In a year that marks the director’s 75th birthday, the Film Society is pleased to present Life Is a Dream: The Films of Raúl Ruiz (December 2-22), the first part of an ongoing retrospective devoted to Ruiz, among the great visionaries in film history and perhaps its most intrepid explorer of the unconscious.
Arguably Chile’s most internationally renowned and prolific filmmaker, Raúl Ruiz completed over one hundred films in numerous national cinemas. The mind-bending works that comprise Ruiz’s eclectic, influential oeuvre are labyrinthine, beguiling, and oneiric. They are obsessed with questions of theology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, and visual expression; wildly experimental and slyly humorous; surrealist, magical realist, gothic, and neo-Baroque. His films are unified by his singular imagination, idiosyncratic working methods, and the dreamlike experience of watching them. To see one of Ruiz’s films is to go on an adventure full of humor, intellectual curiosity, and artistic daring; to see several of them is to land on a new continent, where his many obsessions find their delirious expression in the most surprising ways and where reason and madness are delightfully, terrifyingly indistinguishable.
Mysteries of Lisbon
The first part of the series showcases the range of Ruiz’s staggering career, from his feature debut in Chile (Three Sad Tigers) to selections from his highly inventive, limited-budget European films from the 1970s and ’80s following his home country’s coup d’etat (including The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting, The Territory, Three Crowns of the Sailor, and new restorations of Bérénice and The Suspended Vocation); the expanded scope and star-led casts of his celebrated ’90s work (Genealogies of a Crime, Three Lives and Only One Death, Time Regained); and highlights from his ever-prolific final decade, such as international success Mysteries of Lisbon and Peninsular War epic Lines of Wellington, directed by Ruiz’s frequent collaborator and wife Valeria Sarmiento from a script he had prepared before his death. The Film Society is pleased to host Sarmiento for Q&As and appearances at screenings throughout opening weekend.
To contextualize Ruiz’s films and influences, Life Is a Dream also features a sidebar of two titles from Ruiz’s list of favorite films to screen: Ousmane Sembene’s Black Girl and Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat. Part two of this landmark retrospective will be announced in the coming months.
Tickets will go on sale November 17. A 3+ Film Discount Package and an All Access Pass will be available.
Life Is a Dream: The Films of Raúl Ruiz is organized by Dennis Lim and Dan Sullivan. Special thanks to Association des Amis de Raoul Ruiz; National Council of Culture and Arts of Chile; La Cinémathèque française; La Cinémathèque de Toulouse; Cinemateca Portuguesa; Archives du Film du CNC; National Audiovisual Institute (INA); The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Paulo Branco; Valeria Sarmiento; Ethan Spigland; Jeronimo Rodriguez.
The Black Cat
Lineup:
All films screen digitally and at the Walter Reade Theater unless otherwise noted.
New Restoration
Bérénice
Raúl Ruiz, France, 1983, 105m
French with English subtitles
Ruiz had a longstanding interest in Racine, whose work he planned in at least one instance to direct for the stage. (He even toyed, according to the critic Olivier Churchod, with the idea of filming the great French playwright’s complete works on Super 8.) His imagination was particularly ignited by this 1670 tragedy about a Roman emperor who bends to popular will and declines to marry the Palestinian queen he loves. When he filmed it, it was with his usual lush, baroque textures but also, as Churchod points out, with a kind of ghostly insubstantiality, as if the characters were disembodied spirits re-enacting a drama they’d already lived out. One of the director’s straighter adaptations, Bérénice was also one of several Ruiz movies that seem to take place in a borderland between life and death. Restored by François Ede for La Cinémathèque française with the support from Ina.
Saturday, December 10, 5:00pm
Wednesday, December 14, 4:30pm
New Restoration
Black Girl / La noire de…
Ousmane Sembene, 1965, France/Senegal, 65m
French with English subtitles
Ousmane Sembene’s first feature and one of his finest—and the movie that opened the door for African cinema in the West—was selected by Ruiz in 2003 (on the occasion of a retrospective in Bobigny) as one of his favorite films to screen. A young woman (Mbissine Thérèse Diop) leaves Senegal with dreams of a more carefree and glamorous existence in France, where she procures a job as a live-in maid and nanny for a young couple in a tiny apartment on the French Riviera. She is gradually deadened by the endless routines and tasks and rhythms of life, and by the dissatisfactions felt by the husband and wife, which they project onto their “black girl.” Sembene’s “perfect short story is unlike anything in the film library: translucent and no tricks, amazingly pure, but spiritualized,” wrote Manny Farber, who named it the best movie of 1969.
Sunday, December 11, 5:30pm
Wednesday, December 21, 4:30pm
The Black Cat
Edgar G. Ulmer, USA, 1934, 35mm, 65m
English, Latin, and Hungarian with English subtitles
Edgar Ulmer’s influence on Ruiz is conspicuous throughout the Chilean master’s oeuvre, and no film seems to have left a more indelible mark on Ruiz’s imagination than this hallucinatory and macabre 1934 horror/thriller. The Black Cat begins with a creepy encounter between an American novelist, his wife, and a Hungarian psychiatrist (Bela Lugosi), and soon enough we’re transported to the haut modernist mansion of a Satan-worshipping Austrian architect (Boris Karloff), where the intrigues grow ever more bizarre and unsettling. The film’s visionary sense of surreality and idiosyncratic approach to politics earned it a slot in Ruiz’s 2003 list of his favorite films to screen (composed on the occasion of a retrospective in Bobigny), and the affinities between it and his own films are striking.
Sunday, December 4, 2:00pm
Thursday, December 22, 2:30pm
City of Pirates
City of Pirates / La ville des pirates
Raúl Ruiz, France/Portugal, 1983, 35mm, 111m
French with English subtitles
Propelled by a ferocious creative energy and blending folk legends, surrealist poetry, children’s adventure stories, and Hollywood horror movies, City of Pirates follows a decidedly nonlinear narrative about a sleepwalking virgin (Anne Alvaro), a ten-year-old boy (Melvil Poupaud) who claims to have raped and murdered his entire family, and the lone inhabitant of an island castle (Hughes Quester) who shares his body with an imaginary sister. Funny, frightening, and enigmatic, City of Pirates is like a cross between Peter Pan and Friday the 13th told with a wildly baroque visual style that suggests both Georges Méliès and Sergio Leone. An NYFF23 selection.
Saturday, December 3, 6:00pm (Introduction by Valeria Sarmiento)
Wednesday, December 7, 4:30pm
Thursday, December 22, 4:00pm
Dialogues of the Exiles / Diálogos de exiliados
Raúl Ruiz, 1975, Chile/France, 100m
Spanish and French with English subtitles
In 1974, forced into exile after the violent military coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power, Ruiz fled Chile for Paris. He’d hardly been living there more than a month when he started filming this ironic, thinly fictionalized depiction of the city’s Chilean exile community and its tense rapport with its allies on the French left. Much of Dialogues of the Exiles consists of documentary-style interviews with displaced Chileans and staged conversations in which divisive questions emerge—how should Chilean exiles represent their country abroad? What kind of political engagement can they keep up? How well can they get on with their well-meaning but somewhat clueless French benefactors? The film caused controversy for its sometimes unflattering view of the exile community, but it confirmed Ruiz’s position as a fiercely observant filmmaker with an unsentimental view of the political defeat he and his compatriots had suffered. Restored by the Cinémathèque française with the support from CNC.
Saturday, December 3, 3:45pm (Introduction by Valeria Sarmiento)
Monday, December 5, 3:45pm
Saturday, December 17, 2:00pm
Genealogies of a Crime / Généalogies d’un crime
Raúl Ruiz, France/Portugal, 1997, 35mm, 103m
French with English subtitles
You could take this nutty fantasy of murder and identity-swapping—starring Melvil Poupaud as a man accused of killing his aunt, Catherine Deneuve both as the victim of the crime and the murderer’s defense lawyer, and Michel Piccoli as the leader of a fringe psychoanalytic society—for a kind of index of Ruiz’s obsessions as a filmmaker. Characters bleed into each other; odd rituals are enacted; chronologies splinter and dissolve. Piccoli’s character, doomed by a rare disorder to forget whomever he meets, uses photographs as memory surrogates. For one of his rivals, on the other hand, the most severe human dependency isn’t on images but on plots. “Men think that they live stories,” he says in a moment suggestive of Ruiz’s own willingness to flood his movies with narrative information. “In reality, it is stories that possess men.”
Saturday, December 10, 9:15pm
Tuesday, December 13, 4:15pm
Sunday, December 18, 4:00pm
The Golden Boat
Digital Restoration
The Golden Boat
Raúl Ruiz, Belgium/USA, 1990, 83m
Ruiz’s first film made in the USA freely borrows from American police dramas and telenovelas alike in transforming downtown NYC into a phantasmagorical labyrinth of noirish intrigues, inexplicable menace, and metaphysical quagmires—and, in the process, achieves a unique portrait of its particular time and place. A bloodthirsty assassin (Michael Kirby) joins up with a philosopher and a rock critic in pursuit of the Mexican soap star who has captured his heart, and along the way he encounters one bizarre character after another. Featuring memorable cameos from Kathy Acker, Jim Jarmusch, Barbet Schroeder, Annie Sprinkle, and Vito Acconci, and with music by John Zorn, The Golden Boat must be seen to be believed. An NYFF28 selection.
Saturday, December 10, 7:15pm
Wednesday, December 14, 2:30pm
The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting / L’Hypothèse du tableau volé
Raul Ruiz, France, 1978, 35mm, 66m
French with English subtitles
The film that arguably put Ruiz on the map was this beguiling art-historical whatsit—an investigation, informed equally by scholarship and speculation, into the connections between a series of paintings by the unheralded 19th-century French painter Frédéric Tonnerre and human sacrifices carried out by a Baphometic cult. An art collector and his unseen interviewer seek to unravel the increasingly bizarre and sordid links between the paintings and their historical moment by staging painstakingly crafted tableaux vivants to conjure their mystery, menace, and erotic energy. However, one of the paintings went missing many years ago… Co-written by Pierre Klossowski, The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting announces one of Ruiz’s key concerns: the terrifying encounter between human imagination and the unknowable. 35mm copy from the collection of La Cinémathèque de Toulouse.
Saturday, December 3, 2:00pm
Tuesday, December 6, 2:30pm
Thursday, December 15, 7:00pm
Lines of Wellington / Linhas de Wellington
Valeria Sarmiento, Portugal/France, 2012, 151m
English, Portuguese, and French with English subtitles
After conquering Spain, Napoleon Bonaparte sent a powerful army to invade Portugal in 1810. The French plowed through the resistance mounted against them until, as they approached Lisbon, they were met by a combined British and Portuguese army under the command of the Viscount Wellington. That’s the general historical outline for Valeria Sarmiento’s extraordinarily intimate epic of the Peninsular War. Along the way, we witness love affairs and treachery, noble action and selfish cruelty, from the highest social echelons to the humblest quarters. Prepared by Ruiz from a screenplay by Carlos Saboga (Mysteries of Lisbon), Lines of Wellington was completed by Sarmiento—Ruiz’s longtime editor as well as his widow—who has created a revealing portrait of life during what has been called one of the first examples of “total war.” The all-star cast includes Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Elsa Zylberstein, Marisa Paredes, and John Malkovich as Wellington. An NYFF50 Selection.
Friday, December 2, 9:15pm (Introduction by Valeria Sarmiento)
Love Torn in a Dream
Love Torn in a Dream / Combat d’amour en songe
Raúl Ruiz, France/Portugal/Chile, 2000, 35mm, 120m
French, Portuguese, and Spanish with English subtitles
In the late nineties, Ruiz made some of the highest-profile, most widely distributed and accessible movies of his career. Then, by the end of the decade, as though driven to purge something, he returned to wilder, less organized territory. The result was this confounding, deliriously diffuse collage of nine stories, all but one set in the 17th or 18th centuries. Les Inrockuptibles wasn’t wrong to call Love Torn in a Dream “a kind of self-parodying best-of” drawn from Ruiz’s previous films: the overlapping stories involve debates over religious dogma, a film crew making landfall in Portugal, marauding pirates, and talismanic mirrors and paintings. “Ruiz wins you over better when he works with fewer ideas and brings them to term,” Les Inrocks went on. But Ruiz always seized on more ideas than his movies could hold, letting some ripen and abandoning others halfway, and this movie shows him working at his freest and most exuberant.
Sunday, December 4, 9:00pm
Wednesday, December 7, 9:15pm
Mysteries of Lisbon / Mistérios de Lisboa
Raúl Ruiz, Portugal/France, 2010, 272m
English, Portuguese, French with English subtitles
Ruiz took such delight in the form of plots—the texture of their exposition; the tricks they employed to introduce characters; the jolt their twists could give—that he sometimes mischievously pushed them into incoherence, piling on characters and revelations and backstories and reversals until the plot became a kind of abstract field of information without a clear sequence or plan. In Mysteries of Lisbon, his four-and-a-half-hour-long adaptation of a novel by the 19th-century Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco, he had the space to tell a story of breathtaking complexity that nonetheless keeps its shape. (The film also exists as a longer miniseries.) It starts with the reunion of a supposedly orphaned boy with his estranged mother and from there expands into an epic, densely peopled story of deception, intrigue, murder, elopement, and disguise, set against the backdrop of Portugal’s 1820 revolution. The result was one of Ruiz’s most successful movies, and an ultimate flowering of his later style. An NYFF48 selection.
Friday, December 9, 2:00pm
Sunday, December 11, 7:00pm
La Recta Provincia
Raúl Ruiz, Chile/France, 2007, 180m
Spanish with English subtitles
Initially conceived as a television miniseries and seen by many as Ruiz’s late career ode to the country he was forced to leave in the early 1970s, La Recta Provincia delves headlong into Chilean folklore and comes up with a winding, digressive, and schizoid narrative that effectively sets the scene for 2010’s similarly epic Mysteries of Lisbon. The great Belgica Castro stars as a caretaker who, along with her son, discovers a mysterious bone on her estate and sets out to find the rest of the skeleton; these two quickly find themselves caught in a demonic wild goose chase as chilling as it is humorous and constructed with stories within stories. Postproduction of the film version by La Cinémathèque française with the support from the National Council for Culture and Arts of Chile.
Sunday, December 11, 2:00pm
Wednesday, December 14, 7:00pm
The Territory
New Restoration
The State of Things / Der Stand der Dinge
Wim Wenders, USA/Portugal/West Germany/France/Spain/Netherlands/UK, 1982, 121m
English and French with English subtitles
A director (Patrick Bauchau) runs out of film stock while in Portugal making a postnuclear Roger Corman adaptation called The Survivors in Wim Wenders’s largely improvised 1982 filmmaking nightmare. But there’s more: a behind-the-scenes intrigue that might never be resolved. In 1980, Ruiz was in Portugal making The Territory, an eccentric, garishly colored horror film about a group of stranded campers who revert to a mystical, cannibalistic lifestyle. With film stock running low, Wenders came to visit his then-girlfriend, one of Ruiz’s lead actors. From there, accounts differ. Some, including the filmmaker and critic Jon Jost, claim that Wenders hijacked the set to shoot his own meta-movie “inspired” by Ruiz’s troubled production; others, including Ruiz himself, deny that Wenders took undue advantage of the situation. This dispute only adds to the fascination of The State of Things—a vision of filmmaking as primal chaos and confusion.
Friday, December 9, 9:15pm
New Restoration
The Suspended Vocation / La vocation suspendue
Raúl Ruiz, France, 1978, 90m
French with English subtitles
For what he called his “first French film,” Ruiz chose to adapt a 1950 novel by French writer Pierre Klossowski, a transgressive novelist and a pioneering critic of Nietzsche and Sade. Klossowski doubted that his novel, which followed a Dominican monk caught up in interchurch quarrels over dogma and religious practice, could be adapted. But he collaborated closely with Ruiz on what became one of the filmmaker’s most legendary metafictional experiments—two films-within-a-film set in different periods in which the novel’s story is told in overlapping but contrasting variations. For Ruiz, as he’d later tell critic Adrian Martin, the factional disputes depicted in The Suspended Vocation were “not very different from the discussions and quarrels inside the Left movement in Latin America…They transposed old Catholic quarrels into the Left.”
Sunday, December 4, 3:30pm (Introduction by Valeria Sarmiento)
Tuesday, December 6, 4:00pm
Thursday, December 15, 8:45pm
The Territory / Le Territoire
Raúl Ruiz, Portugal, 1981, 35mm, 100m
English and French with English subtitles
Perhaps the only Raúl Ruiz film that could be described as containing a story “ripped from the headlines,” this philosophical horror flick (co-written by Gilbert Adair) tracks the descent of two American families into cannibalism during a camping trip in the south of France. Celebrated upon its release for the strangeness of its theological vision (reminiscent of that of former Ruiz collaborator Pierre Klossowski), The Territory explores the body as a site of desire and violence with Ruiz’s signature touch, yielding a slippery work that is mortifying, mystifying, and surprisingly funny.
Friday, December 9, 7:00pm
La Recta Provincia
Three Crowns of the Sailor / Les trois couronnes du matelot
Raúl Ruiz, France, 1983, 35mm, 117m
French with English subtitles
Ruiz’s dazzling opium dream of a film, Three Crowns of the Sailor is centered on an encounter between a student who has just committed a brutal murder and a drunken sailor who persuades the scared youth to accompany him to a nearby dance hall and listen to his macabre life story. Discovering that he’s condemned to remain the only living member of the crew, the sailor passes through a series of adventures in brothels and Latin American ports, all of which take place in a vividly surreal limbo world that Ruiz and master cinematographer Sacha Vierny (Hiroshima mon amour, Belle de jour) fashioned out of real locations in Paris and Portugal using a series of ingenious optical effects. “Paradoxes build on paradoxes and logic on illogic,” wrote Chicago Reader film reviewer David Kehr. “And yet the game has a serious end, building toward a world stripped of substance, in which everything signifies but nothing means.” An NYFF22 selection.
Tuesday, December 13, 6:30pm
Thursday, December 15, 2:00pm
Tuesday, December 20, 3:30pm
Three Lives and Only One Death / Trois vies et une seule mort
Raúl Ruiz, 1996, France/Portugal, 35mm, 123m
French with English subtitles
In this idiosyncratic puzzle film, Marcello Mastroianni plays three different characters, each with his own set of multiple identities: a married man who left home one morning only to spend two decades in an enchanted apartment across the street; a lecturer at the Sorbonne who abandons his post to become a beggar; a butler waiting on a young couple in a mansion they’ve mysteriously acquired. Or are they all the same man? Drawing on stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Isak Dinesen, Ruiz fashioned a delightful pattern of overlapping plots—fantasies of lives left behind, people seduced and abandoned, and personas taken on. The film stands as, among other things, a tribute to the range and charisma of Mastroianni, who died the year the film premiered. An NYFF34 selection.
Tuesday, December 13, 9:00pm
Thursday, December 15, 4:30pm
Saturday, December 17, 4:00pm
Digital Restoration
Three Sad Tigers / Tres tristes tigres
Raúl Ruiz, Chile, 1968, 100m
Spanish with English subtitles
Ruiz’s lively debut was based on a play by Alejandro Sieveking, following the various maneuverings and hustles of a group of small-timers striving to carve out a living in the seedy underworld of pre-Allende Santiago. Though this effort—shot in black-and-white, unmistakably under the signs of the French New Wave and Cassavetes—finds Ruiz operating in a more realist mode than in the more widely seen, delirious works to come, his signature playfulness, taste for atmosphere, and knack for unveiling the majesty of the grotesque are already in evidence. Notably, Three Sad Tigers was the first of the three films that Ruiz made in Chile before the 1973 military coup necessitated his exile to France. Restored by the Association des Amis de Raoul Ruiz with the support from the National Council of Culture and Arts of Chile.
Friday, December 2, 6:30pm (Intro/Q&A with Valeria Sarmiento)
Monday, December 5, 1:30pm
Sunday, December 18, 2:00pm
Time Regained
Time Regained / Le temps retrouvé, d’après l’oeuvre de Marcel Proust
Raúl Ruiz, France/Italy/Portugal, 1999, 35mm, 170m
French with English subtitles
Ruiz’s most ambitious literary adaptation—an attempt to condense all of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time into a single feature, using the seven-part novel’s last installment as a kind of frame—is also one of his lushest, most transporting reflections on the movies’ power to seize and preserve moments of time. Proust’s narrator, Marcel (Marcello Mazzarella), is a consistent presence in the movie, but Time Regained is dominated by entrancing, sometimes tragic figures that seem to drift in and out of the film’s field of view: Catherine Deneuve as the stately former courtesan Odette de Crecy; Emmanuelle Béart as Marcel’s young love Gilberte; John Malkovich as the closeted, mysterious Baron de Charlus. Ruiz gives special attention to Proust’s fascination with photography and early forms of radio and cinema—technologies that promised a more perfect form of “time regained” than words or memories could provide. An NYFF37 selection.
Friday, December 2, 3:00pm
Sunday, December 4, 5:30pm
Monday, December 19, 2:00pm
Treasure Island
Raúl Ruiz, UK/France/USA, 1985, 115m
Between 1983 and 1987, Ruiz made a cluster of utterly inimitable movies: dense metafictional experiments drawn loosely from literary texts, shot in an extravagant, baroque style full of vertiginous angles and splendid colors, and often centered on fantasies of moviegoing or storytelling. Treasure Island, from the middle of that period, is less an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s book than a set of imaginative variations on the themes it suggests. In Ruiz’s vision, young Jim lives in a seaside inn populated by mysterious figures and intruders—a situation that sets the stage for an odd experiment in storytelling carried out by a cabal of feuding grownups (played by, among others, Anna Karina and Jean-Pierre Léaud). The result is unruly, disjointed, and maniacally enjoyable—a little-seen key text from one of Ruiz’s most fertile periods.
Saturday, December 3, 8:30pm (Introduction by Valeria Sarmiento)
Wednesday, December 7, 6:45pm
Friday, December 16, 4:00pm
