Helen Bandis, Adrian Martin and Grant McDonald (eds),
Raúl Ruiz: Images of Passage.
Rouge Press/Rotterdam International Film Festival, 2004.
ISBN: 0 97518 690 6
114 pp
Au $24.95
(Review copy supplied by Books @ Manic)
“If you can make it complicated, why make it simple?”
Thus spoke Raúl Ruiz, the renowned Chilean-born, surrealist director self-exiled for over twenty-five years in Paris, in interview at the Rotterdam Film Festival 2004.
Task: Make a film approximately ten minutes long, consisting of shots in which the centrifugal function predominates, so that when the film is projected in reverse we discover at the end a second story. Or the same story (narrative palindrome). Or that both stories complement each other, thus creating a third story. (60)
Thus writes Ruiz in “The Six functions of the shot”, a theoretical piece published in Raul Ruiz: Images of Passage.
It would come as no surprise then to find that Ruiz is a rather slippery director – the more of his work you see, the more he defies definition. As Jonathan Rosenbaum stated some years back: “It’s partially the strategy of this [anti-auteur par excellence] to elude categorical imperatives.” [1] Furthermore, Ruiz delights in a narrative that confuses – as he admits in interview in this book, he often omits the clue that would elucidate. Rosenbaum again: “His fantasies (…) set off in treacherous directions without return tickets.” [2] Or, as Adrian Martin puts it in his contribution to this book, Ruiz is a director who “loves to eulogise dispersal, who is glad when his films drift from their initial premise and lose sight of any nominal theme” (47). His complex narratives do demand some serious work from his viewers – whilst amply rewarding it.
But if it is impossible to define and categorise Ruiz, critics do veer towards a few recurrent words. Words like prolific – according to Gilbert Adair “only God knows (for I doubt that Ruiz himself knows) how many [films] he has made, and even God couldn’t have found the time to see them all!”, [3] thus making the filmography alone in this book an achievement; inventive, innovative – not only for the content of his films but also the circumstances under which they are made, for whom they are made and perhaps how they are made; diverse, perhaps best demonstrated by naming some of his collaborators – he has worked with producers from Roger Corman (The Territory, 1982) to Paulo Branco, musicians such as John Zorn who provided the musical soundtrack for The Golden Boat (USA1990) and actors such as Marcello Mastroianni (Three Lives and Only One Death, France 1996) and Catherine Deneuve and Emmanuelle Béart (Time Regained, France 1999).
All this perhaps goes toward explaining the difficulty of seeing his films in Australia, despite their international renown. Clearly they are considered too difficult for commercial release in this country.
Although Ruiz has regularly made work for television in France, only a single one of his films (Dark at Noon, 1992) has been released here, but not even the relatively mainstream Time Regained, which had a wide international release. Shattered Image (USA 1998), a surreal thriller for which an Australian distributor held rights, disappointingly went straight to video.
In Australia, the last serious opportunity to see the films of Ruiz was the Australian Film Institute’s 1993 retrospective – the catalogue for which was written by Adrian Martin, one of the editors of this new book. But a major retrospective, including some of his intriguing work for French and Chilean television, was mounted at the Rotterdam Film Festival in January this year, with a smaller follow-on focus in Buenos Aires. And, to accompany the Rotterdam screenings, Rouge, an Australian web-based cinephilic journal ), was commissioned to publish an accompanying book.
Raul Ruiz: Images of Passage is an elegant little volume of non-standard size, covered in a shade of rouge (naturally) with the indexnew on the back cover and a flick book of a scene from Shattered Image decorating the lower right corner of the inside pages. As well as commissioning new pieces, the Rouge team (Helen Bandis, Martin and Grant McDonald) has chosen to draw together a collection of articles and interviews spanning some twenty years, probably as hard to access as the films. Hard to access because of the nature of the original publication, or because many of the works were not in English until translated for this book.
The concept of “Images of Passage” seems rooted in a statement once made by Rosenbaum. “From one point of view, at least, any attempt to chart the breadth and unity of Ruiz’s works in film and video threatens to become a betrayal of that work. If the map suppresses the labyrinth, it is always possible that the cultish desire to possess Ruiz’s œuvre as a coherent entity works against many of Ruiz’s own strategies.” [4] Somehow Images of Passage mirrors the work of Ruiz both physically and in content. For anyone unfamiliar with Ruiz there are no introductory pieces here, no easy explanations of what are undeniably difficult films. The view presented here of Ruiz’s work somewhat resembles the shattered shards of the mirror from the flick book – and, with a little effort, the reader can re-assemble those shards into something highly illuminating and rewarding.
There is, for example, a great deal of pleasure to be experienced in reading Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s delightfully playful essay, “The Baroque eye of the camera”, along with gratefulness that someone has translated this extract from the 1987 French publication that constitutes the first book about Ruiz in any language [5] – and, for me, regret that there is not more. Buci-Glucksmann’s rather baroque writing style seems so apt, I hope the Rouge translation team will treat us to more of it one day.
Various articles directly from Ruiz’s mouth or pen – an early interview in which he discusses his notions on the script with Benoît Peeters, an extract from an actual script of an unfinished movie, the theoretical piece “Six functions of the shot” quoted above, and his own “tales for the cast” for his most recent film, Ce jour-là (That Day, France/Switzerland, 2003) – contribute significantly to some understanding of Ruiz’s approach to filmmaking.
Martin’s own essay, written especially for the book, functions in part as a sort of introduction. (If one takes it as such, it parallels its own title – “Displacements” – by sitting in the middle of the book.) There he also explains the particular usefulness of reading Ruiz’s scripts and tales for the cast.
There’s also a witty extract from a Gilbert Adair script written for Ruiz; and, to conclude, a delightful anecdote about a ‘Ruizian’ moment related by Bérénice Reynaud which I’ll leave to you to read!
In Brisbane, the sector of Australian film culture where I work, locals have seen little of Ruiz’s work – perhaps on SBS or World Movies (where Ce jour-là has appeared late in 2004), once before at a previous edition of Brisbane International Film Festival, or the odd cinema group screening. But this is where my own interest arises: this year BIFF screened two of Ruiz’s recent films (Ce jour-là and Time Regained). It’s almost a case of chicken or egg – the films or the book? To read this book having viewed little or none of his work would be challenging, but would certainly intrigue. And, as Rosenbaum reassuringly states, “Ruiz proceeds partially by subterfuge and anonymity, addressing many of his works to an audience whose responsiveness is largely predicated on not knowing who he is or even precisely what he is up to.” [6]
Most studies of film directors seek to define, to categorise, to distil some kind of essence about the director’s collaboration in the filmmaking process. Images of Passage recognises that Ruiz tells many stories at once and seeks to locate his work at that intersection of high and low culture, arthouse and B movie, and respects the inherent nature of the subject by not reducing. It dazzles, and not merely with shattered shards of mirror.
Anne Demy-Geroe
Australia.
Information about book availability at Rouge Press: http://www.rouge.com.au/press.html
Endnotes
[1] Jonathan Rosenbaum, Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 225.
[2] Ibid, pp. 235-6.
[3]Gilbert Adair, “Raúl”, Sight and Sound (Summer 1984), p. 26.
[4]Rosenbaum, Placing Movies, p. 225.
[5] Christine Buci-Gluckmann and Fabrice Revault d’Allonnes, Raoul Ruiz (Paris: Dis voir, 1987).
[6]Rosenbaum, Placing Movies, p. 225.
Created on: Friday, 3 December 2004 | Last Updated: 30-Nov-04