Raúl Ruiz (director)

Raúl Ruiz
Born Raúl Ernesto Ruiz Pino
(1941-07-25)25 July 1941
Puerto Montt, Chile
Died 19 August 2011(2011-08-19) (aged 70)
Paris, France
Other names Raoul Ruiz
Occupation Film director
Years active 1963–2011

Raúl Ernesto Ruiz Pino (French: Raoul Ruiz; 25 July 1941 – 19 August 2011) was an experimental Chilean filmmaker, writer and teacher whose work is best known in France. He directed more than 100 films.[1]

Biography

The son of a ship's captain and a schoolteacher in southern Chile, Raúl Ruiz abandoned his university studies in theology and law to write 100 plays with the support of a Rockefeller Foundation grant. He went on to learn his craft working in Chilean and Mexican television[2] and studying at film school in Argentina (1964). Back in Chile, he made his feature debut Three Sad Tigers (1968), sharing the Golden Leopard at the 1969 Locarno Film Festival. According to Ruiz in a 1991 interview, Three Sad Tigers "is a film without a story, it is the reverse of a story. Somebody kills somebody. All the elements of a story are there but they are used like a landscape, and the landscape is used like story." [3] He was something of an outsider among the politically oriented Chilean filmmakers of his generation such as Miguel Littín and Patricio Guzmán, his work being far more ironic, surrealistic and experimental. In 1973, shortly after the military coup d'état led by the dictator Augusto Pinochet, Ruiz and his wife (fellow director Valeria Sarmiento) fled Chile and settled in Paris, France.[4]

Ruiz soon developed a reputation among European critics and cinephiles as an avant-garde film magician, writing and directing a remarkable number of amusingly eccentric though highly literary and complex low-to-no-budget films in the 1970s and 1980s (often for France's Institut national de l'audiovisuel and then for Portuguese producer Paulo Branco). The best known of these are: Colloque de chiens (1977), a short which marked the start of Ruiz's long-term working relationship with Chilean composer Jorge Arriagada; The Suspended Vocation (1978); The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1979); On Top of the Whale (1982); Three Crowns of the Sailor (1983); City of Pirates (1983); Manoel's Destinies (1985); Treasure Island (1985) and Life is a Dream (1986).[5] A special issue of Cahiers du cinéma was devoted to Ruiz in March 1983.[6]

In the 1990s, Ruiz began working with larger budgets and "name" stars like John Hurt in Dark at Noon (1992) and Marcello Mastroianni in Three Lives and Only One Death (1996). The following year, he made Genealogies of a Crime starring Catherine Deneuve, winning the Silver Bear at the 47th Berlin International Film Festival.[7] A second major French actress, Isabelle Huppert, worked with Ruiz on Comedy of Innocence (2000), which was nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The American John Malkovich acted in the star-studded Marcel Proust adaptation Time Regained (1999) and the somewhat less successful Savage Souls (2001) and Klimt (2006). That Day (2003) was the fourth and last Ruiz film to be shown in the main competition of the Cannes Film festival.[8] He also made forays into the English-language mainstream with the thrillers Shattered Image (1998) and A Closed Book (2010). In the final decade of his life, Ruiz wrote and directed several low-budget productions in his native Chile, but his final international success was the Franco-Portuguese epic Mysteries of Lisbon (2010).

Ruiz claimed that he was "always trying to make this connection between different ways of producing: film, theater, installations, and videos" - he hoped his "films would have to be seen many times, like objects in the house, like a painting. They have to have a minimum of complexity."[3] Over the years, he taught his own particular brand of film theory, which he explained in his two books Poetics of Cinema 1: Miscellanies (1995) and Poetics of Cinema 2 (2007), and actively engaged in film and video projects with university and film school students in many countries, including the US, France, Colombia, Chile, Italy and Scotland.[9]

Ruiz died in August 2011 as a result of complications from a lung infection, having successfully undergone a liver transplant in early 2010 after being diagnosed with a life-threatening tumour. The Presidents of France and Chile both praised him.[10][11] The Church of Saint George-Paul in Paris held a memorial service which was attended by many notable friends, including Catherine Deneuve, Chiara Mastroianni, Melvil Poupaud, Paulo Branco, Arielle Dombasle, Michel Piccoli and Jorge Edwards. Ruiz's body was then returned to Chile to be buried as specified in his will and a National Day of Mourning was declared in Chile.[12]

Ruiz's final completed feature Night Across the Street (2012) was selected to be screened posthumously in the Directors' Fortnight section of the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.[13][14] His widow Valeria Sarmiento, who was also his collaborator and frequent editor for several decades, completed Lines of Wellington (2012), the Napoleonic epic that Ruiz was preparing when he died[15][16] and the film was in competition for the Golden Lion at the 69th Venice International Film Festival[17] and as a Zabaltegi Special at the 2012 San Sebastián International Film Festival.[18] Both films were also shown at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival[19] and the 2012 New York Film Festival.[20]

The most complete retrospective yet of Ruiz's work is being held at the Cinémathèque française in Paris between 30 March and 30 May 2016.[21]

Filmography

Awards

Bibliography

Books by Ruiz

English-language books on Ruiz

French-language books on Ruiz

Spanish-language books on Ruiz

References

  1. ↑ "R.I.P. Raoul Ruiz, prolific and enigmatic director". avclub.com. Retrieved 2011-08-21.
  2. ↑ "The Raul thing". The Guardian. London. 7 January 2000. Retrieved 2012-06-22.
  3. 1 2 Klonarides, Carole Ann http://bombsite.com/issues/34/articles/1391, BOMB Magazine Winter, 1991. Retrieved on 3 June 2013.
  4. ↑ Grimes, William (19 August 2011). "Raúl Ruiz, Prolific Director of Cryptic Films, Dies at 70". The New York Times. New York Times. Retrieved 2012-05-14.
  5. ↑ Bergan, Ronald (19 August 2011). "Chilean-born film-maker who became the darling of the French avant garde". The Guardian. London. The Guardian. Retrieved 2012-05-14.
  6. ↑ "Cover of the 'Ruiz special'". Cahiers du cinéma, March 1983. Retrieved 2012-05-14.
  7. 1 2 "Berlinale: 1997 Prize Winners". berlinale.de. Retrieved 2012-01-08.
  8. ↑ "Raoul Ruiz biography". Festival de Cannes. Retrieved 2012-05-14.
  9. ↑ "A new face for film studies" (PDF). University of Aberdeen magazine, 2007. Retrieved 2012-05-14.
  10. ↑ "Raoul Ruiz, French-Chilean Filmmaker, Dead At 70". Huffington Post. 19 August 2011. Huffington Post. Retrieved 2012-05-14.
  11. ↑ "Piñera: Cine de Raúl Ruiz nos abrió el mundo". La Nación. Retrieved 2012-05-14.
  12. ↑ "Beloved Chilean Filmmaker Raúl Ruiz Dies at 70". elrepuertero.cl. Retrieved 2011-08-21.
  13. ↑ Leffler, Rebecca (24 April 2012). "Cannes 2012: Michel Gondry's 'The We & The I' to Open Director's Fortnight". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 2012-04-28.
  14. ↑ "2012 Selection". quinzaine-realisateurs.com. Directors' Fortnight. Retrieved 2012-04-28.
  15. ↑ "Passings: Raul Ruiz". Los Angeles Times. 20 August 2011. Retrieved 2012-05-14.
  16. ↑ Macnab, Geoffrey (20 August 2012). "Raul Ruiz and the ghosts on the battlefield". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 2012-08-21.
  17. ↑ "Venezia 69". labiennale.org. Retrieved 2012-07-28.
  18. ↑ "Zabaltegi Specials". sansebastianfestival.com. Retrieved 2012-08-21.
  19. ↑ "Programmer's Note". tiff.net. Retrieved 2012-08-21.
  20. ↑ "2012 New York Film Festival Line-Up Announced". collider.com. Retrieved 2012-08-21.
  21. ↑ "Raoul Ruiz". cinematheque.fr. Retrieved 2016-03-30.
  22. ↑ Cinema from Chiloé to Paris, "Raul Ruiz".
  23. ↑ "28th Moscow International Film Festival (2006)". MIFF. Retrieved 2013-04-14.
  24. ↑ "'Mysteries of Lisbon' nabs Louis Delluc prize". Variety. Variety. Retrieved 2012-05-14.

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 3/30/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.