The Suspended Vocation

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.” New restoration!