Raul Ruiz

Raul Ruiz

Raúl Ernesto Ruiz Pino ( July 25, 1941 in Puerto Montt - August 19, 2011 in Paris ), also known as Raoul Ruiz , was a Chilean - French film director , screenwriter and film producer .

life and work

Complete works

Raúl Ruiz's life's work includes no less than 115 films for cinema and television. By 1962 he had written exactly 100 plays, not one more and not one less; He made the decision to do so at the age of 15. Although he was sometimes referred to as baroque or as a surrealist , his idiosyncratic and complex work can hardly be assigned to any category. He claimed the term baroque for himself and characterized it in an original way:

“Le baroque… est une façon d'économiser et pas une dépense. Il ne faut pas mélanger le baroque et le rococo mais plutôt le comparer à un certain restaurant à midi; il ya très peu d'espace, où on met le maximum de gens, pour avoir le maximum de clients. »

“The Baroque… is a way of saving and not an expense. You can't mix Baroque and Rococo, you have to compare the former with a restaurant at lunchtime: there is very little space, you try to accommodate as many people as possible in order to have the largest possible number of customers. "

- Raúl Ruiz

The beginnings

The son of a captain moved to the country with his family after contracting tuberculosis at the age of five. At the age of 19 Ruiz made his first short film, La Maleta (The Suitcase); he took the subject from his own play. He studied law and theology before enrolling with Fernando Birri for a year at the film academy in Santa Fe, Argentina in 1962 . In 1963 he was the presenter of a daily journal broadcast on Chilean television. In 1965 he wrote scenarios for feature programs in Mexico and, after his return to Chile, adapted classical pieces for television.

With his fourth film Tres tristes tigres , released in 1968 , he won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival in 1969 . The film is based on a play by Alejandro Sieveking and describes the life of three outsiders in the summer of Santiago de Chile . In 1971 he shot a revealing version of Franz Kafka's penal colony . He was appointed by the Allende government as a consultant for cinema culture.

Escape to France - experiments and successes

After the coup in Chile in 1973 , he left the country in 1974 and went into exile in France. In the same year he shot the film La question de l'exil there with amateur and professional actors, including Françoise Arnoul and Daniel Gélin . The film deals ironically with the situation of the numerous Chileans in exile in France - to the displeasure of many Chilean artists. After the premiere in a Parisian cinema, the film fell into oblivion.

In the following years he concentrated on short films and commissioned work for television, including Petit manuel de l'Histoire de France in 1979 . With a sense of humor, he embarked on various experiments. Colloque de chiens, for example, is a short film consisting of a series of photos, with a voice off-screen describing disturbing experiences. La Vocation is the adaptation of a bulky text by Pierre Klossovski , an intricate theological dispute between the voice of vocation and the voice of doubt - a short film that recalls similar attempts by Luis Buñuel . In 1979 he also made the television film L'Hypothèse du tableau volé ; he wrote the script for it together with Klossovski. The film begins like a report about Klossovski, but turns into a story about two men who argue about painting and puzzle over a collection that seems to be missing a picture. One of the two strolls through the scenes shown in the pictures and meets people living in the scenery. The film had a shocking impact among French intellectuals and provoked a lively debate about whether there was any meaning to art and reality.

Some of the French film audience accepted Ruiz's work with enthusiasm. His style of abstraction and illusion was a welcome contrast to the naturalistic French cinema of the 1970s. In March 1983, the Cahiers du Cinéma dedicated a complete edition to him. Ruiz was hailed as the second Orson Welles , a master of baroque abstraction who staged simple, poetic hallucinations on a minimal budget. In the 1980s he sequenced film after film; for the short film Colloque de chiens he received a César for best short film in 1980 .

Big cinema

In the 1990s, his work took a surprising turn. He made films with a large cast, awarded roles to stars, in 1994 to Arielle Dombasle in Fado majeur et mineur , 1995 to Marcello Mastroianni in Trois vies et une seule mort , 1997 to Catherine Deneuve and Michel Piccoli in Généalogies d'un crime , who as Genealogy of a crime has been published in German. Jessie (1998) is a bizarre Alfred Hitchcock- inspired story starring Anne Parillaud and James Baldwin .

In 1995 he published a small treatise on cinema, Le Poétique du Cinéma . The following year he became a French citizen.

With Le temps retrouvé , The Time Found again , he ventured into the ambitious undertaking of adapting Marcel Proust with Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Béart and John Malkovich in the leading roles for the cinema. Les Ames fortes with Laetitia Casta , published in 2001, is based on a novel by Jean Giono .

At that time, his films were also represented at the major, renowned festivals, including the Cannes International Film Festival .

The late years

He remained true to his predilection for the puzzling, the paradoxical and the unspeakable. Ce jour là is a macabre, grotesque comedy set in a strange language with absurd repetitions. In his late work he again limited himself to productions with a more modest budget. La Maison Nucingen , published in 2009, uses surrealist sources; the film has little in common with Balzac 's novel of the same name . His last production, the film The Mysteries of Lisbon ( Les Mystères de Lisbonne , Mistérios de Lisboa ), which also became a small television series with a total duration of 4½ hours, is based on a novel by the Portuguese writer Camilo Castelo Branco ; the film received a number of awards, including a. 2010 the Prix ​​Louis-Delluc .

Raúl Ruiz died on August 19, 2011 at the Hôpital Saint-Antoine in Paris at the age of 70 as a result of an infection. A year earlier he had had surgery to treat liver cancer . From 1969, Ruiz was married to the Chilean director Valeria Sarmiento , who worked on many of his films, among other things as an editor. She took over the Lines of Wellington project from her late husband . She completed the historical drama about the lines of Torres Vedras , a defensive ring during the Napoleonic Wars in Portugal in the early 19th century, in 2012, with John Malkovich , Soraia Chaves , Nuno Lopes and Mathieu Amalric in the lead roles. Following the example of Ruíz's last work, The Secrets of Lisbon , the film came on television as Linhas de Torres Vedras as a multi-part series.

Filmography (selection)

• 1963: La maleta (short film)
• 1964: El regreso (short film)
• 1967: El tango del viudo
• 1968: Tres tristes tigres
• 1969: Militarismo y tortura (short film)
• 1975: Diálogos de exiliados
• 1976: Utopía (TV movie)
• 1977: Colloque de chiens
• 1978: La vocation suspendue
• 1979: L'hypothèse du tableau volé
• 1981: O Território
• 1983: Les trois couronnes du matelot
• 1983: La ville des pirates
• 1985: L'Éveillé du pont de l'Alma
• 1985/91: L'île au trésor / Treasure Island
• 1986: Mémoire des apparences
• 1987: La chouette aveugle
• 1996: Trois vies & une seule mort
• 1997: Genealogies of a crime (Généalogies d'un crime)
• 1999: Time found again (Le temps retrouvé)
• 2000: Comédie de l'innocence
• 2002: Cofralandes, rapsodia chilena ( documentary )
• 2005: Le domaine perdu
• 2006: Klimt
• 2008: La Maison Nucingen
• 2010: L'estate breve (documentary)
• 2010: A Closed Book
• 2010: The Secrets of Lisbon (Mistérios de Lisboa)
• 2010: Mistérios de Lisboa (TV multi-part), based on the novel by Camilo Castelo Branco from 1854 (the series was broadcast in German by arte in May 2011 )

literature

• Jean-François Rauger: Raul Ruiz . In: Le Monde . August 22, 2011, p. 18 .

Web links

• Raúl Ruiz in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Individual references and notes

1. ↑ Film director Raoul Ruiz has died. In: orf.at , August 19, 2011, accessed on November 21, 2017.
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e} This section follows the obituary of Jean-François Rauger in Le Monde, unless other sources are expressly stated
3. ↑ Quoted from Le Monde
4. ↑ ^{a b c d} Raúl Ruiz . In: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 26/2011 from June 28, 2011, supplemented by news from MA-Journal up to week 33/2011 (accessed via Munzinger Online )
5. ↑ Small handbook of the history of France
6. ^ The stolen picture hypothesis
7. ^ Raúl Ruiz: Le Poétique du Cinéma . Ed. Dis Voir, 1995. ISBN 9782906571389
8. ↑ Film profile ( Memento of the original from August 16, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at labiennale.org (accessed September 4, 2012) 
9. ↑ www.imdb.com , accessed February 8, 2013