Happy Birthday, Raúl Ruiz! Born today in 1941 as Raúl Ernesto Ruiz Pino, this Chilean teacher, writer and experimental filmmaker was best known in France.
Throughout his prolific career, he had directed more than one hundred films in numerous national cinemas.
One of the most innovative and versatile filmmakers in international cinema, the free-spirited Ruiz was unafraid to experiment in a variety of genres, including documentaries.
During his twenty-year career, he had made over fifty films for theatrical release and European television.
Before becoming a director, Ruiz wrote over one hundred plays for avant-garde theater between 1956-1962.
He later began playing with filmmaking in the early 1960s, but did not release a full feature until 1968.
This film put Ruiz in league with Chilean cinema innovators: Chilean film director, screenwriter, film producer and novelist Miguel Littin and Chilean filmmaker Aldo Francia.
However, Ruiz's political activities later forced him into to self-exile during the politically tempestuous 1970s.
Since 1973, he had been living in Paris, where he had worked in European television while also continually making features.
His films are characterized by fantastic images that deftly meld reality with imagination.
To create his images, he utilizes a variety of strange camera angles, close-ups, bright colors, and complex plotlines that force the audience to work hard to understand his message.
Though his films are renowned internationally, only a few of his pictures are available in the United States.
Among his many credits, Ruiz's most notable films are the 1996 French/Portuguese comedy/crime film 'Trois vies et une seule mort' ('Three Lives and Only One Death') and the 1999 French/Italian/Portuguese drama/romance film 'Le Temps retrouvé' ('Time Regained').
The former film tells of the same characters who experience different realities across four separate stories in an experimental exploration of truth and identity.
In one, Parisian salesman Mateo Strano abandons his wife, Maria (Marisa Paredes), then reemerges two decades later.
In another, a professor becomes a panhandler. Next, a butler serves a young couple that has inherited a large house. And finally, a business mogul is confronted by a family he thought he had made up.
Each of these four characters were portrayed by Italian film actor Marcello Mastroianni in his penultimate feature before his passing later that same year.
Many critics ascribe Mastoianni's performance to the film's commercial acceptance.
However, this did not keep critics like American film critic and author Jonathan Rosenbaum from recognizing 'Three Lives and Only One Death' “as being the best of [Ruiz’s] movies [he’d] seen in a long time.”
Yet, even Rosenbaum's states that this praise did not persuade the films biggest critic, Ruiz himself, into accepting it as his own favorite film.
The latter film begins in 1922; French novelist, critic, and essayist Marcel Proust is on his deathbed. Looking through photographs, he reflects on his past, recalling his life and the people he has known and loved.
Gradually, the memories of his life are supplanted by the memories of the characters in his novels, and soon, fiction overwhelms reality.
It is the happy days and lost paradise of his childhood of which alternate with more recent memories of his social and literary life.
'Time Regained' is an adaptation of the 1927 final volume of the seven-volume series In Search of Lost Time by Proust.
The film received a three and a half star rating out of four from Roger Ebert. The film also received a 70% score on Rotten Tomatoes, as did 'Three Lives'.
While most of the critics spoke highly of the film's ability to bring the book to life, there were a lot of reviews complaining that the film had been a bore.
Ruiz passed in Paris, France on August 19, 2011. This was due to a result of complications from a lung infection, having successfully undergone a liver transplant in early 2010 after being diagnosed with a life-threatening tumor. Ruiz was 70.
His mind-bending works are obsessed with questions of theology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, and visual expression; wildly experimental and slyly humorous; surrealist, magical-realist, gothic, and neo-Baroque.
To see one of Ruiz’s films is to go on an adventure full of humor, intellectual curiosity, and artistic daring; to see several is to land on a new continent, where his many obsessions find their delirious expression in the most surprising ways and where reason and madness are delightfully, terrifyingly indistinguishable.
Ruiz had been active from 1963–2011.
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