THE LIBRARY LOVER: THE FILMS OF RAÚL RUIZ—Quintín on Mysteries of Lisbon (2010)

"The Library Lover: The Films of Raúl Ruiz" starts up this evening at the Pacific Film Archive (PFA) with the exquisite Mysteries of Lisbon (2010). In their hegemonic myopia, AMPAS may have insulted cinephiles the world over for failing to include Raúl Ruiz (and Theo Angelopoulos) in their annual memorium, but Bay Area audiences can count on PFA to honor Ruiz. I've yet to write up Mysteries of Lisbon as I someday intend, but for now, offer some choice quotes from my favorite write-up on the film by Argentine critic Quintín, published in the Winter 2011 issue of Cinema Scope (Issue 45, pp. 40-41). Unfortunately, this is not one of Cinema Scope's online samples, but hopefully these quotes will inspire readers to hunt out the issue to read Quintín's full text.

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"More than just making a period piece—an enterprise that always assumes that the past should be somehow adulterated or translated in order to fit it into the idioms of the present—Ruiz proves with Mysteries of Lisbon that an old Portuguese feuilleton, a present-day telenovela, and an American mini-series can share not only the same kind of narrative form, but the same kind of audience (except that the Ruiz, of course, is so much better). Not the least bit outdated, Mysteries is four-and-a-half hours of pure pleasure, made up of elegant long takes, fake walls, hidden identities and full-blooded cloak-and-dagger melodrama. Ruiz makes it clear like never before that storytelling need not be confined to 99-minute sprints to keep the pulse racing."

Quintín quotes Adrian Martin: "Ruiz is not interested in telling one story, a unique and particular story in each of his films. Above all, he doesn't reach the coherence of imaginary plenitude of a story. Narration is only an excuse for him, but an excuse for what? As he states, he is interested first of all in the passage between different worlds (real or imaginary) or between different narrative levels. He wants to understand, explore and rework these 'bridges,' these suspension points, those difficult moments of connection and disconnection." [Emphasis in the original.]

As example of such a bridge between fiction and reality ("more specifically between writers, characters, and the material of literature in general"), Quintín refers to the scene towards the end of the film where two duelists settle their affair of honor. "A figure appears in the background: a man seen at a distance, walking along the perimeter of the action. When the duel concludes and the participants withdraw, the man enters the space previously occupied by the contenders and proceeds to shoot himself. Could this be Castelo Branco (who killed himself in real life), watching his characters? After all, in Ruiz's adaptation of Le temps retrouvé (1999) Proust is a character in his own right, living alongside his creations...."

"Ruiz seems to believe that film is the medium where literature comes alive and resists the effects of time. It is not that cinema is a way of preserving the memory of the living after their deaths, as people used to think a hundred years ago, but rather the memory of those who never existed—which is a much stronger statement about what we call reality."

AKIRA KUROSAWA @ 100—Cinema Scope

In his hundredth year it seems you can't turn around without bumping elbows with the films of Akira Kurosawa, which have been celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic. Continuing at the Pacific Film Archive (PFA) through August 29 is the 30-film series organized by Susan Oxtoby, which is nearing its halfway point. Meanwhile, PFA's colleagues at the Cinematheque Ontario have launched their comparable series entitled Akira Kurosawa—Centenary of a Sensei, running through Monday, August 2, 2010. As is their generous custom, Cinematheque Ontario's website is rich with suggested links and Kurosawa fans are invited to glean further insights on their favorite films.

Add Andrew Tracy's provocative critique "The Poetics of Departure: Kurosawa at 100" in the current issue of Cinema Scope (Issue 43, Vol. 12, No. 2, Summer 2010). Tracy suggests that—through decades-long cultural positioning—Kurosawa has achieved a "transhistorical unity" and a kind of sanctified "completeness" largely denied other lauded auteurs, even as he prompts the question of "why [Kurosawa's] presence among the most active and engaged sectors of present-day cinephilia feels so pallid."

Whether or not one actually concurs with the question, Tracy sets about to structure his own answer. He writes intriguingly about a "rather frictionless quality found in so many of Kurosawa's films—the inability to do anything with them beyond that which they themselves set out to do" as potential explanation for "the slightly dispiriting quality of Kurosawa's mastery", which "blocks that interpretive space wherein the viewer can become a participant in the work." Veering towards the iconoclastic even as he (healthily) skewers the hagiographic, Tracy argues that Kurosawa's narrative skills as a "postwar modernist" actually "disavows that ruminative space wherein critical performativity can function" and suggests that this may account for why contemporary critics can't do much with Kurosawa's ouevre.

Tracy observes: "It is Kurosawa's consistent inability to subordinate himself to the autonomy of the images which he was so gifted in conjuring, to let them unfold into multiple paths, that places him below Ozu or Mizoguchi, filmmakers who possessed this quality intrinsically—or rather, rigorously refined their skills all the better to allow those images to take leave of them." Here is where his essay's title comes into focus. "Rather than monolithic fixity," Tracy continues, "it's this poetics of departure that offers the timeliest means of navigation for a film world exploding outwards exponentially."

It's a provocative critique, a compelling read, and a welcome (yes, poetic) departure from the received wisdom on Akira Kurosawa.

Cross-published on Twitch.