The Black Cat
Life Is a Dream: The Films of Raúl Ruiz (Part 1)
December 2 - 22, 2016
Ulmer’s influence on Ruiz is conspicuous throughout his oeuvre, and no film seems to have left a more indelible mark on Ruiz’s imagination than this hallucinatory and macabre 1934 horror/thriller, in which an American novelist and his wife find themselves held captive in the haut modernist mansion of a Satan-worshipping Austrian architect (Boris Karloff).
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.
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