WHO is he?
Prolific Chilean film director, scenarist, producer, author, teacher and theorist who made over 100 feature and short- length documentary and fictional feature films between the mid-sixties and the late 2010s. In the seventies, Ruiz migrated to France where he worked for the rest of his life. He wrote about his approach to cinema in the much celebrated two-part film theory book, Poetics of Cinema . He won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival for Three Sad Tigers (1968).
WHAT are his films about?
Themes
Ruiz’s cinema is steeped in French intellectual history and deals with a number of contemporary philosophical, linguistic and critical-theoretical problems. The persistence effects of colonialism, the relation between painting, theatre, music, literature and cinema, the shifting nature of identities and the labyrinthine nature of memory and thought are some of the major ideas his films have dealt with. These films are in continuous dialogue with Western literary tradition. Ruiz nature as an expatriate also finds an echo in the films’ examination of the ideas of nationality and exile.
Style
Ruiz’s films are characterised by a vehement rejection of established classical tenets of both documentary and fictional filmmaking. These movies do not employ traditional storytelling methods and instead unfold as a series of discursive narrative incidents. They draw from a variety of cinematic sources, ranging from Hollywood B-pictures to French Surrealist painting to South American Magic Realist literature. Deep focus cinematography with distortion of scale, a profusion of tracking shots, episodic narrative construction with a gleeful abandonment of logic and an anti-realistic acting style are a few of the stylistic features of Ruiz’s cinema.
WHY is he of interest?
Despite his relative obscurity and the lack of access to his work, Ruiz is among the most venerated of experimental filmmakers, especially in Europe. His challenging, elusive pictures continue to perplex and provoke audiences and could well be placed among the most important modernist films ever made. Ruiz’s stature among critics and cinephiles is bound to go up once his films are available on home video.
WHERE to discover him?
The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978) is a beguiling, mysterious, hour-long film which revolves around a set of possibly interrelated paintings, the collector of which is convinced that they conceal within them a grave scandal. Ruiz’s one-of-a-kind film is partly an examination of the way narratives are constructed and partly a treatise on the rapport between art and cinema.
