Raul Ruiz -- Search and Destroy

well there was an actual working definition in that era, at least in NY: "makes art and lives in cheap housing"

surely being a post-punk band, then making movies with disaffected protagonists citing ozu movies makes him an especially pure instance of the breed

i should have added, movies shot in b&w using short ends

This film was equal parts goofy absurdism and inert downtown show-up-and-act ... apparently it was shot in about 8 days. Characters keep getting stabbed by a malevolent, drifting father figure, then turning up alive a scene or two later. (Jarmusch only has a 2-minute role playing a hood.) Photographed in color and b&w by Maryse Alberti (saw Todd Haynes on the way out of the theater).

Christine Vachon (who was the a.d.), James Schamus and a couple of the other producers did Q&A after. Raul apparently kept a bottle on the set ("It had to be scotch because my mother was drinking it with him," Vachon said) and he would bolt for the nearest Irish bar when lunch was called. He was "high-functioning," though.

I'm alive and I've seen probably 95% of his films. Big fan and was pretty obsessively tracking down his stuff a few years back. I've since chilled out but - yes - there's a LOT.

first part of a NY retro begins

http://www.filmlinc.org/series/life-is-a-dream-the-films-of-raul-ruiz-part-1/#films

i'm taking recs on the rare stuff

" Love Torn In A Dream" one of my favorite films, period. And def see "Hypothesis Of A Stolen Painting". "The Golden Boat" is good if I recall. It's been a while since I watched it.

heh i STRONGLY DISLIKED Love Torn in a Dream

meh on TGB, see above

Ah then I got nothin' for ya.

Yeah, Golden Boat is not good. On Top of the Whale, on the other hand....

Hoberman:

Exile was Ruiz’s natural state, said Richard Peña, former director of the New York Film Festival: “He loved being the perpetual outsider.” Asked to locate him in film history, Mr. Peña added that Ruiz — who alienated many of his displaced countrymen with “Dialogues of the Exiled” (1975), a parodic documentary — never fit into the context of Latin American cinema. Nor did he feel entirely comfortable as a European, Mr. Peña said: “He hated to see Raúl spelled French-style with an O.”....

Slowly, Ruiz tunneled his way into American consciousness. For the 1989-90 academic year, he taught filmmaking at Harvard. “No one really knew who he was,” his former student Laura Colella told me. A filmmaker who teaches screenwriting at Brown, Ms. Colella was one of about 10 who took Ruiz’s course.

Given his imperfect English and erudite references to abstruse (possibly invented) philosophical conundrums, Ms. Colella said that “it was hard to understand him at first.” While Ruiz devoted some time to practical exercises, she explained, he viewed cinema as a game, adding that, “he influenced me so much as a filmmaker it’s been almost a curse.”

To appreciate Ruiz is to be often confounded by him. Following Borges, he created his own Garden of Forking Paths. “We thought it would be overwhelming to show too many films in one go,” said the Lincoln Center Film Society’s director of programming, Dennis Lim. Noting complications over rights and subtitles, Mr. Lim suggested that “Life Is a Dream,” the first in a series, may extend to three installments.

Perhaps the next will include “On Top of the Whale” (1982), an account of a European anthropological expedition to Tierra del Fuego, shot in five languages, one invented, or “Life Is a Dream,” set largely in a Chilean movie house where, possibly in a parody of Ruiz’s fan base, half the audience is enthralled and the rest are snoring....

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/movies/the-films-of-raul-ruiz-come-to-lincoln-center.html?_r=0

Second half of NYC retro starts Friday, incl Redd's fave On Top of the Whale.

https://www.filmlinc.org/series/life-is-a-dream-the-films-of-raul-ruiz-part-2/#films

more

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5380-the-daily-life-is-a-dream-the-films-of-raul-ruiz

I've seen a bunch this week, several of which were, um, difficult, but I recommend his 1977 short Dog's Dialogue. Here's J.Ro:

http://www.rouge.com.au/2/dogs.html

and the film!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYo2SHHakhM

I can't imagine a person watching Time Regained without at least an acquaintance with Proust's characters, but the aptness of Ruiz's choices -- some of the most shrewdly deployed tracking shots I've seen in the last 20 years -- consistently impresses me. This is the third time I watch it.

I like to imagine Ruiz slapping his knee thinking, "John Malkovich speaking his own French as Baron Charlus? This'll kill'em at Cannes!"

I have to admit every time I pick up a new volume of Proust I feel like I know none of the characters. There are just too much stuff happening for me to understand. I think Ruiz captures that feeling perfectly, it's quite brilliant. And to a large extent it's what the work is about, Marcel looking back on events and realizing so much more was happening than he understood at the time.

My favorite moment of the film is when Marcel walks in to a small room, and it's littered with tophats on the floor. It makes absolutely no sense in context. And then I read volume five, I think, and that's where it's from, Marcel remembers that at one point it was the style to keep all the hats of guests on the floor of a small chamber at a party, and that the room would look incredibly weird when you went to pick up your hat afterwards.

I think the film shows how weird a film can get if you really try to adapt a work of literature on it's own terms, instead of letting the adaptation process be about making it as normatively 'cinematic' as possible.