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:

Gozzi affirmed that there are only 36 tragic situations. Schiller tried very hard to find more of them, but he found less than Gozzi. ~ Goethe.

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https://nitro.download/view/CABA7BBEE309032/Ombres_chinoises.mpeg
https://nitro.download/view/0DE2E6D86657A21/Ombres_chinoises.en_v3.srt

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Raoul Ruiz – Ombres chinoises (1982) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.

La Chouette aveugle.1987.720p.WEB-DL-Threnodyy.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 34 min
Size: 	2.35 GiB
Video
Codec: 	h264
Resolution: 	1280x720 
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Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
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https://nitro.download/view/75B7F398B427F54/La_Chouette_aveugle.1987.720p.WEB-DL-Threnodyy.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/C8A5811932EFF3E/La_Chouette_aveugle.1987.720p.WEB-DL-Threnodyy.srt

Language(s):French, Spanish, Imaginary language
Subtitles:English

The post Raoul Ruiz – La Chouette aveugle AKA The Blind Owl (1987) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.’
– IMDb

‘Abandoning his project of filming the collected works of Racine on Super 8, Ruiz produced this remarkable piece of ‘theatre on film’ in collaboration with the Avignon Festival. On screen, the absolutely remarkable actors read the text, nothing but the text, and almost all the text of Bérénice. The light modernisation does not turn it into a pretext for a familiar Ruizian rebus. He opts for, simultaneously, great unity and great richness: every scene invents a new effect, a new way to play the scene, but the aesthetic of shadow and light gives it overall unity. Ruiz chose Bérénice precisely because it is the only Racine tragedy that doesn’t end in slaughter. And yet the characters are presented as spectres, ‘dead souls’. This beyond-the-grave ambience relates to an ambiguity some have detected in Racine: the possibility that the characters are already dead. If one takes play and film together, everything occurs as if the drama has already played out, and we are witness to its post-mortem re-presentation. Bérénice is about an impossible meeting, impossible harmony: a tragedy of closing doors. Ruiz’s typical intellectualism is ghosted here by an unexpected lyricism; rarely has his work attained such heights of emotion.’
– Olivier Curchod

https://nitro.download/view/5386B3419732769/Berenice.1983.DVDRip.x264.AC3.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/6E749567649ECFD/Berenice_(1983).srt

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Raoul Ruiz – Bérénice (1983) first appeared on Cinema of the World.