THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MATTHEW (IL VANGELO SECONDO MATTEO, 1964)—A Critical Overview

"Someone who walks up to a couple of people and says, 'Drop your nets and follow me' is a total revolutionary."—Pier Paolo Pasolini

I envy anyone their first viewing of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Matthew, 1964). Hopefully, that first viewing will be in-cinema with a 35mm print so that the film's defamiliarizing visuals can achieve their full and intended impact. My first viewing was at home on DVD screener, yet—even as such—I was tremendously impacted by this film, thrown off by it you might say, and it has lingered with me weeks afterwards. I eagerly anticipate a second viewing tomorrow when a restored 35mm print of Matthew screens at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive (PFA), as part of the Bay Area's multi-venue tribute to Pasolini.

As Judy Bloch has written in her PFA program note: "What was seen in 1964 as a daringly direct, almost reportorial account of the Gospel of St. Matthew, set against the everyday life of the times, today looks like a radically stylized classic. Pasolini employed a cast of nonprofessional actors, and settings of rugged Southern Italian landscapes and hill towns, shot with a mixture of cinema-verité techniques, expressive close-ups, and ingenious set pieces. His Christ (Catalonian economics student Enrique Irazoqui) is an anguished and determined revolutionary, setting children against their parents as he has turned against his, a peripatetic preacher against the afflictions of social injustice. (He has an artist's ego: 'Only in his own country, a prophet goes unhonored.') His miracles are as matter-of-fact as Pasolini's pageantry is gritty. The faces Pasolini has chosen are those of the rural proletariat, but they evoke parallels with Italian religious art; similarly, the music is a mixture of black spirituals, the Missa Luba, and Bach."

The story goes that the idea to make a Passion film came to Pasolini in October 1962 during the Pope's visit to Assisi. The filmmaker was trapped in a hotel room and had nothing better to do but read a copy of the Bible. He found the text incredibly rich and decided to bring it to the screen. Pasolini dedicated the film to Pope John XXIII, who turned around centuries of Christian anti-Semitism with the Second Vatican Council.

Matthew premiered in competition at the 1964 Venice Film Festival, where—according to John Wakemen, editor of World Film Directors Volume 2: 1945-1985—crowds had gathered prepared to boo Pasolini. He had scandalized Catholic sensibilities a year earlier with his short film La Ricotta—deemed contemptuous of the state religion—earning him a conviction and a four-month jail sentence. Instead, the film was awarded the OCIC Award and the Special Jury Prize, audiences cheered, and his conviction was voided by an appeals court. Matthew went on to have a robust festival run, opening theatrically in the United States in 1966, receiving three Oscar® nominations for Art Direction (Luigi Scaccianoce), Costume Design (Danilo Donati), and Score (Luis Enriquez Bacalov).

Matthew also won the grand prize of the International Catholic Film Office, which screened the film inside Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and it was one of 45 films recommended by the Vatican in 1996 in honor of the centenary of cinema; honors that—Kenneth Turan reports—were "huffily condemned" by fellow director Franco Zeffirelli whose religious films Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972) and Jesus of Nazareth (1973) did not make the list. Zeffirelli complained Pasolini was "not only mediocre but also an atheist.''

As Roger Ebert pointed out, along with right-wing Catholic groups who picketed the film, "the French left was as outraged as the Italian right, and Sartre met with Pasolini, telling him somewhat obscurely, 'Stalin rehabilitated Ivan the Terrible; Christ is not yet rehabilitated by Marxists.' "

As Matthew approached the U.S., anticipatory reviews were more consistently enthusiastic. Writing for the Autumn 1965 issue of Film Comment, Maryvonne Butcher asserted: "In my opinion, The Gospel According to Matthew is incomparably the most effective picture ever made on a scriptural theme." Veteran British critic Alexander Walker likewise proclaimed that Matthew "grips the historical and psychological imagination like no other religious film I have ever seen." Nearly 40 years later, Roger Ebert concurred: "Pasolini's is one of the most effective films on a religious theme I have ever seen, perhaps because it was made by a nonbeliever who did not preach, glorify, underline, sentimentalize or romanticize his famous story, but tried his best to simply record it." Reporting from the New York premiere for The New York Times, Bosley Crowther praised the film's "flinty" language, naturalistic sense of place, Pasolini's "remarkable avoidance of clichés", and the surprisingly memorable performances of his unskilled actors. As summed up by The Virginia Pilot, Pasolini's film suffered "no starched laundry."

A critical overview of The Gospel According to Matthew requires attention to the sequential waves of criticism reacting to the film: the first wave in the mid-'60s, as stated above, when the film premiered at festivals and during its early theatrical life. The second, nearly 40 years later, occurred in the wake of the controversy elicited by Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004), which inspired reviewers to make comparisons with the existing canon of films depicting the life of Christ, including Pasolini's. One might argue that this seeming necessity emerged as a very good moment indeed for Pasolini's Matthew to be rediscoverd, revisited and re-appreciated, not only comparatively, but on its own terms (which—let's face it—shouldn't have required Gibson's folly).

Of the reviews comparing Gibson with Pasolini pro and con are Kenneth Turan's for the L.A. Weekly, Roger Ebert for his site, Christopher C. Fuller, Ph.D. for The Society of Biblical Literature (interestingly analyzing fidelity to source in both films), Russell Hittinger and Elizabeth Lev for First Things, and Stefano Ciammaroni for Reverse Shot.

Ebert provides, perhaps, the most trenchant comparison: "To see the film a few weeks after seeing Gibson's is to understand that there is no single version of his story. It acts as a template into which we fit our ideas, and we see it as our lives have prepared us for it. Gibson sees Christ's suffering as the overwhelming fact of his life, and his film contains very little of Christ's teachings. Pasolini thought the teachings were the central story. If a hypothetical viewer came to The Passion with no previous knowledge of Jesus and wondered what all the furor was about, Pasolini's film would argue: Jesus was a radical whose teachings, if taken seriously, would contradict the values of most human societies ever since."

Of course, as Pasolini's films began to be shown in institutional retrospectives, regional critics responded. By way of example, when Matthew screened as part of the Harvard Film Archives' September 2010 retrospective, Peter Keough wrote of Pasolini's "perverse poetry" at The Phoenix: "Although Pasolini remains faithful to the original text, his Christ … stirs crowds like a revolutionary, and the Marxist subtext couples with a meditative stillness that builds to an epiphany. Everything, including miracles, occurs with blunt literalness but also shimmers with immanence. And so the blunt Crucifixion and the threadbare Resurrection pierce ideology and open into something deeper."

In 2012, Masters of Cinema released Matthew on DVD/Blu-Ray, initiating a fresh suite of critiques, several which were profiled by David Hudson at his Daily (then at MUBI), including Philip French's Guardian review and David Jenkins at Little White Lies, let alone a sizeable earlier quote from Martin Scorsese regarding Pasolini's influence on his own The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).

To Hudson's list, I might add the write-up at Covey on Film, which is refreshingly informed as to the historical context of the gospels, particularly the Gospel of Matthew, allowing Covey to more fully recognize the artistic license Pasolini took filming particular passages. The challenge of creating a dramatic narrative while adhering to a verbatim text is astutely analyzed, and questions regarding Pasolini's reasons for stylizing and/or omitting the gospel's five sermons are intriguingly raised.

Perhaps most importantly is when Covey questions Masters of Cinema's "misplaced emphasis" on changing the English title from its previous cinematic releases by removing the "Saint" honorific, thereby restoring the film to its original Italian title. Apparently the addition of "Saint" during the film's U.S. distribution caused Pasolini "considerable anguish." Pasolini's personal wishes aside, Covey suggests it's all much ado about nothing considering most "scholars, Christian and not, have recognized since the 1600s that Matthew wasn't the author at all. The fact that it is an anonymous text did not keep it from being associated, from a very early date in Christian tradition, with one of the first apostles, but the fact is, calling the author 'Matthew' is really just a convention, in textual history terms." Notwithstanding, I follow Master of Cinema's impetus to honor Pasolini's wishes.

A third wave of critical appreciation—this one having more the feel of a tsunami—attends the touring retrospective of remastered 35mm prints (currently at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive). When the films screened earlier this year at the British Film Institute, Geoff Andrews considered the challenges of making a plausibly religious film. "Just as prayer is hard to get right in a movie," he writes, "so too are most things to do with faith and notions of divinity. …Even with the magic of cinema, miracles and visionary epiphanies often come across as incredible, simply because we know how editing, special effects and film artifice in general are so often devoted to deceiving the eye. And then there's the perennial question of how to represent holiness: too often it comes down to the clichés of dramatic backlighting and filters, a soaring, saccharine choral score and actors behaving in a way which seems so angelically distracted that they barely feel human at all. Perhaps that's why the films which depict divinity, spirituality or religious faith most persuasively are very often those which adhere most closely to a kind of materialistic realism rooted in the physical aspects of existence." Here, of course, Andrews extols Pasolini's specific achievement, earlier cited by Russell Hittinger and Elizabeth Lev as a "relevant Jesus mode" (emphasis added).

At The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw categorizes Matthew as a "brilliant and entirely unforgiving neorealist Passion play" that "looks as if it has been hacked from some stark rockface." He adds: "This really is raw film-making, in a political vernacular which speaks of Pasolini's high, theocratic Marxist belief in the sovereignty of the people, like the publicans and the harlots that Christ said understood him. The texture and feel of what's on the screen is abrasive and uncompromising…. A fierce magnesium flame of a movie."

"Pier Paolo Pasolini's greatest strength as a filmmaker," writes Vagrant Café, "was his ability to take scenes from canonized literature and transform them into literal images." At the London Review of Books, Michael Wood delivers an eloquent analysis of Matthew's opening scene, first to praise Pasolini's use of the faces of non-actors to tell the story of Matthew's gospel as images—later with images—at which point Wood criticizes the film's impatience "to finish, to run away from a story it now finds crowded rather than interesting." Wood writes that "Pasolini has taken Matthew's jagged narrative and made it into a bleak, Brechtian epic." He grants that Pasolini's portrayal of Jesus is "an impeccable artistic response in the Brechtian sense" (in that it is "a tangible representation of an impossible case") but cautions that this theologically sound disconnect—"this is the son of God, how could he look like anybody, talk like anybody?"—can't be kept up forever. When the disconnect no longer serves its defamiliarizing purpose, Wood complains that "everything lapses into bathos. The film becomes a school nativity play taking itself too seriously. The person who a moment ago had been a vivid but schematic, almost abstract representation of Jesus (or Peter or Judas or Pilate or Mary), a figure in a tapestry say, now seems to have wandered in from a Fellini film, or better, an audition for a Fellini film in its early stages of planning. And we can't even enjoy the effect of the grotesque here, since the austere style doesn't allow it. The figures just seem stranded, real people watching their notional identities walk awkwardly away from them."

Also in response to the BFI retrospective, Mamoun Hassan introduced a screening of Pasolini's Matthew to a full house at the National Film Theatre in London on March 8, 2013, and this has been captured on video and offered for viewing at Vimeo.

Pasolini's The Gospel According to Matthew is available for mail rental at Netflix, and streaming on Hulu Plus, Amazon, and Fandor. Fandor synopsizes: "The birth, life, teachings and death on the cross of Jesus Christ presented almost as a cinéma-vérité documentary. Pasolini's second feature seemed a strange choice for such a revolutionary director, but it is an attempt to take Christ out of the opulent church and present him as an outcast Italian peasant. Applying Neo-Realist methods, the director shot in Calabria, using the expressive faces of non-professionals including that of his mother as the Virgin Mary. The Gospel According to Matthew is considered the greatest screen version of the 'greatest story ever told' and this freshly remastered version brings the film to life in a way that has never been seen before." Also at Fandor is Kevin Lee's appreciative video essay "The Gospel Faces of Pier Paolo Pasolini".

The trailer for the film is available at YouTube, where the film can likewise be found in its entirety. At the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive CineFiles database, several rare documents on Matthew can be studied.

INDEX—RAÚL RUIZ

PFA Program Notes (by Jason Sanders)

Jonathan Rosenbaum on Ruiz

Rouge on Ruiz

MUBI on Ruiz

Cinefiles on Ruiz

Adrian Martin on Ruiz

Quintín on Mysteries of Lisbon (2010)

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."

ROXIE: NASTY-ASS FILMS—JOAN BLONDELL X 2

As Juliet Clark wrote in her introductory program note for the Pacific Film Archive (PFA) retrospective "Joan Blondell: The Fizz on the Soda" (which ran June 13-29, 2008): "With a lush figure, bright, platter-sized eyes that missed nothing, and a mouth equally ready to dish a wisecrack, pull a sneer, or plant a kiss, actress Joan Blondell (1906–1979) was a staple of Hollywood's studio heyday. The fact that she rarely got first billing testifies more to the wealth of star power in her era than to any shortage of talent or hard work on her part: she made close to a hundred films over half a century, and brought freshness and spirit to every role."

Blondell is featured as a pre-Code staple in two "nasty-ass" films from Warner Brothers programmed into Elliot Lavine's "Hollywood Before the Code: Nasty-Ass Films For a Nasty-Ass World!", upcoming at the Roxie Theater (March 2-8, 2012); both films in B&W HQ Digital.

Lavine synopsizes the first, Three on a Match (1932), screening on opening night, Friday, March 2: "Three young women, friends since childhood, reunite after years of separation. But the random hand of fate has determined that at least one of them will descend into the depths of drugs, depravity and death before the breathless pace of this tragically exciting sixty-three minute pre-code melodrama has exhausted itself." That "random hand of fate"—later avoided by Sydney Greenstreet in Three Strangers (1946)—is the WWI superstition that if three people lit their cigarettes off the same match, the third was doomed to die.

Juliet Clark synopsizes in her PFA capsule: "Compressing thirteen years into sixty-three minutes of screaming headlines and sordid melodrama, Three on a Match draws a triangle of types—bad girl, good girl, rich girl—only to tweak the social-determinist schematic with bitter irony. A chance meeting in a beauty parlor reunites a trio of childhood classmates: Blondell the reform-school graduate, pegged in girlhood as 'just not serious enough'; Bette Davis, the serious one; and Ann Dvorak, the snobbish striver who, ambitions fulfilled, finds adult life 'tiresome and pointless.' As the scenario rapidly descends into an underworld of drugs and crime, it becomes clear that there are worse things to be than a bad girl. The film showcases Blondell's knack for combining charming vulgarity with basic decency, and Dvorak's alarming talent for depravity; only Davis's character is underdeveloped (although her full physical development is on frequent display). Watch for an early appearance by Humphrey Bogart."

In his biography Joan Blondell: A Life Between Takes (University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 2007), film historian Matthew Kennedy adds: "In early 1932 [Joan Blondell] made the trenchant Three on a Match, all about the divergent fortunes of school friends who meet ten years later. Vivian (Ann Dvorak) has married a wealthy lawyer. Ruth (Bette Davis) is a secretary, and Mary (Blondell) has taken to the stage after a stint in reform school. With its attention on violence, drugs, and kidnapping, Three on a Match was judged by the New York Times to be 'tedious and distasteful,' but it has become a minor pre-Code classic. It is a wonder of economic film making, as a fully realized story covering thirteen years is contained in sixty-three minutes. The plot hinges on Dvorak's character, who squanders loveless, conventional respectability and winds up ensnared in the underworld. The idiom-filled dialogue had forward momentum and gutter-inspired realism. With its uncompromising conclusion, Three on a Match became a primal scream against the injustices visited upon women." (Supra, p. 48)

When I spoke to Matthew Kennedy during the PFA "Fizz on the Soda" retrospective, he said of Three on a Match: "If you want gritty pre-Code, they don't come any grittier than Three on a Match. It's part of volume two of TCM's Forbidden Hollywood series and it involves three women who were friends in grade school and then it catches up with them several years later and the different paths their lives have taken. One in particular—played by the shamefully neglected Ann Dvorak—burns a hole through the screen. The three women are Dvorak, Blondell and Bette Davis and, interestingly, of the three the one who makes the least impression is Bette Davis. Her role is quite underwritten. What's also interesting about Three on a Match is that it's only 63 minutes long and it covers something like 15 years. It is the most tight, economical, without-feeling-rushed movie you will ever see. It's a text book lesson in filmmaking efficiency and storytelling; it's absolutely amazing that way."

According to a positive review of the film in the November 17, 1932 issue of The Spokane Spokesman, Three on a Match depicted the passage of time through "a brand new approach and treatment... The parade of time is cleverly portrayed through news headlines down the years, popular song sheets, reproduced on screen, and excerpts from the news weeklies from 1919 and 1932." Within these montages, Three on a Match made clever use of its titular superstition by including a graphic of a "Believe it or Not" newspaper clip explaining Swedish match tycoon Ivar Kreuger's attempt to get people to use more matches by exploiting the WWI superstition.

The second Blondell film in the "Nasty-Ass" lineup, screening on Tuesday, March 6, is Blondie Johnson (1933). Lavine writes: "Against a graphically depicted Depression-era backdrop, the story of a wise-cracking gal who rises to the top in the male-dominated crime rackets is played out with enough gusto and sexually charged ammo to load a dozen tommy guns. A rapid-fire exercise in economy and excitement, this is first-class pre-code entertainment of the highest order!"

In my conversation with film historian Matthew Kennedy referenced earlier, I asked him to profile a Blondell film not included in the PFA series that he would want audiences to catch and his prompt suggestion was Blondie Johnson. "It's one of the few times," Kennedy told me, "where Warner Brothers said to Blondell, 'You are in no uncertain terms the name above the title and you're not co-starring with a man, not supporting somebody, it's a movie about you.' She's in every scene. It's a fantastic, low-budget gangster movie where Blondell plays the gangster. She's not the gangster's moll; she's the gangster."

Kennedy wrote about the film in his Blondell biography: "Joan finally had her chance at a solo turn with Blondie Johnson. This was her movie outright; she worked every day of its four week schedule. Conceived as a female Little Caesar, Blondie undergoes an extreme transformation at the hands of an indifferent society. As a Depression victim, she appears before a magistrate begging for assistance so that she may care for her sick mother. She gets no sympathy, then goes home to find her mother dead. She hardens quickly. 'This city's going to pay me a living, a good living, and it's going to get back from me just as little as I have to give,' she says with bitter certainty.

"Blondie Johnson gently twisted movie storytelling and sexual stereotypes. This time Joan was not a gangster's female sidekick, she was the gangster. She became that way by the malfunctions of government, not because of a predisposition to be bad as was often the case in roles played by Cagney and Robinson. There is humor and authenticity in Blondie Johnson, and Joan enjoyed a personal success. She showed a new command on screen, occupying the space with full, confident strides and persuasively shifting from charity case to tough Mafiosa to vulnerable woman in love. It was a tidy hit at the box-office, grossing $325,000, more than twice its negative costs." (Supra, pp. 50-51)

THE LIBRARY LOVER: MARTIN ON RUIZ

Long before the Rotterdam International Film Festival programmed their 2004 retrospective "Raúl Ruiz: An Eternal Wanderer", in collaboration with the second issue of Rouge, Adrian Martin had already been a key player in organizing "The Cinema of Raúl Ruiz", a 1993 Ruiz retrospective sponsored by the Australian Film Institute. He authored the accompaning booklet for the retrospective, which featured his introductory essay "Raúl Ruiz: The Comedy of Exile", as well as program capsules for 16 Ruiz films. That booklet is available in PDF format at the Pacific Film Archive (PFA) CineFiles website; but, for ease of reference, Adrian Martin has generously granted The Evening Class permission to replicate his essay and four of his program capsules relevant to PFA's retrospective "The Library Lover: The Films of Raúl Ruiz (March 2, 2012 - April 15, 2012). Along with his seven essays on Ruiz for Rouge, and—relevant to PFA's upcoming series—his specific essays on A TV Dante (1989) and Three Lives and Only One Death (Trois vies et une seule mort, 1996), these earlier pieces from the 1993 Australian retrospective provide keen and additional insight.

Also of related interest is Martin's eloquent elegy "A Ghost At Noon" published at Girish Shambu's site. Upcoming: Along with Jonathan Rosenbaum, Adrian Martin is finishing up a long new essay for the Madrid Filmoteca volume on Ruiz and, of course, hopes to write his own book on Ruiz in the future. He advised that it was great to see one of the last Ruiz films, Ballet Aquatique (2011) at Rotterdam, which he described as a "droll and wonderful tribute" to Jean Painlevé.

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Raúl Ruiz: The Comedy of Exile
by Adrian Martin

An exile, as Bertolt Brecht stated, is the ultimate dialectician. But I want to add that an exile is also a consummate traveller whose cultural territory is shaped through a layering process and whose representational world is made up of intersecting figures.—Zuzana M. Pick, 1989

I spend my life looking for equivalences, like all exiles.—Raúl Ruiz, 1983

Raúl Ruiz has often been described as the exemplary artist in exile. Since his sudden departure from Chile in 1974, he has wandered between many countries and cultures—France, Portugal, Germany, America, Italy—and explored many different ways of getting films made (in TV, cinema, schools, arts centers, galleries and museums). Probably more intensely than any other living artist, he has consciously lived out what Zuzana Pick calls the "subjective paradox" of exile, everywhere finding surreal equivalences or building baroque bridges between bits and pieces of various real and imaginary worlds.

Exiled (in Eduardo Galeano's formulation) "between nostalgia and creation", Ruiz has been poetically dubbed by one commentator the "fatherless ghost" of modern cinema. Given the steady erosion of the old myths of national identity in an increasingly multicultural, diasporic and "post colonial" world, the tag is surely true: Ruiz has himself stated, "I believe in the variety of cultural identities—you need many if you want to become yourself."

Yet Ruiz and his characters are fatherless (and motherless) in another, equally pressing and poetic sense. Personal identity is always in flux in the wayward Ruizian universe. His motley crew of heroes and heroines—twins, reincarnated beings, ghosts, zombies, sleep­ walkers, wandering spirits who inhabit many bodies—are forever in search of a home, a self, any kind of resting point. The problem is that none of these charming, old fashioned unities seem to actually exist. (The narrator in Three Crowns of the Sailor learns too late that his life only has a meaning as part of an infernal pact with the dead—and he is condemned to re-live, re-tell that lesson eternally.)

Yet if there is a territory (key Ruizian term) that one can profitably inhabit, it is that shifting, partly phantasmagoric space formed at the intersection of many stages, stories and identities. If Ruiz found himself, at the end of the 1970s, at the helm of a "return to fiction" within experimental narrative cinema, it was because of his open, shameless delight in spinning stories ("high" or "low" culture, it doesn't matter), conjuring imaginary worlds, and playing childlike games with their building blocks.

Ruiz is one of the great storytellers of the modern cinema—not one story at a time, but many all at once, or overlapping each other, or suddenly displacing each other. He is drawn to pregnant physical sites—gothic houses, mystery islands, picture palaces—where stories are going on everywhere, in a perpetual cycle. And those perenially ghostly and/or multiple characters of his are ones who can easily jump (or be shunted) from one parallel story to another, one parallel world to another.

Many of Ruiz's films resemble the B movies of yesteryear—the cheap, seedy horror, fantasy and pirate movies that he used to watch as a child in Chile. Ruiz loves obvious artifice. His films use bargain basement special effects from the cinema's earliest days: mirrors, split screens, optical toys, smoke, shadow, garish colored filters. Ruiz emphasizes the strangeness of shots, edits, scene transitions. "If you take two images and link them by superimposition, a simple enough device, you—the spectator—are actually in two places at once: a logical impossibility."

From the connections between shots, characters and events, Ruiz derives and explores an entire metaphysics of cinema. He is undoubtedly a highly philosophical filmmaker. But his intellectualism is (as he has avowed) often of a "very sportive and funny" kind. And it expresses itself in his work in a devious, volatile way. For if Ruiz seeks to create a rebus, a didactic illustration of abstract ideas, he pursues this rebus through the intricate, material alchemy of images, sounds, environments and gestures. This translation of the rational into the sensual always results in a joyous betrayal of the initial intention, a vertiginous transformation of the givens, and the opening of a door onto the unknown, the not-yet-­thought-or-felt.

Ruiz is the poet laureate of cinematic excess. Many elements of his films appear adrift, hallucinated, surreal: bizarre point-of-view shots; gaping, grotesque distances between foreground and background; colors, lights, decors forever twisting and transforming themselves around the actors; the music of Jorge Arriagada bathing everything in unruly, oceanic, romantic sentiment. Ruiz dreams of making a film in one continuous shot where all the elements would be utterly transformed from start to end; or conversely, where the characters and plot would be perfectly consistent, but the film would "begin in the time of Ivanhoe and end as a Western".

Perhaps we are close to the very heart of Ruiz's cinema here. Reflecting on Eisenstein's unusual "laws of cinematic perspective" which Ruiz adopts as perverse axioms—the part is greater than the whole, the instant is longer than the day—Cahiers du Cinema critic and screenwriter Pascal Bonitzer intuited the deep logic of the director's poetics and his politics. "If the smallest is greater than the largest, the order of the world is overthrown, inverted. The cinematic dream becomes a subversive enterprise, the subversion proper to humor." It is this comedy of exile that liberates us when we encounter the cinema of Raúl Ruiz....

© Adrian Martin, January 1993

Tres Tristes Tigres (Three Sad Tigers, 1968)

Three Sad Tigers, Ruiz's first feature, is a fiction of everyday life, following the random adventures of a group of Chilean "marginals" during a summer weekend. The overtly psychodramatic aspect of the film reflects the influence on Ruiz of John Cassavetes' early films, and also the social reality of "violence and self-deception" which (as Ian Christie has remarked) are "shown as elements in the everyday life of many Chilean marginals". Freddy Buache compares the film to Luis Buñuel's Mexican B-movie melodramas of the 1950s, in which an "exaggerated dramatization is aimed at disparaging the ideology it at first sight seems to be illustrating".

Stylistically, the film is an innovative hybrid of Italian nee-realist and French nouvelle vague styles. Pushing the possibilities afforded by light, portable filmmaking equipment to their limit, Ruiz pursued a systematic, deliberately contrived exaggeration of cinema verite style, highlighting the extreme mobility of the camera, "rough" editing, and the wayward trajectories of the actors. Charles Tesson notes the film's "figures of inversion: the landscape becomes a character, the story becomes a backdrop, and the characters become pure decor".

Zuzana Pick highlights the film in its original historic and national context: "The work of Raúl Ruiz was marginal to what was termed as the 'cinema of Allende'. The ironic treatment of middle-class stereotypes in Three Sad Tigers and Nobody Said Anything (1972) went against the grain of social realism in that it transgressed the documentary tendencies that impregnated the cinema of his generation".—© Adrian Martin, program capsule for The Cinema of Raúl Ruiz.

The Penal Colony (La colonia penal, 1970)

One of Ruiz's key concerns during the 1960s and 70s was what he called the "institutional" behavior of individuals, regardless of their specific ideological creed: whether a member of a political party, a religious group, or indeed any professional association, the individual "hyperconforms" by consciously or unconsciously adopting certain bodily postures, a way of speaking, a complete mode of psychological behavior. What made Ruiz's Chilean films controversial was the use of his own left-wing culture as a prime (and richly comic) example of such institutional behavior. More broadly, Zuzana Pick has emphasized how Ruiz's Chilean films "drew attention to national identity as a perversely codified and ritualized performance".

The available, subtitled version of The Penal Colony (a free adaptation of Kafka's short story of that name) lacks all credit titles, and may be some seven minutes short. The basic premise of the plot involves an island named Captiva, whose basic industry is the manufacture of news on behalf of international press agencies—and in particular a visiting journalist who is a declared "specialist in underdeveloped countries". Thus, "typically" Latin American scenes of torture and execution are staged for the eyes of the world, while a typically Latin American President strikes dictatorial poses.

"A complex ironic commentary on Latin America's strenuous efforts to conform to the stereotypes by which it is commonly represented abroad" (Ian Christie).— © Adrian Martin, program capsule for The Cinema of Raúl Ruiz.

Dog's Dialogue (Colloque de chiens, 1977)

Ruiz once remarked apropos the smallness of his budgets: "Usually I'll take a poor image and drown it in words." This inversion of the typical sound / image relation has been explored by Ruiz in a number of ways throughout his career. In its extreme form, a reduced number of static images (such as the paintings in Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting or the stills and icescapes in his episode of Icebreaker) are rotated, while a voice-track breathlessly narrates a comically excessive, fantastically exaggerated story. Dogs' Dialogue is devoted entirely to this principle, counterpointing a spoken "family romance" melodrama of love, murder, and shifting personal identities with spare images of barking dogs, streetscapes and a set of illustrative stills.

"The net result of these combined strategies is to reveal melodrama itself as a pure formal mechanism, with characters and plot reduced to the status of necessary props. The disturbing lack of individuality and identity which derives from these attitudes, turning all the characters into mere aspects of a playful, arbitrary schema, seems merely the logical outcome of Ruiz's skepticism about the homogeneity of his own authorship. With characters and auteur all assigned such a mockingly nihilist function, the dialogue that ensues might well signify no more than the barking of dogs" Jonathan Rosenbaum).— © Adrian Martin, program capsule for The Cinema of Raúl Ruiz.

The Suspended Vocation
(La vocation suspendue, 1978)

Suspended Vocation is based on a 1950 book by Pierre Klossowski, written in the indirect form of a commentary on an imaginary novel. Aiming to translate this technique, Ruiz's adaptation purports to be two films, one shot in black-and-white in 1942, the other in color in 1971 (although deliberate anachronisms appear), each film having its own cast of actors.

Ruiz: "The story told by the film occurs within the Church. Its internal ideological and political struggles are unfolded, but treated from the point of view of the Church itself. What is the interest of a story of this sort? Like any organization, the Church is constructed on a dual principle of obedience, and separation from the rest of the world. Like any organization, it requires exclusivity, constant growth and hierarchy. In a certain way, the Church is the organization par excellence. To speak of the Church is thus, perhaps, to speak of bureaucracy and dogmatism. The Church is thus the totalitarian system par excellence, based not on police violence but the free will of its members. The Church is perhaps the most successful example of 'totalitarian fascination', with two principal sources of pleasure: the fascination of discipline, and of power."

"There is, in both novel and film, what ought to be the ultimate heresy: a meticulous description of a theological combat from which every trace, every relevant sign, of the truly religious—the 'supernatural', as Klossowski would say—has been erased. And, as one might expect, what remains is—in its purest, most pathological, most totalitarian form—paranoia" (Gilbert Adair).— © Adrian Martin, program capsule for The Cinema of Raúl Ruiz.