"My films are poor," Raul Ruiz said in a recent interview. "They're like my family. They are all poor, but they have longevity." The Chilean-born writer-director had a huge movie family: in a prodigious career that spanned nearly a half-century, he made about 90 feature films and 30 shorts, many of which have earned the lasting esteem of the world's critics and cinephiles. But longevity was something Ruiz could not claim for himself. Operated on two years ago for stomach cancer, he succumbed Friday, Aug. 19, in Paris, at 70.
Two thoughts might enter an American reader's mind: That's a shame; and Who was he? The answer: Raul (also Raúl and Raoul) Ruiz was an exceptional filmmaker who flourished at just the wrong time to have his work appreciated here. Back in 1963, when he made his first expressionist short, La maleta, international cinema was an enthralling preoccupation of the American thinking class. Bergman, Truffaut, Godard, Buñuel, Fellini, Antonioni and Kurosawa were not only making great films; they were brand names to rival Gucci, and a new work by any of them could stoke passionate debate at cocktail parties and in college dorms.
Born and raised in Chile, and living in Paris since he exiled himself after the 1973 assassination of Salvador Allende, Ruiz produced a body of work so inventive, demanding and rewarding that he deserves to nestle in the company of those giants. Also the Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, ever molding what we think of as reality into the extraordinary balloon animals of his imagination. And though Ruiz's movies aren't as accessible as superhero blockbusters, they can be enthralling. To the receptive viewer they open whole worlds, dozens of characters, trapdoors of narrative surprise and revelation. Their closest cousins are the 19th century novels Ruiz adored and often adapted, and the telenovelas — Latino soap operas — that he worked on as a young man in Chile and Mexico. Admirers of brain-teasing mystery novels should flock to Ruiz films.
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