The Library Lover: The Films of Raúl Ruiz

3/2/12 to 4/15/12

Surreal, hilarious cerebral, surprising, entertaining-the films of Chilean director Raúl Ruiz are unlike anything else in contemporary cinema. We present eight films (plus one short) by the celebrated filmmaker, who died last year. A self-proclaimed “library lover,” Ruiz often adapted his films from literary sources; our series includes Ruiz's artful adaptations of Proust, Klossowski, Kafka, Dante, and others.

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Past Films

The Suspended Vocation
- Sunday, April 15 4 pm
Raúl Ruiz (France, 1977). Three different “films” about rival Catholic factions are combined in Ruiz's dry investigation of institutional frameworks, whether religious or cinematic, photographed by Sacha Vierny (Last Year at Marienbad). (107 mins)
Tres Tristes Tigres
- Saturday, April 14 6 pm
Raúl Ruiz (Chile, 1968). Ruiz's debut feature adapts a popular play involving a seedy older brother who prostitutes his younger sister. Positioned in opposition to then-popular Mexican melodramas, the film pointedly disregards their overly dramatic aesthetics and creates instead a hyper-realist, Cassavettes-like style more concerned with everyday realities. (100 mins)
The Penal Colony
- Wednesday, April 4 7 pm
Raúl Ruiz (Chile, 1971). Loosely adapting a Kafka story, Ruiz creates a satirical power allegory worthy of Jonathan Swift and Eduardo Galeano. An impoverished Latin American country has nothing left to export except the only thing the First World expects from it: atrocity, or at least the news of it. With A TV Dante: Cantos 9–14, which Ruiz set in Santiago. (133 mins)
The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting
- Friday, March 23 6:45 pm
Raúl Ruiz (France, 1979). A satire on the urge to define and thus control art, The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting follows a doddering art collector as he pontificates on several paintings by a great artist that he's recreated in human form in the rooms of his monstrous estate. With Ruiz's delightful short, Dog's Dialogue (1977). (84 mins)
Time Regained
- Sunday, March 18 6 pm
Raúl Ruiz (France/Italy/Portugal, 1999). Introduced by Larry Bensky, executive producer of the website radioproust.org. Ruiz's adaptation of the final volume of In Search of Lost Time is a film at once wholly faithful to Proust and to the distinctive vision of its director. With Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Béart, Vincent Perez, and John Malkovich. (162 mins)
Three Lives and Only One Death
- Saturday, March 3 8:30 pm
Raúl Ruiz (France/Portugal, 1996). In his second-to-last role, Marcello Mastroianni stars as a husband, a professor, a butler, and a businessman in Ruiz's light-hearted, Borgesian salute to fantasy life and the telling of tales. “A brilliant comedy . . . sexy . . . elegantly surreal” (New York Times). (123 mins)
Mysteries of Lisbon
- Friday, March 2 7 pm
Raúl Ruiz (Portugal/France, 2010). The noble and the damned are interchangeable in this magisterial gambit on the art of storytelling, based on a nineteenth-century Portuguese novel yet more radical than any contemporary tale. A young Lisbon orphan wonders who he is, but soon every possible identity comes into question. (272 mins)

The Library Lover: The Films of Raúl Ruiz

3/2/12 to 4/15/12

“Baroque imagery, bizarre humor and labyrinthine plots made his elusive and allusive oeuvre unlike anything else in contemporary cinema. Although most of his films were made while he was an exile in France, his work was part of the fabulist tradition that runs through much Latin American literature.”-Ronald Bergan, The Guardian

The Return of a Library Lover is the title of an autobiographical short by Chilean director Raúl Ruiz and, looking over his remarkable filmography, it's easy to see why: adaptations of Dante, Kafka, Proust, Calderón, Pierre Klossowski, Camilo Castelo Branco, the Iranian novelist Sadegh Hedayat, and Enrique Lafourcade (among many others) dot his career, while a list of citations could include Jorges Luis Borges, Lacan, Le petit prince, Qing Dynasty–era theories of portraiture, Lewis Carroll, and nineteenth-century Catholic thought-often in the same film. Intensely cerebral, his films are also highly entertaining, often hilarious, and always surprising. “The world of his movies - as experienced by the characters and the audience alike - is at once soothingly, elegantly familiar and booby-trapped with surprises,” wrote A. O. Scott in the New York Times Magazine. “There are sudden disappearances, long-buried secrets coming to light, supernatural happenings and bizarre coincidences. In his universe, improbability is the rule.”

Born in Chile in 1941, Ruiz studied law and theology before attending film school in Argentina. Returning to Chile, he completed a handful of works-including the seminal The Penal Colony-before the 1973 military coup forced him into exile in France, where he began a nearly forty-year career spanning several continents, countries, funding sources, and formats. A stint as codirector of the Maison de la Culture of Le Havre gave him the artistic latitude required for his dizzying narrative experiments, philosophical provocations, and surrealist touches, as did the relative largesse of European television funding in the 1980s. The success of later works like City of Pirates (1983) led to bigger budgets and bigger stars (and a brief shedding of his “Ulmer of the European Art Film” tag); by the mid-1990s Ruiz was able to work with such international stars as John Malkovich (Time Regained), Catherine Deneuve (Geneologies of a Crime), and Marcello Mastroianni (Three Lives and Only One Death).

Ruiz passed away in August of 2011, having completed one last film in his native Chile after the international success of his Mysteries of Lisbon, regarded by many as the encapsulation of his career. Whether well funded or barely funded, made for film or television, in France, Portugal, Chile, or the U.S., his films embraced a “logic governed by miracles,” as he wrote, a “poetics of cinema” (to borrow the title of his book on theory) that remains unmatched in its freedom.

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Series curated by Kathy Geritz. With thanks to Valeria Sarmentio; Marie Bonnel, Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Paris; Denis Bisson, Cultural Attaché, Consulate General of France, San Francisco; Suzanne Fedak, Music Box Films; Gary Palmucci, Kino Lorber, Inc.; Jackie Raynal; Andrew Youdell, Annabelle Shaw, BFI Collections; Guillemette Laucoin, La Cinémathèque de Toulouse.

The Library Lover: The Films of Raúl Ruiz

3/2/12 to 4/15/12

Past Films

The Suspended Vocation

Tres Tristes Tigres

The Penal Colony

The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting

Time Regained

Three Lives and Only One Death

Mysteries of Lisbon