TSPDT

Key Production Countries: France, Chile, Portugal, UK, USA
Key Genres: Drama, Avant-garde/Experimental, Psychological Drama, Adventure Drama, Documentary, Culture & Society, Surrealist Film, Fantasy, Comedy Drama, Period Film, Comedy of Manners, Mystery
Key Collaborators: Jorge Arriagada (Composer), Valeria Sarmiento (Editor/Director), Paulo Branco (Producer), Melvil Poupaud (Leading Character Actor), Jean Badin (Character Actor), Acácio de Almeida (Cinematographer), Rudolfo Wedeles (Editor), Jean-Bernard Guillard (Leading Actor), Inti Briones (Cinematographer), Christian Vadim (Leading Character Actor), Bruno Beaugé (Production Designer), Jacques Bouquin (Cinematographer)

"A prodigious storyteller, Raúl Ruiz is also a prolific manufacturer of moving images. This Chilean filmmaker, now living in exile in Paris, has molded his films by a deeply personal concern with representation and discourse. His innovative and experimental work thus defies any attempt at classification. The cinema of Ruiz is a cinema of ideas... Chilean cinema in exile has found in Ruiz a respected and vital representative. A total filmmaker, for whom theater, music, literature, and visual arts are familiar territory, Ruiz successfully combines intellectual inquiry with Latin American hedonism." - Zuzana Mirjam Pick (International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, 2000)

"His European work, ranging from Portugal to Sicily and the Netherlands, has promoted him to the status of a cult art-film director. His eclectic, ironic films display great imagination, combining realism with fantasy and narratives of exile with popular entertainment; they have elicited from critics terms such as 'baroque', 'surrealist' and postmodern', their mise-en-scène drawing on non-naturalistic techniques, with frequent use of filters, mirrors and disorienting camera angles." - Ginette Vincendeau (Encyclopedia of European Cinema, 1995)

"Ruiz is brilliantly educated, irresistibly drawn to the confusion of languages and the exigencies of being an émigré. So, Chilean once, he could no more resist the role of exile than the rapturous tracking shots he loves. Thus driven, film or the attempt at film became his notebook. But he abhorred that chestnut about story depending on conflict, and he shied away from every orthodoxy about how to film things, faces, and action. He actually sees action as a kind of mathematical principle—an x that happens to other people and which permits, from time to time, the illusion of story." - David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2010)

"Arguably Chile’s most internationally renowned and prolific filmmaker, Raúl Ruiz completed over 100 movies in numerous national cinemas. 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." - Film at Lincoln Center, 2018

"Although his work has often been savaged by mainstream critics, who find much of it not so much puzzling as indecipherable, Chilean-born Ruiz is undoubtedly an innovator - a surrealist at heart, and probably the biggest challenger of the rules since Luis Buñuel... Ruiz plays with absurdity and juggles with imagination. If his rule-bending sometimes leads him to drop the ball, he can, as few others could claim, say that he has almost invented his own cinematic language." - David Quinlan (Quinlan's Film Directors, 1999)

"Baroque imagery, bizarre humour 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, such as the writings of Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges and Alfonso Reyes. Ruiz liked to quote the Cuban surrealist writer José Lezama Lima, who stated that the task of the poet is "to go into a dark room and build a waterfall there"." - Ronald Bergan (The Guardian, 2011)

"The eccentric, experimental and erudite films of prolific Chilean-in-exile Ruiz are marked by off-centre, labyrinthine narratives and copies references to art, literature and film. Cheaply made yet visually rich, they explore philosophical questions of identity, representation and the line between reality and fantasy: the imagery, though often verging on the minimalist, tends to the dreamlike and surreal. Borges, Calderón and Kafka are among his literary forebears; visually, his influences are many, though Magritte, Welles and American B-movies figure strongly." - Geoff Andrew (The Director's Vision, 1999)

"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." - BAMPFA, 2012

"My films are poor. They’re like my family. They are all poor, but they have longevity." - Raúl Ruiz