by ·Comments Off on Life is a Dream (1986, Raoul Ruiz)

At a movie theater with birds flying around, a man talks with the police stationed behind the screen and with the Chileans in a club accessible through the ladies room. Not exactly an adaptation of the 1600’s Spanish play, but our man has used the play as a mnemonic device to memorize (then forget) the names of 15,000 Chilean revolutionaries, and the film apparently includes footage of Ruiz’s prior staging of the play. Life may be a dream, or a movie, as the man tries to re-remember the list of names while the story blends dreamily with the genre films playing at the timeless theater. Variations on themes and images I’ve seen before, and then there’s this:

Lesley Stern wrote about it, reprinted in Rouge.

Maybe too complex for me, but hopefully we’ll get a restoration some day and I can get lost in it again.

by ·Comments Off on The Real Presence (1984, Raoul Ruiz)

Rivettian by his own confession, it’s an AI universe-is-simulation all-is-theater sort of movie. Only an hour long, I intended it as another Ruiz double feature with Life is a Dream, but it was too heady and intense and I had to put on something more straightforward afterwards.

The traitor-foot blind man in my Three Crowns screenshots was the star here, playing an actor who sees himself on video saying things he never said. Timely – Q: “Does this mean we will never get paid for the scenes we filmed where our real presence could be reasonably put to doubt?” – A: “If we paid you, we would have to admit the real existence of possible worlds.” He talks to the programmer (who is creating photorealistic AI on an Apple II), then visits another actor to discuss the situation, then attempts suicide. Then we fall into a vortex of different realities, confusing characters, acting/theater metaphors and layers. “He understands that the dream that was haunting him for years was only a theatrical performance.”

by ·Comments Off on The Suspended Vocation & Of Great Events (1978, Raoul Ruiz)

The Suspended Vocation

Very nice photography of a monk in a black-and-white film crosscut with his counterpart in a color film. Unfortunately “interchurch quarrels over dogma and religious practice” is not a topic that keeps me alert and engaged. The lead monk is played by Cahiers critic Pascal Bonitzer in color, and Didier Flamand (one of the Dalis in the new Dupieux) in b/w. Based on a novel from Pierre Klossowski, a biographer of Nietzsche and de Sade.

Ruiz in Rouge:

This book talks about all the quarrels inside the church, of different factions in the Catholic church. This was not very different from the discussions and quarrels inside the Left movement in Latin America. Which is not so strange when you think that this movement was composed of ex-Catholics. They transposed old Catholic quarrels into the Left; this is one of the ways you can read the political movements in Latin America.

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Of Great Events and Ordinary People

That’s more like it – the truefalsiest movie. It announces itself as a doc on Paris’s 12th during election season, but it’s really a doc about making that doc, then a doc about making docs in general, as it gradually swallows itself.

I think Ruiz has seen News From Home, since he opens a slow 360+ degree pan on its poster, and Adrian Martin points out the movie’s closing Le Joli Mai parody.

Martin:

Ruiz increasingly spices up this cubist lesson in documentary deconstruction with surreal elaborations – such as progressively shorter re-edits of the entire film, avant-garde decentrings of image and sound, and crazy runs of ‘secondary elements’ such as particular colours, angles, gestures and camera movements (collect all shots that pan to the right …). The critical agenda tends to merrily lose itself – which is a mercy in our remorseless age of rigidly theory-driven essay-films.

by ·Comments Off on Tres Tristes Tigres (1968, Raoul Ruiz)

Infant Ruiz, nothing like his later stuff (though Tango of the Widower was filmed before this and released over 50 years later). Low-key and post-synched, he claimed Shadows and the French New Wave as influences. Mustached Tito and Hotgirl Amanda are siblings, get into drunken shenanigans with some other guys and tempers flare. Mubi calls it “a nearly plotless glimpse at… Santiago’s semi-criminal underworld.” There’s plenty of drinking, at least.

Ruiz was still a Chilean upstart director, 5 years away from Pinochet and exile. Adapted from a play by Alejandro Sieveking (The Club) based on a celebrated Cuban novel by Guillermo Cabrera Infante (who cowrote Vanishing Point). Both Amanda and Tito appeared in Miguel Littín films after this. Some actors were in Widower and/or Wandering Soap Opera, a couple others would pop up 40+ years later in Pablo Larraín’s No. This won an award at Locarno, shared with Alain Tanner and a couple others.

Ian Christie in Rouge:

An important theme is the everyday violence and moral cynicism typical of an alienated urban class who are neither proletarian nor part of Chile’s Europeanised bourgeoisie. The film’s temporal ambiguity, seeking to represent the suspended tempo of Chilean life, looks forward to Ruiz’s later more stylised and cerebral projects.

by ·Comments Off on Love Torn in Dream (2000, Raoul Ruiz)

We have found another great Ruiz movie – the cinematography and music in this are not kidding around. Like La Flor, it opens with a diagram of the movie’s structure, then proceeds to blend some of Ruiz’s favorite things (pirates, painting, mirrors) into a meta-narrative folding in on itself. Death is extremely temporary here. Throw in some cannibalism and incest. And of course there’s a Ruiz film with morphing in it, why wouldn’t there be?

Guy Scarpetta in Rouge:

Here, the familiar features of Ruiz’s universe – parallel worlds, baroque uncertainties, telescoping of different times, co-presence of multiple spaces, deconstruction of characters, transgression of every parameter of classical narrative – are subject to an overflowing enthusiasm and gamesmanship … But we must not conclude that the film proceeds from the pure arbitrariness of an unbridled imagination. Quite the contrary, and this is the first great paradox to be emphasised: nothing, here, is left to chance … Nine narrative themes (in principle autonomous, heterogeneous) are posed as the raw material … the entire combinatory consists of making these cellular narratives cross each other’s paths, whether two by two or three by three, and also consecutively – each of these telescopings engendering, almost automatically, a specific narrative (one which logically implies that the characters can double or reincarnate themselves, leap time frames, and belong in several places at once).

by ·Comments Off on More Feb 2022 Shorts

Lie Lie Lie (2007 Martha Colburn)

Animated music video, cutout characters with swivel limb joints are always grabbing each other and falling from heights. Judging from his wiki photo, the male lead in the video is based on musician Serj Tankian (System of a Down).

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O Black Hole! (2020 Renee Zhan)

Wow, pencil and watercolors on Rejected textured paper gives an intro story on how a woman who couldn’t let go of anything became a black hole, then we go inside to a stop-motion tower and a girl (“the singularity”) who has to climb to the top and free the entrapped people and seasons and planets. So it’s a reverse Mad God – climbing out of the darkness. The paint-swirl black hole transitions into the stop-motion world are nice. And it’s a musical. Presented online by Locarno in February, even though the festival’s in August.

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Journey to the East (2021 Eve Liu)

The start of a three hour(!) Metrograph shorts program that I didn’t feel like tackling in its entirety. A Chinese-American Western, had good lighting, and finger jewelry, and Ashes of Time-style slow-mo. Feels like an ad, I dunno for what, maybe for itself.

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Daffy Doodles (1946 Robert McKimson)

A full-bodied Daffy, all his parts in sync, is a mad graffitist, painting mustaches on all posters and pig cops. Some unusual 3D perspective stuff, good gags and a daffier Duck than normal – I approve.

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On Memory (2021 Don Hertzfeldt)

The new piece for the World of Tomorrow blu-ray is a Don monologue on exactly that, placing his voice into characters from his past films, and wonderful new ones. “A movie is something that will eventually spend more time living in our heads than the time we took to experience it.”

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Voyage of a Hand (1985 Raoul Ruiz)

Europeans fondle their African art. A mustache man with two souls communicates through whistling. A guy says that all human voyages take the form of a hand, then he screams in pain. Others look at the man’s hand and see maps and patterns. He later travels carrying his own severed hand as a magic talisman, then sews his eyes shut, relying only on the hand to see the world. Obviously needs further study – should be watched annually, alongside Dog’s Dialogue, Zig-Zag, Le Film a Venir, and The Gift.

by ·Comments Off on Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror (2020, Ruiz & Sarmiento)

After finally catching up with Three Lives, checking out Ruiz’s latest posthumous release, completed by Valeria Sarmiento. Due to the vagaries of video releasing this lost/unfinished film from the mid-60’s is in better shape than the mid-90’s hit with the major movie star.

Iriarte is a gruff-voiced professor (the soundtrack was lost and all actors were re-dubbed in 2019), bottling sock water with his Jason Schwartzmann-looking nephew Joaquin. He visits friends Silva and Lola, tells them about his dreams, which involve a wig under the bed, rivers of blood, and the return of his late wife Maria. Finally, Iriarte can’t sleep, tormented by wigs, and shoots himself after writing letters to everyone he knows.

The second half is mesmerising, the scenes replaying in reverse with backwards dialogue and new thoughts via voiceover. Silva and Lola had appeared in Three Sad Tigers, and Joaquin joined them in Nadie dijo nada. Ghost Maria reportedly appears in a Sebastián Silva movie, and our main guy was in a couple Miguel Littín movies.

by ·Comments Off on Three Lives and Only One Death (1996, Raoul Ruiz)

I thought this would be more Four Weddings and a Funeral, but all the lives/deaths in the title belong to Marcello Mastroianni, who lives at least three different lives in this almost-anthology movie.

Birds and snake:

Firstly, Marcello had walked out on his wife, rented an apartment down the street, and fallen asleep for 20 years, hypnotized by tiny Parisian fairies. When he escapes, he talks his wife’s current guy (Féodor Atkine of a couple Rohmers) into listening to his story, then coming to the apartment and taking his place (less “talks” and more “kidnaps and murders” at that point) while Marcello returns to wife Marisa Peredes (an Almodóvar regular).

Marisa:

Atkine, swimming in chicks

Then Marcello is a bachelor professor with an invalid mum until he gets the sudden urge to leave home and becomes a very successful street beggar and befriends CEO/prostitute Alla Galiena (The Tulse Luper Suitcases), living a double life with her dangerous husband.

Galiena and perverse husband:

Polyamorous couple Martin (Ruiz fave Melvil Poupaud) and Cecile (Marcello’s daughter Chiara Mastroianni) have a mysterious benefactor in Marcello, who leaves them a mansion then performs as their mute butler, and this turns out to be a scheme to steal their newborn and deliver it to Wife #1 Marisa Peredes. Marcello is introduced as a fourth character, a businessman whose young wife is cheating on him, but we’ve already seen characters from the other stories interacting, and now it turns out there’s only one Marcello, and he starts rapidly flipping between personas, then all Marcellos share one death after a fateful meeting at the cafe between the women from each chapter.

A Poupaud and two Mastroiannis:

Marcello is excellent in this, and would die a couple months after it came out. It played a stacked Cannes with Crash, Fargo and Breaking the Waves.

by ·Comments Off on Time Regained (1999, Raoul Ruiz)

Ruiz’s Proust adaptation sounds like a dream come true – I held off watching for years, hoping a blu-ray would come out – and it did! From the opening titles, the camera is already doing something dizzying, and there’s a feverish guy in bed, the furniture moving by itself. So far, so close to Mysteries of Lisbon. This turns out to have more stylish flourishes and be more properly expensive looking than Lisbon – but Lisbon is more interested in telling a story than Time Regained is.

The video extra by Bernard Génin says Rene Clement, Luchino Visconti, and Joseph Losey all tried to film Proust. Volker Schlondorff’s Swann In Love is good except for Alain Delon’s casting (“sacrilege”), and Nina Companez’s four-hour miniseries is “a creditable effort.” Ruiz skipped entire books and episodes, including the ones covered by Schlondorff and by Chantal Akerman in The Captive, looking for a way to convey Proust’s prose and time slippages through cinematographic means (including long takes and alarming edits). I haven’t read any Proust, and sometimes I can’t tell one identically-dressed mustached man from the other, so didn’t follow the story so much as enjoy the trip.

Gilberte:

Edith:

“Then, one day, everything changes.” Proust is in bed at the beginning, dictating to serious-looking Mathilde Seigner (Venus Beauty Institute), then he’s played by different actors at various ages throughout the story.

Red-haired Gilberte (La Belle Noiseuse star Emmanuelle Béart) is with blond Robert Saint-Loup (Pascal Greggory from a bunch of Rohmer and Patrice Chéreau movies), but when he’s supposedly on business trips he sneaks off with Rachel (Elsa Zylberstein, star of That Day). Gilberte confides in Marcel (usually played by Italian Marcello Mazzarella), arrives in one scene dressed as Rachel – not the only time the movie tricks us by substituting identically-dressed women. Oriane (the great Edith Scob) is pissed at Gilberte, thinks she was sleeping around, and not Robert. He eventually enlists in WWI, thinking the war won’t last, and dies in battle.

Saint-Loup’s tribute to The Prestige:

Charlie Morel is a longhair violinist, wanted as a deserter (Vincent Perez, star of The Crow 2). Jacques/Bloch (he changes his name) is Christian Vadim (Night Across the Street), and the “American” woman he’s with is Arielle Dombasle (La belle captive). John Malkovich is Baron Charlus, who pays young men to beat him bloody. Catherine Deneuve appears in at least two time periods, looking the same in each. She is Gilberte’s mom, and each of them changes names at least once, adding to my confusion.

In here somewhere is Melvil Poupaud (the kid from City of Pirates and Treasure Island), still looking younger than his mustache… party host Madame Verdurin (Marie-France Pisier of Celine & Julie)… and Marcel’s girl, the curl-haired Albertine (Chiara Mastroianni of Bastards)

Mouseover to see a false Mme Verdurin become Marie-France Pisier:
image

The DP worked with Resnais, and the editor with Rivette, which feels about right.

Played Cannes with Rosetta, Ghost Dog, Kikujiro, and Pola X.

Slant called it “one of the boldest literary adaptations ever made,” and calls out the sound design: “the intense care placed into using sound to capture the material’s subjective perspectives. Small noises like the scratch of a pen on paper or distant bells can become deafening in the mix as they trigger new reminiscences.”

Ebert’s review is the only great one, taking the movie’s (and novel’s) focus on memory and loss to heart.