Visions of the Blind

Raúl Ruiz: A Users Guide and Pedagogy

16 NOTES That Go Nowhere

“What we saw, had no place.

And if it had a place, we don’t remember.”

— La Recta Provincia

“I doubt it.”

“All the more reason!” — Treasure Island

***

A story Ruiz repeats like folklore. An explorer—pirate, brigand, pilgrim—projects a fake map over a fairy tale world, only to find it works, that he’s been projected into the diagrams of his imagination. In The Territory (1981), it’s a picture of a skull used to navigate a forest; in Le jeu de l’oie (1980) and Manoel (1985), a kid’s board game used on a city; in Voyage d’une main (Voyage of a Hand, 1984), a man’s hand. All work as if reality had conformed to the map, the world to their imagination. As Alice continues the adventures of her book asleep, Ruiz’s films can seem like the stories Don Quixote would tell of himself as a Romantic hero, or, alternately, those an anthropologist would bring back from a fairy tale kingdom. In either case, the hero, like the filmmaker, determines life to follow lesson plans of myth and legend.

There are other types of maps than maps, overlays Ruiz’s heroes use to guide them through blind worlds: the resistance agent of Life is a Dream (Mémoire des apparences, 1986) uses Calderon as a mnemonic to remember names of other agents, until a genre-straddling Calderon adaptation he watches in a movie theater makes a thin scrim over his adventures in modern politics; in Treasure Island (1986), a kid leads his life believing it’s a continuation of an action TV show. Like the schoolkids throughout Ruiz’s career who diligently parrot their teacher’s gestures and phrases, as if propaganda were a math lesson, characters in Ruiz’s early, mock-verité Chilean work of the 70s flatly recite grandiose speeches as though their love affairs were stuff of legend, their dull lives mapped by myth; in A Closed Book (2010), one of Ruiz’s blind heroes maintains a mental map of his house, a movie mansion projecting every cliché of grandfather clocks and leather-bound anthologies, that’s slowly eroded as his assistant readjusts the furniture. And in a short documentary, La Ville Nouvelle (1980), architects discuss their maps and blueprints for a new, brutalist city in which each floor of each building will be endlessly replicated, and the city itself will perfectly replicate the plans. As there’s no difference in scale between a model and a building on-screen, Ruiz openly substitutes models for objects in insert shots through his films: maps of the real thing, even as the map, in all these films, becomes the real thing itself.

The map—copy, model, substitute, artwork, trace, and language to be decoded —is its own substitute cinema. Almost every Ruiz film is testament to a men’s imagination projecting them into anything, not only the worlds of their drawings, but into phantom body parts, movie screens, and inanimate objects that give form to souls that are reincarnated like bartered lunch. One of the main characters of City of Pirates (La ville des pirates, 1983), in which the protagonist switches actors halfway through, is an ominous bouncing ball, as in The Blind Owl (La chouette aveugle, 1987), a shaman speaks by dancing, each of his gestures subtitled: in each case a surface-level phenomenon gets preposterously ascribed an inner significance, so that each action becomes a sign to be decoded. At once, Ruiz can parody Enlightenment thinking that everything must be explained, and the legacy of Romantic myth, as if men could project themselves into toilets, pencil sharpeners, and bouncing balls as much as mountains and trees.

At the same time, this mock-insistence that one can read souls by the codes of body movements and surface action, as if the body were a map onto the soul, only emphasizes the feeling watching Ruiz’s movies, with their ghosts, zombies, devils, saints, and movie figures made of light, that nothing is just as it seems, and yet nothing can quite be figured as anything other than itself. Everything becomes a sign reaching out to some elsewhere, phantom existence. But there are only these apparitions and maps to go by. The joke is that religion or science could give us the decoder—and that the rhythm of a dance or bouncing ball, each treated with ritualistic gravity, could ever speak for anything other than itself. To convert the dance to words destroys it—and so it’s context, that constant inadequate in Ruiz, that’s needed, rather than the arbitrary translations he always provides. Not to define the meaning of a thing and destroy it in conversion (translation), but to let imagination revive it and suggest possibilities of all it might mean (context). Naturally Ruiz’s characters want answers, but are in the least likely movies to get them. Why does the ball bounce, and why does the shaman dance?

***

In Voyage d’une main, the protagonist bargains in whistles for a man’s soul he stole from his brother, instructs a trio of women that Greek architecture is “living flesh” surviving lamentable centuries, learns that his left palm contains a map of the world, blinds himself and uses his dismembered hand to guide him through the world and his own old age. Ruiz’s own dismembered story seems connected only in its framing: a psychological explanation at the start that the man sought revenge against Europe, and the device throughout that his hand has only to touch a spinning globe for him to be projected against a matte of colonialist iconography into a distant opium den or fur station. The shaggy dog story is also bookended by a rhyme: the hand that strokes black statues at the start becomes what it touches by the end, as a portentous voice-over suggests the man’s turned into a kid on-screen, dressed in blackface and a wig and mimicking his white superiors. So the story starts again as the guy becomes a copy of the copies he touched at the movie’s start: he’s refigured as a white kid refigured as a black kid refigured as a white.

Again the point where everything can be translated is the point where everything can be equated, and nothing has a meaning of its own: whistles no longer sound like whistles, but have to be decoded into universal currency—so Ruiz subverts his own universe by lingering on their sounds. But these transitive principles are pervasive in Voyage d’une main. The man seems to assume the position and sensation of whatever he touches: even of his own phantom hand. Blind, he is the ultimate voyeur, so passive to whatever worlds he encounters that he assumes their languages and their customs with chameleon composure. His hands are just as his vision, though he never seems to realize that the function of hands can be as much to grasp as to feel.

Of course the traditions he really assumes are the stereotypes of his own self-hating, Western imagination, probably learned in youth, as his child reincarnation at the movie’s end continues to learn them in mimicry. Each person he meets has been colonized by his imagination, as has he—it’s by watching that the child learns the image to assume, and becomes another voyeur, like any movie-watcher, who projects himself into the world he watches. The image becomes eternal, a role to be incarnated by various players throughout the ages, but surviving only as long as they do. There is no escaping its perspective.

“The living flesh,” the man in Voyage says of the Greek columns, framed as skeletons of modern culture. Meanwhile the soul is an alienable object that can be bought and traded. Like the man who lives by his hand, or the boy who gains a sense of self by imitating gestures—or the new king in Régime Sans Pain who studies Stanislavsky to ace his new role, only to learn audiences believe him by his royal garb—the man’s line about “living flesh” reveals a world where bodies animate souls, and it’s iconography that brings its subjects to life. In other words, the world of movies—a world in which substance, mass, and meaning is the product of appearances. The man’s hand is visionary because it makes people appear in their roles of colonialist icons; it’s visionary as Hollywood prestige. The man projects himself blindly where he likes in his own imagined map of the world, but his imagination is the kind of schoolroom imagination that claims each character as a brand of his culture. As he is himself: in trying to rid himself of a Westerner’s perspective, he can only assume foreign roles predicated by his white European heritage.

Sympathy becomes an usurpation, the belief that we can understand someone else or anything at all—without which we’re locked inside ourselves. The fluidity of Ruiz’s heroes, surrogate movie-goers swapping sights and slipping between bodies, personalities, and plots, redefining themselves continuously, has its counterpoint that to assume any body or role is not only to assume its limits, but to preempt those limits by personal experience and perspective: to stake them as one’s personal territory. So when Ruiz’s heroes lose themselves in worlds of appearances, their images are always drawn from convention: from memory, schoolbooks, folklore, and movie iconography.

The map becomes fact: in redefining themselves, even without a touch of volition, they almost inevitably colonize each other. Ruiz as parodist can only let the images parody themselves by reviving them in splendor; luxury inevitably becomes its own parody, flaunting its own waste, a substance that’s nothing more than style. Perhaps Ruiz’s favorite subject—the violence of luxury, purifying humans into a smooth, unified aesthetic with their surroundings at the expense of all individuation.

The images can only be turned against themselves to sabotage every principle of continuity and self-projection attendant on watching movies: by displacing, re-projecting them toward unseen, phantom worlds. Any Ruiz film finds the seams where reality is manufactured, as the brutalist mass-productions of La Ville Nouvelle (1980) are an artist’s blueprint for modern life. Voyage d’une main shows colonialism as a real work of art, a beautiful, mass hallucination.

***

“When we perceive facts and events from the outside world… we are confronted at the level of the imagination by chains of images made up of visual misunderstandings leading to a unitary or singular vision; an illusion. Meanwhile, a chain of synthetic images, say mental ideograms, evolves around the corpus of language by trying to reach and visualize its beyond. It may well be that this is the world that madmen and those who hallucinate inhabit, and perhaps not everyone is as fortunate, but it is here that many scientific intuitions have come about” (Poetics of Cinema).

Extensive synchronizations are required for an audience to project itself in a character’s shoes: coherencies and contingencies of space and time, image and sound, to simulate a stable character expressing himself or herself through outward appearances. And one by one Ruiz subverts these synchronizations, essential to character-based drama. Instead of playing by the continuities of a “classic” movie scene made to unify disparate moments into one, the fact of Ruiz’s collages— the different personalities of an actor, the different times of a sequence, the different tracks of sound and image meshed together—punctures the smooth opulence of their fade-ins and fade-outs. The appearances no longer correspond but float apart; each becomes the ghost of an absent source, a sign to beyond. Or a voice or image the characters can assume as a role to play.

A voice synchronized to a body doesn’t necessarily belong to it, as men in City of Pirates (1983) trade each other’s voices. Neither does a nostalgic, first-person voice-over synchronized to the protagonist’s action, as in Treasure Island, the narrator finally confesses he’s been jealous all the film of the on-screen hero, the kid Jim Hawkins who took he role he always dreamed he’d possess. A song no longer need be commentary on a scene; as Ruiz told Positif in 1983, “I’ve tried to use music,” not as leitmotiv or an atmospheric fog-machine, “but for its own emotional value independent of the images, to tie together two sequences that, in principle, have nothing to do with each other.”

Songs are no longer synchronized to single scenes, a character is no longer synchronized to a single body (City of Pirates), and single bodies are no longer synchronized with single roles (Marcello Mastroiani plays four in Three Lives and Only One Death, 1996). The violent unification one affirms in a name—including unified narrator and subject—is undone by a cut each time an actor in Le Professeur Taranne (1987) states, “I am Prof. Taranne,” and is instantly replaced by another saying the same. Between shots, a simple shot-reverse-shot can span continents (Voyage d’une main), worlds (Shattered Image, 1997), or decades (Combat d’amour en songe, 2000). Within a shot, spaces or times can collapse in a sort of screen memory (Time Regained, 1999), as figures from all eras intersect in Ruiz’s late, Chilean films from A TV Dante (1989) to Cofralandes (2002) to Litoral (2008). A point of view can be from no character but the camera itself (a sepia, handheld shot in Three Crowns of the Sailor (Les trios couronnes du matelot, 1982) ending with the protagonist setting his drink on the camera).

A foundation of genre filmmaking, that the director’s cache of music and dynamic compositions extends in perfect synchronicity from a world for which it provides the terms, is subverted so that each element (a speech, a song) can continue on its own past any correspondence with the others, as if each were passing from different movie universes. What universes? Every element becomes autonomous, an echo talking back to an echo (mise-en-abîme), that each seems to derive from each other more than any centralizing vision. So there’s a question: where do all these cultural codes come from that have always governed these correspondences—that a child’s dreams must be accompanied by wooden flutes, and a man’s mental breakdown by quivering cellos? The director and characters become players in genre games of hallucinatory rules. It’s another type of map, a game board.

The best Ruiz can do is to reveal the limits of their logic, and as the closer the elements nearly, not quite synch, the clearer the distance between them becomes. To open up this gap between elements so that each hangs suspended, paused, echoes from a bottomless well (mise-en-abysse), the opposite approach becomes equally valid: to try to embed the director’s every use of sound and composition within the scene itself, as if the songs and camera were characters, each reacting to the narrative as the narrative reacts to them. For the camera to work in a mock-1st person in Three Crowns that stands for nothing but its own sight, is not so different than if it were to operate from impossible perspectives of unseeing objects; either way the camera records an image that corresponds to nothing but itself as a floating, prosthetic limb of the action within the movie’s world.

So Ruiz’s camera does all the things in a scene it can’t do, like take the perspective of objects (the paintbrush in Miotte, 2001), or possess a body from other perspectives than an eye (City of Pirates). The soundtrack can turn out to come from within the scene (in Life is a Dream, it’s always unclear whether it’s from the movie the character is watching or the one he’s in). As can the voice-over: Ruiz’s own voice turns out to be generated from a radio in the wilderness of La Recta Provincia (2007), and since this voice is now from within the scene, part of its diegesis, he naturally holds a conversation with his protagonists. In A Place Among the Living (Une place parmi les vivants, 2003), the canted angles pastiched from 60 years of noir are finally given a logical justification: each time a character slants his neck, the camera slants with him. This, however, creates a logical conundrum for the camera that faces the subject without assuming its perspective: whether the camera should simply mirror the character’s slant to keep him upright on-screen, or whether the camera should mimic the slant—house right when the character slants stage right, or house left? Ruiz does both, alternately, and by the movie’s halfway point, characters have craned their necks to such neat right angles that Ruiz lays their faces lateral in wide-screen.

Every time Ruiz seems to be showing his own guiding hand, and yet the logic of Hollywood history reaches a breaking point as failed matches between a voice-over and scene, perspective and mouth, composition and strained neck show each element of the mise-en-scène inadequate to relate any perspective or position but its own. A pack of disembodied signs result, antennas signaling, like Ruiz’s phones and radios, to some absent context and source. Character, unbeknownst to themselves, disappear into mask-like images and sounds Ruiz can use to structure his movie as ideograms. Camera is no better than soundtrack as a foothold onto the movie’s world; Ruiz seems to make it as difficult as possible for an audience to project itself into either or into a character’s consciousness.

Instead the audience has to learn the rules of the game by playing, has to assimilate all these elements at once like words in a language, said Borges, that’s “a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past.” Ruiz: “I think that in any film worth seeing you should identify with the film itself, not with one of its characters. You should identify with the objects being manipulated, with the landscapes, with all the characters, though this doubling can never take place until you have reached and gone beyond the hypnotic point… Suddenly we are all the characters of the film, all the objects, all the scenery” (Poetics I). But the more hypnotic Ruiz’s films become in their images and sounds, redeployed in endless variations like private rituals, the less: “If a film’s images, all of a film’s given images, are but instances of doubling or splitting, that is, they are shamanic journeys mechanized by means of cinematography, perhaps then all we really have is detachment.”

In Colloque de Chiens (1977) and Brise-Glace(1989), the signs are only series of seemingly unrelated photographs, suspended from unseen scenes: a voice-over strings them together, though as Luc Moullet’s wondered (http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/cosmic-leveling-raul-ruizs-brise-glace), the correspondence of sound to image—speaker to character, description to photo, and narrative to montage—seems fanciful. At the point of skepticism, the voice-over only suggests some of the images’ narrative potential. Each element, treated as a unit of a language, of narrative, points to endless connotations beyond whatever framework’s been imposed on them.

***

For example: in A TV Dante, Ruiz takes Dante’s figurations of historical realities into eternal hells and loops them back into reality; his hell is “Santiago, Chile,” filmed after Pinochet’s failed plebiscite in 1988, but made into a stage in which marauders from all eras of Chilean history and iconography crisscross on horseback and in cars singing folk songs, revolting, dancing. In ten-minute segments, Ruiz recasts Dante and his own contemporary media, guerilla reels of Chilean agitators, into a cinematic hell of cheap horror films, boiling brains and huasos crying blood. Without anything more than music (on one stereo track) and voice-over (on another) for connective tissue, these parodies of two types of underground film lay parallel without any apparent links as if Ruiz were flipping channels. But the links are implicit: not only in the rhyming structures of the episodes themselves—as T.C. Smith’s shown—but in Dante’s text behind the film.

Dante’s poetic justice—that through metaphor and metamorphosis, the nature of a thing becomes apparent when refigured in another form (the suicides have left their human bodies, and so are refigured as trees)—gets extended by Ruiz, who films not only Dante’s stories, but Dante’s literary metaphors, and even his own metaphors for them. His visuals make no distinction; each of Dante’s images, like each of Ruiz’s modes, is aligned horizontally so that it’s impossible to tell what’s the tenor and what’s the vehicle, what’s the reality and what’s the fantasy. When Dante, in Canto 14, writes of a world consumed by fire, as if the fire’s flakes were flakes of Alpine snow, as if the earth were lit by tinder underneath, as hands yaw from the ground, Ruiz combines each of Dante’s elements and shows them being combined: dismembered body parts are cooked in oil (first the eyes, finally the brains), with flakes of flour sprinkled on top, over a stove lit from beneath. A poetic interpretation of Dante’s world as it’s cooked alive when Dante’s appeals to the heights of the Alps and the depths of hell become ingredients of a mock-ancestral dish. It’s Ruiz’s gross-out rather than the contemporary footage that with literal perversity becomes the most explicitly political moment of the series: the brain, served on a plate, is staked with small, Martini-scaled flags of a half-dozen nations.

Again in Ruiz the imagination is colonized, and there’s no escaping the forms of thinking and seeing prescribed by forgotten horror flicks, haunting a culture’s collective imagination, any more than those prescribed by verité newsreels. Opposition, in straits of despair, can simply be in opposing these modes against each other. But even when Ruiz is blatant with his own metaphors (the conquered brain), the image is exploded as it’s made to stand for all strands of experience: for a decodable scoring point, for a decent horror sequence, for Dante’s original text, for all the sequences in Ruiz in which body parts are interchangeable copies, for all those in Chile who were actually killed and dismembered by all-consuming ambitions of the elite. Ruiz’s own explanation is always simpler: “And because [A TV Dante] is done for TV, there is a part which is like a TV cooking show, so in the last canto the souls are eyes being cooked with mole."

Ruiz parodies prescriptive modes to offer their opposite: a film, like Dante’s poetry, in which the symbols dangle by a thread to their sources and the viewer can choose to see them by whatever context they might be seen; the ironies of Klimt (2005), Ruiz has suggested, come when the movie’s judged against historical reality. The terminal point for a media age—the meaning of a thing is in its form, and all the forms of modern life have been staked out and branded by cheap TV—becomes an opening onto Ruiz’s poetics, in which the form of a thing can suggest a thousand meanings and applications in the viewer’s eyes. “What I am proposing here is that the cohesion of these images, gathered on the edge of the screen, does not lead towards a history that could be summarized in words, but rather, towards an open model that, at times, may be seen as the mother-image from which all images proceed” (Poetics II). While on-screen each image, abstracted from structural, graphic, and historical context, but derived from all three, carries the passing force of light and sound as a “vortex,” the sudden, luminous detail.

***

“In cinema, literally, there are nothing but perspectives. Perspectives and continuity.” The mother (Isabelle Hupert) in Comedy of Innocence (La comédie de l’innocence, 2000) finds that her role has nothing to do with genetics but is projection of her nine year old son, who throws his feelings at another woman (Jeanne Balibar) he refers to as his “real mother.” So good is he at rewriting the conventions of his perfect bourgeois universe that when he circles Huppert with his DV cam to trap her as the object of his gaze, Ruiz circles too, as the world of the movie nearly collapses into the boy’s demonic projections and perspective. Nearly.

To project oneself into another consciousness is still to open up and shut down in the rules and choreography of the new world, without which there’s no language for communication or basis for the game. And yet this projection into a movie—Ruiz’s favorite image, the child touching shadows on a wall—can be a way of overcoming codes of sight. Through Poetics of Cinema, Ruiz proposes that even sight is a language—he repeats that narrative comes from images, and asks whether the blind can visualize objects they feel. That they probably can’t suggests that all our eyes actually see is variations of color, but that our mind distinguishes these into a code of individual objects with qualities of dimension and texture we’ve learned over time. This is, partly, a code of perspectival space, in which everything has its place. Against it, Ruiz offers a world of shadows, collapsing planes, and disembodied visions that let his characters project their own place in the world until there is nothing of themselves left.

A few cheap effects are enough to show a totally subjective world animated by one’s perspective on it: the red filters in the 80s that collapse three-dimensional spaces into flat gradients of blood and lipstick, the matte backdrops collapsing space again into a painting, the lengthy tracking shots that replace these effects in the 80s and 90s to summon characters from all eras of history from passing doorways. In all these devices, it’s impossible to discern the world from a perspective on it. In the slow pans of Ruiz’s last films, La Recta Provincia (2007), The Nucingen Haus (2008), Mysteries of Lisbon (2010), and Litoral (2008), in which his camera’s three-minute pan marshals characters together in a mansion each has inhabited centuries apart, the camera orchestrates the characters’ movement as much as vice-versa.

The world becomes an image, a favorite animating device: the magic lantern show. Different planes of reality merge like shadows and intersect like sliding cards. So Ruiz’s famous, poker-faced joke is of a low-angle, deep-screen space straddled by an object in extreme foreground and person in back. It’s a “Wellesian” space, Welles Ruiz’s acknowledged influence, probably because the montage grabs at a myriad of events criss-crossing out of shadows, and Ruiz shows hambone actors in dreamed-up worlds in all their threadbare glory, their make-up apparent, their masks showing, as if the camera were skeptical of its own mythologizing.

But Welles’ deep-space plays at recovering a three-dimensional continuity—Falstaff striding to the foreground in Chimes at Midnight. Ruiz’s strands them like cut-outs in a collage: the matching shapes and sizes of a small object in front and a larger person in back compose a world that seems to collapse dimensions. Instead of receding toward a vanishing point, Ruiz’s shots seem to open V-shaped out from the perspective of the camera as the animating source of the composition: mountains, walls, and matte shops back the compositions like stage sets. Open space, demarcated by Ruiz’s maps and explorers in man-made bounds, stays an open stage, impossible to delineate by any standards of size. Characters, divvied up in diverging planes, don’t seem to belong to any position at all, in either space or time. Instead, they’re subordinate to each other as visual echoes, neatly organized by an unseen, arranging eye.

Whose eye? Ruiz’s own seems borrowed from late-40s, Notorious-era Hitchcock: shots of milk in the foreground determining Ingrid Bergman’s fate in the back. A character, modeled by the director’s gaze, can become a victim of a discerning composition, condemned by the image; like Hitchcock, Ruiz organizes his universe to treat objects (remnants of modernity, telephones, radios, and cocktails) as epic heroes and people as their enablers: the person exists to answer the phone, play the music, drink the drink. But where Hitchcock’s tracking point of view shots traps characters into lines of sight, it’s never quite clear what ghost arranges the visions of Ruiz’s POVs. They remain dispossessed, the product of an intelligence that pits ingredients together to see what narratives will erupt between them. As the model determines reality, as the world exists only as it’s been composed on a map, Ruiz determines his own world, a potlatch of free-floating movie myths and historical tokens (corsairs, gauchos, and the Virgin Maria), by the way he composes one element against another—by the way he maps his universe. “I always start with a [technical] effect that helps the film come into existence,” said Ruiz, “but little by little becomes the subject.” The veil of illusion is unpenetrated, both deflecting and suggesting whatever lies beneath.

***

But there’s a difference between narrative opening up in new refrains and shutting down in tautologies, as the layabouts of Ruiz’s early, Chilean films go nowhere, and in Ruiz’s 70s work and late French films (Three Lives and a Death (1996) to Klimt (2006)), the characters seem nothing but copies of prefabricated, historical clichés. In La Colonia Penal (1971), a banana republic’s major production and export is documentary images of stereotypical, South-American exploitation: images seemingly conceived in the mind of a projected European audience, and images to which the reality of this country, and Ruiz’s own guerilla filmmaking, must submit in order for the image to be captured. A Place Among the Living modifies the structure as a writer hires a hit-man to carry out his crimes so he can write about them later. In Of Great Events and Ordinary People (Des grand événements et des gens ordinaries, 1979), Ruiz’s systematic parody of Rouch/Marker-like ethnography—on-street interviews, talking heads, long takes, babies crying, traffic sounds to chronicle a working-class quarter of Paris—makes a world where each person is treated only as the modes of a TV interrogation and tenants of realism will permit. The title can note a nice despair: there are great events and images, and it’s the function of ordinary people to act them out.

To a world fabricated in the image of its images, 1979 Ruiz, contemporary of Debord, Godard, and Farocki, offers a negative image: a redeployment of images made to signify one thing (war, porn, and great events) against a montage of similar or identical images double and multiplied, until the image starts to reveal a history in mass-production so pervasive that even reality copies it. Le Petit manuel d’histoire de France (1979) tells the story of France though school children reading their history textbooks—ordinary kids copying out swills of sound about great events and extraordinary people, as in Godard’s France/Tour/Détour/Deux/Enfants a few years earlier—and multiplied footage, copies of copies, of cheap, sometimes extraordinary TV productions devoted to the chapters of French history. The self-importance of the Joan of Arc becomes a sparring match between four actresses from different eras competing for the most despairing conflagration, as a little girl provides her own rendition of the story on the soundtrack.

Characters raise their fists as prime movers of melodrama, but the history is long-ago written. Ruiz flips the premise of the films he show, that great men write history, and shows them performing the same stale parts in the bullet-pointed, endlessly circuitous story that’s France’s official history, their roles doomed to repetition for as long as nations streamline their material histories into costume dramas and central-conflict narratives. In Ruiz’s history, there is no conflict: only predetermined stagings of terrific events made ordinary by their endless replaying, pedantry, and statutory acting that can either be too casual or too overwrought. As a history, as in Of Great Events, France’s history is one of the images a country invents for itself under the guise that they are a found reality; the movie ends with the least dramatic moment, the invention of cinema with the Lumières filming workers leaving a factory: the first time in the movie its characters no longer portray history but live it. But Ruiz leaves off at the event that will leave a doomed legacy: the future of cinema, in 1896, will only produce the history he’s just given. As the movie has just taught us, it’s a history of images becoming codes, colonial again. Like all codes, the syntax is arbitrary, but once installed, doomed to the same logic over and over. Still, in Ruiz’s universe, characters living their lives as stories told and retold face the complication that anybody can tell the story—though not only that it can be told endlessly, but that each iteration will change it in the telling.

So a tension, as the permutations of an unfolding logic open up endless possibilities: the maybe, might have been, shadow, trace that suggest an infinity of ways things could look and could be under the yoke of the artist’s imagination. Are these ways of breaking open a manufactured reality to revolutionary currents? Or, as in France, does the logic dictate lines of sight, a new manufactured, virtual reality in which the inhabitant’s eyes and ears, stroked by occultist visions, are deaf and blind to truths of material history, physical labor, the difference between the living and the dead? Or both?

***

Logic—of narrative, of genre—becomes a mad-libs to be filled in by interchangeable characters and an arbitrary vocabulary that override reason altogether; “don’t go in there,” a woman warns a man in L’Oeil qui ment (The Eye That Lies / Dark at Noon, 1993), “I’m scared it’s watching us.” “What?,” he asks. “The painting.” But just as often Ruiz follows an opposite logic of complete literal-mindedness that returns a figurative vocabulary to its origins. Thus because paintings entomb their subjects for all eternity, a painter entombs his subjects in L’Oeil Qui Ment while insisting his paintings have to live. And because movie censors cut off all inappropriate body parts, a censor cuts off nipples in Life is a Dream. They’re movies at wit’s literal end.

It’s just when Ruiz’s movies play at their most deterministic, linking two unrelated elements together so that each signifies the other—Calderon to resistance agents; the recited texts of theologians and philosophers to images of the Château de Chambord in Les divisions de la nature (1978); voice-over to image in Brise-Glace; two bodies of an alleged character; two voices—that they seem to create a third element (Godard’s “1+1=3”), an operating principle latent to both, while opening the possibilities of seeing each element through a thousand other lenses and inflections. At the end of the second episode of Cofralandes (2002), the narrator finds a hand-written poem to Cecilia Bolocco in the back of Simenon’s Maigret se defiende. The narrator says something to the effect that, "this only confirmed the link I knew was there, that whenever I saw Simenon, I would think of Bolocco. And here was the proof." Again a Ruiz hero finds his own, mental map of the world mirrored by experience in a link both arbitrary and fated to repetition. And even this unlikely link is itself an unlikely link to whoever else made the connection between a detective (Maigret) and supermodel (Bolocco): and as the book comes from the library, Belocco and Maigret continue to circulate together. Thoughts scatter, dispossessed as visions.

Ruiz’s systems seem so capable of incorporating any experience into their logic (Cofralandes is ostensibly filmed as documentary), that a basis for the link can be generated after the link has been made. Why Magret Defends Himself, Simenon’s caper of police surveillance and a detective’s alleged horseplay with a young girl, with Cecilia Bolocco, Miss Universe 1987? Is it that, conceived at about the same time (late July, 1964), each is a product of a surveillance universe, marking people for their images, in this episodes of Ruiz’s own portraitures about a history of portraits? Probably not, which is to say maybe: I doubt it; all the more reason. Better to elude these reasonable links and, at the end of an episode sequencing hundreds of faces, become our own detectives, questioning what kind of role the image of a supermodel could play in the imagination. Something about Ruiz that he turns us all into amateur movie-watchers.

***

For example: in the final episode of Cofralandes, a youth army hoists giant matchstick stakes to the sun and to an oversized package of “Luzifer” matches (“Lucifer-matches” are traditional), then starts to build a matchstick house. In an episode that starts and ends with a memory of firemen killed years ago—“so many were burnt in those years”—it’s not any more an innocent image than it is comprehensible. A bunch of phallic sticks, like in Genalogies of a Crime (Généalogies d’un crime, 1997)? An irrational literalization of a rationalist creed to light/enlightenment? Matchstick men? House of matches? The matchstick warriors are invoked again, in the same image, by an old man’s imagination in Días del Campo (2004). But some other clue to the code that conceived this weird image comes midway through the episode as the narrator repeats Chilean children’s self-perpetuating rhymes (“should I recount it again? And so…”) while a hand on-screen lights matches, blows them out, and places them geometrically on a table.

Not totally different from the scene in The Birds when playground crows multiply with the children’s circular verses sung off-screen; the inflection of one repetition on another makes both seem uncannily synchronized. Fosforos apagados: stories are retold and matches are mass-produced, but these repetitions depend on each variation passing quickly—a strange, distinctly Ruiz melancholy of stories and lights fading in and out. The sequence works less by some metaphor of two tools for illumination (a viewer’s projection) than the mutual rhythm of two nightly routines being repeated only a bit faster than usual. But even the idea of telling bedtime stories or lighting with matches seems like an ancient custom, barely repeated into the 21st century.

Throughout the episode, people repeat phrases to themselves as balms, private traditions carried on. Repeat nonsense and it gains a sense through the logic of its repetitions; repeat sense and it sounds like garbled nonsense.

***

“The recursive paradigm, like a system of Chomsky or his colleagues, plays with systems of signs that keep on engendering one other, linking ones to others, like a bet or hypothesis, so to speak, and keep conceiving a language out of a branching game or some other way, so that in the end, the systems propel themselves, generating one another as a kind of genealogy. And the strategic paradigm consists simply in intimating that the language is already written, it exists, it’s a game, it’s like a soccer match in which we already know the rules: it starts and ends, it has its limits. So we play to win this kind of game.

And it’s clear cinema can be understood in both ways. It can be understood as Rossellini’s films, waywardly searching for sense as the images engender one another and link each to the other. Or otherwise, a cinema like Hollywood’s that intimates that the film begins and will end, will have an end—“happy or not happy”—but an ending. Fine, those are two tendencies. Something that seemed fascinating was the possibility of, let’s not say mixing the things, but creating a system a bit more complicated than that, in which every element of the form—let’s call it Rossellinian—of making films, that is, in how the sequences give rise to each other, link together, extend from, return toward, and feed back to one another, etc., functions in this way but that each segment, each sequence, be a fiction that has to be completed in the audience’s imagination. That’s to say, each sequence deep down will function according to the rules of the strategic paradigm, but will also have a kind of fictional off-screen space.” — Ruiz (http://www.cinechile.cl/crit&estud-171)

***

In Días del Campo, the dead are displaced through a history whose chronology they seem to be oblivious to; as in so many melodramas, relationships are repeated among different characters like a virus, curse, and chorus. Similarly, the living ignore the dead: when a dead woman visits at end, the writer-hero doesn’t notice her, even though it’s already well established the whole of this physical world is a product of his subconscious thought; that includes his place within it. The difference between the living and the dead turns out to be one of different wavelengths of light. The writer listens to notice of his own death on radio repeated again and again: phantom signals from one time or another that seem to determine his own, like the light in the house marks the hours of the day and composition of space on-screen, though the particular day hardly matters.

The writer becomes a ghost of his own imagination feeling out some ebb of time even because he lives out old, timeless traditions. The man lives life as his own self-projection, and of course it’s the nature of projections that they’re both alive, present and fleeting, and dead, displaced, and endlessly imitable, like shadows and like ghosts.

“Yet what would you say if I affirmed that this resemblance renders them different?... As with all rituals, though we are well aware that these same liturgical gestures and events have been repeated many times before us, when we come to enact them we are intensely here. It is a ‘here’ reinforced by the innumerable over-theres. It is a resonating vicinity” (Poetics II).

As a fabulist, Ruiz has the cheek of Minnelli or Powell to violate all conventions of reality; like them, Ruiz reincarnates characters in new plots, landscapes, languages, and personas, and unstrings them from a mapping of linear, Aristotelian space-time. While Ruiz’s heroes maintain the obsessive desires and neuroses of a Hollywood hero facing down a central conflict, the central conflict itself is usually removed from Ruiz’s films, so that the characters seem grafted as audience members onto a fairy tale universe, with little justification for the centuries-old plots and traditions they insist on enacting as an outlet of their hopes and desires (there is no gold in Treasure Island, as the explorers of The Territory struggle to stay lost in a tourist-ridden forest). And yet they’re never anchored to any one world. Reincarnation entraps characters into the dreams, gestures, and moralities of their roles, even while letting them shape-shift through conflicting, polymorphous desires, the product of the bodies they inhabit—and the images they see all around themselves and in the mirror.

So a question whether Ruiz’s characters are enablers or tools of the traditions they channel; Ruiz’s emphasis on constant, unfurling process and physical movement in Mammame (1985) is also to show dancers who are puppets to it. In Miotte, Jean Miotte’s splays of colors are reshaped not just across the space of his canvas, but across Ruiz’s frame and through the duration of his movie: painting becomes its own process of exploration, but an exploration into the world it creates. Miotte’s painting becomes another self-generating hallucination like the dance of Mammame, and again Ruiz makes this invented reality the reality of his movie as the stage and canvas become the measures of his frame.

In a story within story in Le Domaine Perdu (2005), a bereaved girl and a man who’s just informed her she’s a widow, Grégoire Colin, together hear a knock at the door around 1945. It turns out to be a knock from 1973, from their later incarnations, who have been recounting this old memory: a phantom sound to the young couple who like dreamers hear the outside world that encases their story. The sound, used to pivot from one plane of time to another, is itself both out of time—since sound can’t belong to a time as images, the transition seems less pat than two images of characters repeating an action years apart—but also suggestive that as storytellers hear their story as it comes alive, so can the subjects hear the storytellers.

Ruiz’s tales operate as more ethereal versions of a comedy of errors. Instead of others mistaking the protagonist’s appearance and position, it’s the protagonists themselves who mistake their own identities and project themselves with full conviction into the territory of images all around them. And yet it’s the image that secretly determines them; Ruiz’s characters are both Romantics, forging their own identity in a world of their own imagination, and cosmic jokes. And again as in Minnelli or Powell, the persona of the protagonist, disseminated through his décor and mirror-image, reflects a filmmaker entrenched in 19th century notions of propriety and public appearance as the only arbiters of virtue. Ruiz revels in the absurdities that any standard of taste entails.

***

L’Oeil qui ment (The Eye that Lies / Darkness at Noon) pits a neat, classical face-off between rationalism and faith, the former the dogma of priests and doctors entrenched for so long in the second-hand doctrines of logic that they can’t believe the things they see in front of them; the latter the naivité of artists, saints, and film-goers who, trusting everything they see immediately in front of them, can’t dissociate second-hand apparitions from what they represent. The scientist looks at sperm under a microscope and sees eels making love, but he denies they’re anything but sperm; the artist denies they’re anything but eels. It takes both to see the metamorphosis: the one who can’t see anything in front of him, the one who can’t see anything else. The painter, conflating all appearances for life, insists his paintings have to be fed.

Ruiz’s Poetics of Cinema calls them Ministry and Mystery; together they might see the poetic possibilities of an imagination that could transfigure sperm to eels. Or their own imaginations might just turn their sights into the basis for a new science. So Ruiz’s movie embraces both views at once and obeys an inner logic of miracles and holy visions that are repeated as daily routines of his universe. The Virgin Mary plays a mirror image to one character as his own, private Groucho: as a favorite apparition, she’s just another figure in a mirror, a stolen image endlessly reproduced. The miraculous is pretty ordinary when the Virgin can float in and out of the bedroom with a touch of the remote.

Like a lot of Ruizes, L’Oeil qui ment fixates on that integral when a body or bodies are unified as tools and enablers of a central, unseen spell. In Mammame, Ruiz’s documentary of the Émile Dubois troupe becomes a kind of possessed fantasy of bodies whose pivots, thrusts, and elephant trumps become faster, amplified as they pass from limb to limb, body to body, and shot to shot, then fade; the movie’s circuit of garbled rhythms and speech volleyed back and forth extends not only through the music but Ruiz’s magic-hat montage that seems to summon and dismiss the dancers in and out of a void at every cut, as the movie becomes a chain of paper snowflakes. In L’Oeil qui ment, a field grows prosthetic limbs that can operate as the Marquis’ phantom body parts, phantom women have sex with him to control his body (he grows pregnant), and workers come together in unity for a mine until the Virgin appears to challenge their dogma. The artist, as puppeteer of the world, is the movie’s obvious enemy. But the movie is almost literal-minded that workers have never been allowed their own bodies any more than their own sights.

***

So. To recap? All images are equally valid as perceptions, as sights, unless the artist decides to hierarchize otherwise: on-screen there’s no distinguishing between the literal and figurative, any more than it’s possible to distinguish between a literal and figurative word (“whether literally or figuratively” writes James of a character’s expression in “The Jolly Corner,” as the author doesn’t even know). That’s not denying material reality as just an illusion but thinking that sight and sounds will never be their substitute—only traces, and dubious traces, of an elsewhere reality. So the traces have to multiply to give as many angles, as many different perspectives and genres, on an absent center. The mind’s mistake in Ruiz’s horror films, The Territory and A TV Dante, is to think that the physical world operates as the phenomenological worlds of thoughts, emotions, and visions do: as if bodies could be shared among people like costumes.

Where thoughts, emotions, and visions, these dispossessed perspectives, can be passed around, can provide the structuring principles for mutual fantasies, can give the means for one person to project himself into another’s consciousness, inalienable bodies can only be conquered. When a campfire communist in The Territory invokes Christ to suggest the campers should all share each other’s bodies, take and eat as unto the Lord, he posits Catholic theology as a B-movie maniac, that because the soul is made present through the body, one can subsume the soul by consuming the body alive. Logically he becomes a cannibal.

But Ruiz is still a generation and ideology away from Godard and Rivette’s treatment of bodies as the locus and voice of the film’s own consciousness: here the entire image and soundtrack is what the audience must project itself into viscerally. No body in particular, as the tactility of objects treated as lucent colors fading in and out makes for a kind of reverse-synaesthetic effect of the eye’s replacement with a hand in Voyage d’une main; in Ruiz, the eyes and ears of pleasure-seekers and opium gourmands exist as if to be caressed at the mediating point between outside world and imagination. The soul of his characters is projected in the things they see and hear: a more complicated type of conquering.

On the one hand, these projections are necessary not only for an interdependent world in which a hero can communicate with things around him—at best an exchange of perspectives and languages, at worst a cult’s spell (or script’s direction) under preset terms—but so he can he can open up his own possibilities and potentialities in envisioning himself and the world as it might be in Edenic ignorance of daily operating principles:

“I’m evoking a cinema that has renounced its narrative capacity, its hypnotic power of ravishment, preferring to turn back on itself and let loose a proliferating series of circular images, narrative ‘off-screens’ that profit from the already-seen. All this in order to pluralize narrative sequences, which then reveal their capacity to give birth to an unheard-of form of cinematographic narration, its rules still awaiting invention, its poetics still awaiting discovery” (Poetics).

On the other, he projects himself into an avatar at the risk of losing all sense of material reality, like The Territory’s cannibals or Le petit manuel’s Joans:

If “logic could sweep away all problems,” then “the world, sum total of all events, lies concealed or at least cloaked in possible occurrences: what might have been has supplanted what really was, and what could be is replacing what will be. In this world it is possible to maintain that the Second World War did not take place, that the Trojan War will not take place, that we will not take place either. In the world of plausible scenarios we can live several lives and die repeatedly, on one condition, that we submit to the eternal law of “Enargeia”: evidential narrativa. What I call ‘narrative clarity’ is the territory in which today’s rhetorical persuasion elaborates its fictional stories… The illusion that unreal lives may be lived—what the science fiction writer William Gibson calls ‘consensual hallucination’—is perhaps the best way of killing off superfluous humans: that vast mass of invisible men whom we never see, and never wish to see, those whom the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls ‘the community to come.’”

So one type of role-playing leads to a deeper engagement with “the world,” by seeing it from all its angles, while the other distracts. But what’s the world? We can try and fail to parse out some differences between the two paradigms of phantom lives and images: that against the virtual reality of impossible lives having nothing to do with history, there is the world of potential lives built out of memories. That against the world of modern civilization, of reason, of speculative capital and parlor games—the world of most of Ruiz’s late French films—there is the world of the physical, of the body and the land, of Ruiz’s late Chilean films; here one carries on a role, centuries old, as a resurrection and requiem to the dead, a trace of ritual carried through the ages. Both worlds require people play roles in a timeless tradition as zombies of sorts: in the modern world of reason, under the invented traditions of capitalism, people become copies of their class image, pawns to a made-up, self-perpetuating language of capital in which money stands for objects that only stand for money; in the world of folk story, time is not lost but regained, and the role one plays is a constant reinvention rather than a mass-produced, cultural cliché. The former at least are agents of their actions.

To question these distinctions means affirming them first.

***

Not folk songs or dances, but money that mounts dreams in Ruiz’s modernity. It’s in money that Ruiz shows the modern tool for metamorphoses: the characters who live their lives according to the images they produce now fantasize a world of money and use money to enact it.

Point de Fuite (1984), improvised in a few, interchanged languages, circles around a gambler’s paradigm, the capitalist’s eternal return. “I’ve won everything.” “You know, I’ll be back, win everything again, lose it again. That’s how life is.” “Yeah, that’s how it is. I hope I didn’t get you into trouble. Are the children sleeping? Have a nice trip.” Paulo Branco: “You know, she’ll be a pianist, and he’ll be a violin player.” Cut to kids, one bawling. Cut to radio playing scene’s soundtrack. Cut to black. Another arbitrary fate—prophecy, curse, or the winds of fortune? But one of the character’s earlier stories might be warning: “Once upon a time there lived a king.” But the story is not about the king but his son, imprisoned after the death of his father, who had a dream he’d become king. “But it was a lie. He was never king,” that is, “except when he got out of prison.” So the children will be pianists and violin players, but then they might not be, but then they might be.

Which could be a decent summary of Mysteries of Lisbon (2010), in which pirates become gentlemen and marquises beggars, their fates exchanged as the wages of narrative; it’s on the backs of their bank accounts that characters rise and fall through a succession of period types. Each caricature serves as a kind of fairy tale currency, a vessel, like money, that’s only good to be exchanged as one costume for another. No psychology, no character tic, lies as a constant beneath the gilded form; as usual, the characters exist only as they’re seen. By Mysteries, money has become both its own logic and its own faith: only in Ruiz’s last French films and Lisbon do the rationalists and idol-worshipers join hands to extol the coin’s providence that maketh, breaketh, and gives as it is given unto.

Three Lives and Only One Death and Ce jour-là play as neat allegories of a capitalist slave system, in which servants worship their masters as embodiments of money, and if allegory seems weird for Ruiz—a director who keeps everything on the surface now offering enlightenment in the worst appeal to clever intellectuals, the underlying message movie—the movies hold to a world of the rich, who have never offered much else than to be decoded as tokens of their class. Only as superficial as their characters, these late French films give their own proof that enlightened man lives his life as a metaphor, a stand-in for culture and hollow appearance that can be essentialized only as a superficial type. Each of the movies works the firm, capitalist notion that something is only good for what it stands for, how it can be traded in: the notion Ruiz had spent a career eroding with layers of sounds and images, realities and dreams, that had refused to establish a standard of reality by which they could be decoded, one true and the other only good as commentary, its enlightened footman. (In Point de Fuite, a girl pastes her drawing of a wall to the wall). But Ruiz’s movies had never brokered that other capitalist paradigm, in which everything is exchangeable, equal and undifferentiated, either. What survives in favorite Ruizes, if anything, is the distance and gaps from one perspective or trace to another, the variables of light and sound that form their own circular logic, the melodramatic displacement of the story’s emotion to blinding images and songs’ slow build, in the ebb and flow of tones and rhythms that can make a viewer skeptical there is any right way to see what’s in front of him. “And then from visual doubt working through itself on to a new narrative evidence. This can be achieved by means of the uninterrupted modification of regions of light and shadow.”

All of these are nearly absent in Ruiz’s last French films: concerning rich and educated Europeans just as the last Chilean films follow poor and disenfranchised folk heroes. Ruiz the parodist submits himself to the system of his world: in Three Lives or Ce jour-là or Comedy of Innocence, a world of manor corridors in perfect perspectival space, its texture polished flat. In Three Lives, the central street where personalities are born and die is the Rue Maastricht, after the Maastricht treaty that established the Euro to be implemented in 1999; the narrator’s final words, that Marcello Mastroianni’s five personalities (their names evoking an Italian, Brit, Frenchman, German, Spaniard, and servant, as well as bells, belltowers, and a Peruvian anthropologist) died on August 30, 1999 “in the same place, in the same time, for they all inhabited the same body,” sounds a double death knell for local culture in a Europe soon to be homogenized under the same body. If this is literal-minded, Three Lives is a movie in which a woman holds down a double life as a prostitute and bank president—and Mastroianni’s multiple personalities, less national tokens than class tokens, are repeatedly defined by their prostration to the universal gold standard.

But Ruiz as Marxist Critic—the historical materialist, observing fantasies lived by the imperatives of cash—is almost always the shadow of Ruiz as sailor’s son. It’s money, the language of the sea, that once would have corroded folk traditions as much as bridged them through the common pursuit of Three Crowns or Treasure Island. And the allure of sunken booty or buried doubloons, money not as an empty signifier but a historical marker inscribed with tales of the dead, draws on Ruiz’s exile films, in which (Three Crowns) money is a token passed through worlds and a way to exchange present for past, reality for dreams, one country for another. It’s still traditional to pay for one’s past and for one’s dreams: “I am a trespasser and smuggler,” says the captain in Manoel. “I take people from one world to the next… I inhabit a submerged continent… I took great risks and one day you have to pay the bills.”

And at last there’s the standard to pay. Money is also the token of imperialist raids, of personal debts—but mostly, it offers the possibility of foisting fantasy on reality. Maps are drawn by it, and men from Three Lives to Lisbon remake their lives by it. As Bérénice Reynaud says of Three Crowns (http://www.rouge.com.au/2/crowns.html), it’s the only thing that’s real in these worlds. In Treasure Island, it’s more useful as a structuring absence as the pirates pillage for it blindly; when they finally find a desert island retiree playing with diamonds, he explains that they’re useless without anything to exchange them for. “I think I would like to buy something only money can buy,” he says buoyantly as the music swells: “Dijon mustard.”

***

Thus the world of the shaman’s dance and pirate’s ghost against the world of Dijon mustard, banker’s crowns, crown banks. The populace of the former, playing at a life of adventure, acts in the ways required by whatever stories it lives, and so becomes not the sum of its images, but an unplaceable, unfurling moving image, shifting through a woof and warp of swashbucklers, lotharios, magicians, and masons. The populace of the latter has the illusion of free choice, but is only a product of the image it’s devised to hew to bourgeois conformity, as a dinner party dances to its cell phone rings as a new kind of zombie to virtual technology in Ce jour-là.

But the distinction is never absolute: the characters who buy and sell personalities have at least that chance of reinvention as the characters, under an ancestral spell, who are fated to their bloodline and reincarnations as huasos and buccaneers. And both worlds are founded on the conservative precepts of class solidarity and central-conflict narrative, that man determines his life through action. In Poetics, Ruiz targets this American story system for imperializing narrative around the world: its premises of independence and self-empowerment underwrite Hollywood’s dream for wage slaves to grind the gear of business while believing, not incorrectly, they’re working for their personal future. As Henry Adams put it of the American immigrant, “Every stroke of the axe and the hoe made him a capitalist, and made gentlemen of his children,” and Ruiz’s films are full of these social-strivers. So a world lives on dreams.

But by deconstructing stories as mass-produced goods (Treasure Island), anything but individualistic, and turning his characters into chameleons of their surroundings, pawns without volition of whatever role they’re made to play, Ruiz shows what used to probably be obvious to most Hollywood directors: that a character “proves” himself through his actions because even in a story he initiated, he can only act the act that’s required of him, is only as good as his good as his actions, whether fencing, feasting, wise-cracking. Ruiz’s movies seem to submit both skeptically and gleefully to the system: the stories are all imperialist, but the conquerors no less than the conquered in “acting” and “playing” parts and games become products of their own actions. As in central-conflict stories, the actions show what the characters “are capable of,” “are made of”; action and acting become synonymous, ways of showing the possibilities of what a person could be. The material reality of settings and bodies doesn’t become a lost truth, as in late Godard, that the artist tries and fails to recover, but the basis for an artist’s thousand variations in gesture, light, and scale. In Ruiz, these things stay alive as actions, as long as they’re moving forward, constantly reforming.

As soon as material reality becomes the dogma of logic, other possibilities—the past, the future, the imagination—dissipate as impossibilities under the guidelines for how things are. And in the last French films, with their slightly neater narrative structures, the body treated like a site of occupation, a thing to be conquered by social laws. Otherwise in Ruiz, material reality is rarely (if ever) treated as an end in of itself, an objective truth, as times and spaces collapse on-screen, and only idol-worshipers objectify the body as its own end (as a stripper explains to a horny catechist in Three Crowns, her body is only the clothing worn over her soul). Instead, material reality just becomes the stage of perceptual realities: sights, memories, dreams. In Ruiz’s late historical adaptations, Ruiz shows possible but not impossible lives by neither effacing nor copying the facts: his historical personages become embodiments of their own, historical philosophies, fashions, dreams, and the world of the movie springs as if from the characters’ imaginations. The burden is on the viewer to judge them by other standards than those of their time.

Here, “the cinema would become the perfect instrument for the revelation of the possible worlds which coexist right alongside our own,” while never losing sight of a historical lineage the characters often think they’ve transcended. So Ruiz offers phantom worlds that don’t escape reality, but in which the body and land can only be sites of potential narratives and choreographies that extend through other characters and worlds.

Ruiz’s movies could be placed on some sliding scale between these poles: “material reality” at best as a screen for other, potential realities (the folk tales), at worst an enervated symbol of a world erected from such symbols out of a void (the allegories). Of course it’s the latter that seem to trade in the historical reality we live in, while in films like Mammame or Dias del Campo or Literal, in which characters move in step even as they’re abstracted from time, bodies and rooms each become sites of rituals repeated and passed on. People and places, in constant flux, never quite self-contained but opening onto each other, become accumulations of events and images that continue to unfurl across eras, bodies, and spaces.

But it’s just at the point when one sees oneself projected into every vision, that the visions become strangely disembodied: the body of man becomes the land itself, and no object can be differentiated from another. So enacting fantasies on a page or a screen can be a form of revolution and masturbation at once. One gets in touch with the world and loses it.

***

The Ruiz film, finally a product of memory folding over a hundred examples, starts with the ocean, boundless, impossible to inscribe with territorial lines. But the land has its own hidden depths, its buried treasures that belong to nobody: from Utopia to La Recta Provincia, wanderers scour the land for a body’s bones scattered as wide as a money trail and making its own map of the land: each bone, a porthole into the past, spurs local recollections. So each place becomes a marker not of land but stories, and Ruiz’s film a geography of narratives that cut through time. These bones and body parts the wanderers collect into a suitcase, and finally, when the body is whole again, it’s still just a trace of the past, of the dead that structure the world of the living by the living’s happy consent. Ruiz can value his folk heroes for their delusions, since realism would probably be a worse delusion than them all. Like Ruiz’s other late Chilean films (Dias del campo, Litoral, La Recta Provincia), Cofralandes ends with a photo, a memento from a detached reality, of firemen who were burnt alive, but notes that one lived because he was dreaming, and somehow slept through it all. It was his French dreams, the narrator says, that kept him alive as Chile burned.

***

At the end of The Blind Owl, a shaman draws his hand over his face up and down as a kind of poor man’s magic act: each veiling-unveiling reveals an alternate expression, smiling then solemn, as though he’s conjured up a new person at every pass. In a movie that starts outside the cinema, whose characters continuously appear as products of a projector-light heard flickering off-screen, Ruiz ends with the shaman mimicking a camera’s shutter: each new image is a transformation, one that occurred in the black gap of 1/24th of a second. Here, a good suggestion of Ruiz’s emotional spectrum, he only transforms from a Cheshire grin to monster movie gravity and back.

But what seems Ruiz’s about the moment is that Ruiz removes himself from this self-propagating logic: the shaman enacts his own transformations, even as they seem to move in a pre-determined pattern and rhythm back and forth. So the shaman dances because he’ s under his own spell, and he’s under his spell because he dances, which raises the question again. Why does he dance? And who choreographed his dance as a language? Some things are just intuitive. Stories and folk songs, bridging eras, marshaling ghosts, make a dance through the ages that requires only the opium of sight and sounds: hear the music, play the song. Folk heroes survive as each other’s ghosts and traces, and their traditions carry on in the pure joy of action; the dances, speeches, songs, and soliloquies are good only as they’re enacted, and are enacted only as long as men are stupid enough to believe their eyes and ears, that they’re part of a shared hallucination. History just proves them right, but it’s the folk hero’s charm to act and never think. “Isn’t film then a language?” asks Ruiz at the end of Poetics of Cinema. “Yes, it may be a language, but a language composed solely of verbs.” Another Raoul, filming people as agents of their own desire, is already there. Walsh: “That’s the end of art. Give me the dagger, the sword, and the gun.”

David Phelps