding the representation of power. The result is somewhat akin to Ubu roi.Read More »

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When the child Manuel wanders into a garden that is off-limits to him, he meets an unidentified fisherman, and another boy – the boy is actually himself several years down the road. Manuel experiences three different versions of his encounters in the garden, revealing that fate can have several twists and turns in one’s life, depending on decisions that are made early on.Read More »