Jean Badin

Quote:
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 »

Quote:
A parody of anthropology, linguistics, and cultural imperialism. The film follows an unlikely team of linguists into the wilds of an ersatz Patagonia to study the last speakers of a dying language. That language apparently consists of a single word, which therefore means everything.Read More »

Quote:
This film is one of Ruiz’s greatest. Once, I read, with his film Ruiz pay tribute to Jean Luc Godard’s Le Mepris. So then, I asked Ruiz (Santiago, 2005)… You were influenced by this Godard’s film… ? – which film ? – … This film Le Mepris with Jack Palance and… your film features same kind of music (Georges Delerue’s music is an actor in Le Mepris, and as far as I can feel Jorge Arriagada composed great music for Ruiz’s film, but does not top Delerue’s), (…) close atmosphere, and two languages… – more than two languages ! – (answered Ruiz). Yes, you are right (…), and then Ruiz goes : “Probably I took it from there”. So, as far as art form and influence is concerned we are aware where inspiration is coming from. Read More »

Quote:
A peeping-tom academic (Michael Lonsdale) and a hunchbacked prizefighter (Jean-Bernard Guillard) find nocturnal rapprochement in their shared inability to sleep. Bottomless philosophical discussions take the men further afield of reality, and they eventually decide to rape a pregnant woman named Violette (Olimpia Carlisi), who then throws herself into the Seine—only to return time and again in new, horrifying forms, including the spectral visage of her son (Ruiz’s child alter ego Melvil Poupaud). One of the director’s most confrontational visions, The Insomniac on the Bridge is a barbed avant-garde meditation on trauma, rationalization, and delirium—an underside that Ruiz, as always, reminds us is clinging to the crust of day-to-day reality.Read More »

Synopsis:
‘A lush, baroque adaptation of Jean Racine’s 1670 tragedy about a Roman emperor who bends to popular will and declines to marry the Palestinian queen he loves.’
– IMDbRead More »