Raoul Ruiz

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) is on his deathbed. Looking at photographs brings memories of his childhood, his youth, his lovers, and the way the Great War put an end to a stratum of society. His memories are in no particular order, they move back and forth in time. Marcel at various ages interacts with Odette, with the beautiful Gilberte and her doomed husband, with the pleasure-seeking Baron de Charlus, with Marcel's lover Albertine, and with others... (imdb)

Based on the southern Chilean island of Chiloé's myth of "Caleuche", or The Ship of the Dead. (imdb)

Gustav Klimt's eternal search for perfection, eroticism and love are examined in this film, which centers on his passion for Lea de Castro, his struggle for artistic freedom, and his life-long but platonic relationship with Emilie Floge. (Outsider Pictures)

Two narrators, one seen and one unseen, discuss possible connections between a series of paintings. The on-screen narrator walks through three-dimensional reproductions of each painting, featuring real people, sometimes moving, in an effort to explain the series' significance. (imdb)

At her son's funeral, Solange, a lawyer famous for losing hopeless cases, agrees to defend René, her son's age, accused of murdering his wealthy aunt, Jeanne, who's part of the Franco-Belgian Psychoanalytic Society, known for odd views and methods. She reads Jeanne's journal, documenting René's criminal tendencies. Solange believes him innocent, manipulated into the murder or framed... (IMDB)

Today, Camille turns nine. He had sworn that on his 9th birthday he would show his parents the videos he was shooting on the side-the tail of a cat scampering away, a window, and a veiled woman's face - an intriguing picture... Later that day, Camille's mother, Ariane, meets up with her son in the park. The boys appears perturbed. He is leaning against a tree, eyes cast down. He says that now he wants to return to his "real home" and his "real mother." (imdb)

A 'double-bill' of two discrete narratives, concerning a cherubic infant killer and a neurotic Norman Bates-like loner: when, as the second plot develops, one has all but forgotten the first, it brusquely resurfaces. (filmlinc.com)

A 21-minute, César-winning short film from Chilean expatriate director Raul Ruiz, Colloque de Chiens (in English, Dog's Dialogue) takes its title from a series of barking dogs who reappear throughout the film, one of several motifs used to add unexpected depth to a purposefully melodramatic narrative. The film begins by centering on Monique, a young woman who descends into the world of prostitution...

A mediocre pulp novelist is approached by a stranger claiming to be a serial killer with a proposition to chronicle his crimes. (imdb)

Confusing realities surface in this paranoid film dealing with the fragile nature of a young woman (Anne Parillaud) recovering from rape and an apparent attempted suicide. In one reality, she is a killer destroyer of men. In another she is the new wife on a Jamaican honeymoon with her husband (William Baldwin), who is trying to help her recover. Which is real is the question as the story unfolds. (imdb)

An examination of the patriarchal Jesuits and the matriarchal partisans of the cult of the Virgin Mary (library.aftrs.edu.au)

Take a walk into the weird world of filmmaker Raul Ruiz as he takes us to Paris for a twisted ride. A man which shares four names and four personalities (which is the real one?) is the link between four different, yet similar, stories involving love, lust, crime, and time. (imdb)

A father (Michel Piccoli) is scheming to have his slightly mental daughter from an earlier marriage (Elsa Zylberstein) killed by allowing a murderous psychopath (Bernard Giraudeau) to be released from the asylum and led to his house. However, the psychopath and the daughter fall for each other. (imdb)

A parody of anthropology, linguistics, and cultural imperialism. The film follows an unlikely team of linguists into the wilds of an ersatz Patagonia to study the last speakers of a dying language. That language apparently consists of a single word, which therefore means everything. (imdb)

Three episodes that play out as a fairy tale about a young boy fantastic adventures.

A baroque mix of revolutionary politics, pop culture, and semiotics, loosely based on the play by Pedro Calderon de la Barca (imdb)

Very loosely based on a novella by Sadeq Hedayat, "The Blind Owl."

A dance troupe performs for choreographer Jean-Claude Gallotta.

The film develops into a series of very theatrical sequences which will tell the "story" of a man and his left hand.

A couple win a big house in a gamble, When they get there, don1t find it empty but full of ghosts of the last inhabitants

Max retains a lifelong vision of his hero, a French aviator named Antoine, who keeps finding himself behind the controls of an airplane without remembering how to operate it - and who is also, in some way, the hero of the classic French novel Les Grandes Meaulnes. (filmlinc.org)

Follows a jealous countess, a wealthy businessman, and a young orphaned boy across Portugal, France, Italy and Brazil where they connect with a variety of mysterious individuals. (imdb)

A prelude announces the intent to tell nine stories, all marked with letters of alphabet, with the subsequent permutations of these stories. Not only the plotlines get mutated and re-ordered, so do the actors, hats, beards, accents, manners - whatever may identify a character ceases to be such an identifier. The plot itself becomes a mystery, since there are parallel searches for the treasure, the map of treasure, which as we learn is a treasure in itself, a coin, a kidnapped father etc.

A short documentary examining the Château de Chambord.

A look at Erwin Patkai and the planned community he designed at Marne-la-Vallée.

Several hikers become lost in the woods.

Come to the Village of the Dogs, it's easy to find. Just follow the avenue of crutches and the prosthetic legs hanging from the trees. It's where the Virgin Mary keeps appearing in the sky. And the local Marquis' hobby is burying people alive, sometimes rescued by Ellic. Sometimes not! (imdb)

Thérèse (Casta), a young country girl, gets away with her husband in pursuit of a better life in the city. There, she finds out that her spirit is uncontrollable, that she is an "âme forte". She meets another savage soul, Madame Numance (Dombasle), the cultivated, elegant and mysterious benefactor of the city. An intense relationship, based on mutual admiration, is generated between the two women, until Thérèse's husband decides to take advantage of the Numances' kindness and robs them.

This quickly-filmed avant-garde farce by prolific director Raul Ruiz features an insomniac (Michel Lonsdale) whose main preoccupation is surreptitiously watching private matters -- he is a voyeur. He and an equally disreputable acquaintance rape a woman alongside the Seine, a crime made all the worse because she is pregnant. The rest of this slow-paced film deals with the consequences of that action.

Robert Louis Stevenson's novel, updated to the twentieth century.

Inspired in form by American police TV shows and soap operas, The Golden Boat is a madcap, surreal dash through the streets of New York city, telling the mysterious and often hilarious story of an aged street-person named Austin, a comically compulsive assassin, as he joins up with a young rock critic and philosophy student named Israel Williams.

A 1987 adaptation of an Arthur Adamov play in which all eleven actors rotate their parts.

The story of a cult, obsessed with an everlasting film.

An old man, awaiting death, wanders about a dream city reliving scenes from his youth. (mubi.com)

Sir Paul, a distinguished author, blinded in a horrific accident, advertises for an amanuensis, an assistant to help him with his writing. He employs the amiable Jane Ryder to be his eyes as he revisits scenes from his past and works on what he intends to be his final opus. Jane appears to be ideal: attractive, intelligent, unruffled by her employer's abrupt eccentricities. But, gradually, we come aware that Jane has another agenda. Incrementally, Sir Paul's familiar surroundings are altered. (imdb)

Chilean exiles in Paris discuss the problems facing them. They kidnap and attempt to re-educate a touring singer from their fatherland. (imdb)

Raul Ruiz filmed the gardens of the Château de Versailles. The first one, French, focuses on the King's Square (a space where everything is arranged in order to be seen). The other one, English, is the exact opposite, because from any point within it, one falls out of view.

Mordant, self-aware, freighted with sensitivity toward Chile's problem, wary of caricature, disposed toward consciousness of human fallibility, it is a deft blend of fiction and documentary set in the tumultuous days leading up to the election of Dr. Allende in 1970. (mubi.com)

Shot with damaged stock and wearing its shoddiness like a crown, the film oscillates between half a dozen languages, mainly atonal English and monotonal French, and drives one slightly batty with its portentous central gambling metaphor (poker games between three variously bandaged men), its seemingly irrelevant jazz drums on the sound track, and the capacity of each line reading to make the petulant dialogue sound even less likely than it reads. (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

Why it is so difficult to count fish in an aquarium? Ruiz, his loyal actor Melvil Poupaud and his producer François Margolin come up with a wide range of hypotheses. With their bone-dry wit, they keep up the tradition of the French pataphysics: the science of imaginary solutions. (IFFR)

In a bar in Santiago, two old men talk over their past. This is a strange discussion. In fact, they talk of themselves as if they were dead. We don't know what is true or false, what is dream or reality. (imdb)

Absurdist short about a man with a suitcase and a man inside that suitcase. (imdb)

In a world where cities have become car-graveyards and transport is achieved via bicycles equipped with sails, a princely ruler loses his power due to bad TV ratings, he is depersonalized by a machine run by an evil Professor Pie, and is threatened with ritualized death by car accident. He seeks his personality, a lovestruck wheelchair-bound woman convincing the Professor to help. (The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre)

The search of a fragmented body and the encounter with the political utopia. (Filmaffinity)

'A didactical fiction about cartography'. This "cine-cartographic" essay navigates between the documentary and the fiction, the map and the territory, the dream and the reality. (spacefiction.wordpress.com)

Tv Series about Chile folk and myths. The tale of a mother and her son who begin the hunt of a famous christian bones. (es.wikipedia.org)

Ruiz deconstructs, satirizes and politicizes a rich-boy/poor-girl romance bestseller which had been dubbed 'the Chilean "Love Story"'. (imdb)

Pierre, a middle-aged tourist guide, is the victim of a sudden failure : he does not recognize anything about him any longer. He goes back home and in his apartment he finds a mysterious young man who tells him he is here to avenge a young woman who has taken her own life. What share of responsibility does Pierre hold in this situation?

The film revolves around the concept of soap opera. Its structure is based on the assumption that Chilean reality does not exist, but rather is an ensemble of soap operas. There are four audiovisual provinces, and the threat of war is felt among the factions. The political and economic problems are immersed in a fictional jelly divided into evening episodes.

The drunken nights of several listless chancers in Chile's capital city build inexorably to violence. (imdb)

A lush, baroque adaptation of Jean Racine's 1670 tragedy about a Roman emperor who bends to popular will and declines to marry the Palestinian queen he loves. (imdb)

All the characters are in hell, but they act as though the are in a sitcom, with canned laughter. It's based on Arcana Celestia by Swedenborg, a Swedish esoteric theologian from the 18th Century who started seeing ghosts, angels and demons around him. Instead of seeing a physician about it, he accepted the fact and began studying and interviewing his own hallucinations, like an anthropologist. He was convinced that people in hell are happy, because you find what you want there. (letterboxd.com

Chile is seen through the eyes of a Chinese painter – a traditional painter who uses the concepts of XVIII century Shih-T'ao. (letterboxd.com)

The story of a man whose wife has committed suicide and appears to him as a ghost, following him everywhere and changing his personality. Unfinished in 1967 and completed by Valeria Sarmiento for a 2020 premiere. (imdb)

An Agronom arrives at a farm to expropriate land, but the landowner is willing to leave the country voluntarily. A revolt among the tenants occur. (imdb)

A cinéma vérité documentary about the elections in Paris which reflexively inverts in on itself. (imdb)

Odd "fictional documentary" about the Avignon Festival. (Mubi)

A wild short made as part of a filmmaking workshop that Raúl Ruiz ran in Bogotá in October 1993. (imdb)

Richard of Gloucester uses murder and manipulation to claim England's throne.

An adaptation of the Kafka story updated to the modern day.

Documentary on the effort to integrate natives into Chilean society.