Raúl Ruiz, one of the best there ever was.
Today, 23 August, in Paris, a funeral was held for Raúl Ruiz, the Chilean filmmaker who died this past 19 August, 2011, due to a pulmonary infection.
Ruiz was 70 years old, and although he spent almost 40 years in exile in France after the military coup, his body will be buried in his native Chile, as he returned periodically, saying, "I live in Chile, but I travel to Europe 11 months out of the year," (from the Chilean Memoir Archive).
Fortunately, this Chilean creator will have no problems being remembered after his death, as in his prolific career, which includes more than 150 works, he was awarded and considered as one of the best Chilean filmmakers, working with the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel in France, and star actors like Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni.
In addition to being prolific, Raúl Ruiz was brilliant, giving rise to complete works that addressed themes from traditions —he was fixated on Chilean identity— to narratives that played with time and space. He liked the idea of breaking film´s classic structure, telling many stories at the same time. He points out in his book, Poética del Cine (Poetics of Cinema), "For example, in one street, two men are fighting. A little further down, a boy is poisoned while eating ice-cream. In the middle of all this, a man stationed at a window shoots at pedestrians in the middle of a general indifference. In a corner, a man is painting while a thief steals his wallet, and a dog, in the shadow of a building on fire, devours the brains of a comatose drunk. In the distance, multiple blood-red explosions blend in with the sunset. From the central conflict´s viewpoint, such a scene is of no interest, except to call it "Weekend in Sarajevo," and divide the people into two enemy camps." (Raúl Ruiz. Poética del Cine. Santiago: South America Editorial, 2000, p. 20).
Raúl Ruiz was a true artist that brought his complex mind to the screen, whether it was palatable or not, whether it sold or not. Perhaps that is why his television works such as Litoral or La Recta Provincia did not have such success among the popular audience; however, he had numerous fans, still wondering, why don´t they broadcast them on network television again? Surely now after his death, it will be considered.
I personally admired his work precisely for his films´ narratives, which are almost like reading a book, with all the subtexts that can be found in symbolic interpretation and punctuations and the words themselves, which can mean so many things. Although he thought otherwise, and used a filming method that allowed him to tell a story based on the images and not vice versa; the image isn´t linear like a word, which can be read in multiple ways, but to me, that´s just poetry, and he was one of the best cinematographic poets.
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