Raúl Ruiz

Ruiz worked between 1941 and 2011 across film director, screenwriter, film producer, actor and writer. The registers place that work in drama film and surrealist film. Every statement below returns to a source shown in the evidence panel; where the record is silent or divided, the article says so instead of resolving it.

Raúl Ruiz studied at University of Chile. The recorded working language is French. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are drama film and surrealist film. Residence is recorded at Paris and Puerto Montt. Work by Raúl Ruiz is recorded in the collections of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and Memoria Chilena. Distinctions recorded are Golden Leopard, César Award for Best Fiction Short Film, Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution and National Award for Arts and Audiovisual Representation of Chile.

• Birth Name — Raúl Ernesto Ruiz Pino • Born — 25 July 1941 • Birthplace — Puerto Montt, Chile • Died — 19 August 2011 • Place of death — Paris, France • Education — University of Chile • Other Names — Raoul Ruiz • Occupation — Film director • Years Active — 1963–2011 • Style — Drama, comedy, experimental film, surrealism, fantasy

The son of a ship's captain and a schoolteacher in southern Chile, Raúl Ruiz abandoned his university studies in theology and law to write 100 plays with the support of a Rockefeller Foundation grant. He went on to learn his craft working in Chilean and Mexican television and studying at film school in Argentina (1964). Back in Chile, he made his feature debut Three Sad Tigers (1968), sharing the Golden Leopard at the 1969 Locarno Film Festival. According to Ruiz in a 1991 interview, Three Sad Tigers "is a film without a story, it is the reverse of a story. Somebody kills somebody. All the elements of a story are there but they are used like a landscape, and the landscape is used like story." He was something of an outsider among the politically oriented Chilean filmmakers of his generation such as Miguel Littín and Patricio Guzmán, his work being far more ironic, surrealistic and experimental. In 1973, shortly after the military coup d'état led by Augusto Pinochet, Ruiz and his wife (fellow director Valeria Sarmiento) fled Chile and settled in Paris, France. Ruiz soon developed a reputation among European critics and cinephiles as an avant-garde film magician, writing and directing a remarkable number of amusing, eccentric, complex, and highly literary low-to-no-budget films in the 1970s and 1980s (often for France's Institut national de l'audiovisuel and then for Portuguese producer Paulo Branco). The best known of these often oneiric, fabulist films are: Colloque de chiens (1977), a short which marked the start of Ruiz's long-term working relationship with Chilean composer Jorge Arriagada; The Suspended Vocation (1978); The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978); On Top of the Whale (1982); Three Crowns of the Sailor (1982); City of Pirates (1983); Manoel's Destinies (1985); Treasure Island (1985) and Life is a Dream (1986). A special issue of Cahiers du cinéma was devoted to Ruiz in March 1983. In the 1990s, Ruiz began working with larger budgets and "name" stars like John Hurt in Dark at Noon (1992) and Marcello Mastroianni in Three Lives and Only One Death (1996). The following year, he made Genealogies of a Crime starring Catherine Deneuve, winning the Silver Bear at the 47th Berlin International Film Festival. A second major French actress, Isabelle Huppert, worked with Ruiz on Comedy of Innocence (2000), which was nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The American John Malkovich acted in the star-studded Marcel Proust adaptation Time Regained (1999) and the somewhat less successful Savage Souls (2001) and Klimt (2006). That Day (2003) was the fourth and last Ruiz film to be shown in the main competition of the Cannes Film Festival. He also made forays into the English-language mainstream with the thrillers Shattered Image (1998) and A Closed Book (2010). In the final decade of his life, Ruiz wrote and directed several low-budget productions in his native Chile, but his final international success was the Franco-Portuguese epic Mysteries of Lisbon (2010). Ruiz claimed that he was "always trying to make this connection between different ways of producing: film, theater, installations, and videos" – he hoped his "films would have to be seen many times, like objects in the house, like a painting. They have to have a minimum of complexity." Over the years, he taught his own particular brand of film theory, which he explained in his two books Poetics of Cinema 1: Miscellanies (1995) and Poetics of Cinema 2 (2007), and actively engaged in film and video projects with university and film school students in many countries, including the US, France, Colombia, Chile, Italy and Scotland. Ruiz died in August 2011 as a result of complications from a lung infection, having successfully undergone a liver transplant in early 2010 after being diagnosed with a life-threatening tumour. The Presidents of France and Chile both praised him. The Church of Saint George-Paul in Paris held a memorial service which was attended by many notable friends, including Catherine Deneuve, Chiara Mastroianni, Melvil Poupaud, Paulo Branco, Arielle Dombasle, Michel Piccoli and Jorge Edwards. Ruiz's body was then returned to Chile to be buried as specified in his will and a National Day of Mourning was declared in Chile.

• La maleta (1963) – short film lost and completed in 2008 • Le retour (1964) – unfinished short film • El tango del viudo y su espejo deformante [The Tango of the Widower and its Distorting Mirror] (1967) – unfinished and restored for a 2020 release • Tres tristes tigres [Three Sad Tigers] (1968) • La catanaria (1969) • Militarismo y tortura (1969) – short film • La colonia penal [The Penal Colony] (1970) • Ahora te vamos a llamar hermano (1971) – short film • Nadie dijo nada (1971) • ¡Qué hacer! (1972) • Los minuteros (1972) – short film • Poesía popular: La teoría y la práctica (1972) – short film • Abastecimiento (1973) – short film • Palomita blanca [Little White Dove] (1973) • Realismo socialista como una de las bellas artes [Socialist Realism] (1973) - unfinished and restored for a 2023 release • Palomita brava (1973) – short film • La expropiación [The Expropriation] (1974) • Diálogos de exiliados [Dialogues of Exiles] (1975) • Sotelo (1976) – short film • Utopia (1976) • Colloque de chiens (1977) – short film • Les divisions de la nature (1978) – short film • La vocation suspendue [The Suspended Vocation] (1978) • L'hypothèse du tableau volé [The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting] (1978) • Petit manuel d'histoire de France (1979) • Dog’s Dialogue (1979) • Jeux (1979) • De grands événements et de gens ordinaires [Of Great Events and Ordinary People] (1979) • Images de débat (1979) • Zig-Zag – le jeu de l'oie (une fiction didactique à propos de la cartographie) (1980) – short film • La ville nouvelle (1980) – short film • Fahlstrom (1980) – short film • Musée Dali (1980) • L'image en silence (1980) • Le borgne (1980) • Teletests (1980) – short film • The Territory (1981) • Images de sable (1981) – short film • Ombres chinoises (1982) – short film • Querelle des jardins (1982) – short film • Le petit théâtre (1982) – short film • Het dak van de Walvis [On Top of the Whale] (1982) • Les trois couronnes du matelot [Three Crowns of the Sailor] (1982) • Lettre d'un cinéaste ou Le retour d'un amateur de bibliothèques [Letter from a Library Lover] (1983) – short film • La ville des pirates [City of Pirates] (1983) • Bérénice (1983) • La ville de Paris (1983) • Voyages d'une main (1984) • Point de fuite [Vanishing Point] (1984) • Les destins de Manoel [Manoel's Destinies/Manoel on the Island of Marvels] (1984) • L'Île au trésor [Treasure Island] (1985) • La présence réelle (1985) • Régime sans pain (1985) • L'éveillé du pont de l'Alma [The Insomniac on the Bridge] (1985) • Richard III (1986) • Mémoire des apparences [Life is a Dream] (1986) • Dans un miroir (1986) • Mammame (1986) • Brise-glace (1987) • La chouette aveugle [The Blind Owl] (1987) • Le professeur Taranne (1987) • Allegoria (1988) • Tous les nuages sont des horloges (1988) • Il pozzo dei pazzi (1989) – short film • Derrière le mur (1989) • Hub (1989) • The Golden Boat (1990) • La telenovela errante [The Wandering Soap Opera] (1990) – unfinished feature completed by Sarmiento and released in 2017 • A TV Dante (Cantos 9–14) (1991) • Las soledades (1992) – short film • L'oeil qui ment [Dark at Noon] (1992) • Fado majeur et mineur [Fado, Major and Minor] (1994) • Wind Water (1995) – short film • Trois vies et une seule mort [Three Lives and Only One Death] (1996) • Généalogies d'un crime [Genealogies of a Crime] (1997) • Le film à venir (1997) – short film • Shattered Image (1998) • Le temps retrouvé [Time Regained] (1999) • Comédie de l'innocence [Comedy of Innocence] (2000) • Combat d'amour en songe [Love Torn in a Dream] (2000) • Les Âmes fortes [Savage Souls] (2001) • Miotte vu par Raúl Ruiz (2002) • Cofralandes, rapsodia chilena [Cofralandes, Chilean Rhapsody] (2002) • Ce jour-là [That Day] (2003) • Une place parmi les vivants [A Place Among the Living/A Taste for Murder] (2003) • Vertige de la page blanche [Vertigo of the Blank Page] (2003) • Días de campo [Days in the Country] (2004) • Le domaine perdu [The Lost Domain] (2005) • Klimt (2006) • Le Don (2007) – short film • La Recta Provincia (2007) • Litoral (2008) • La maison Nucingen [Nucingen House] (2008) • Agathopedia (2008) • El pasaporte amarillo [The Yellow Passport] (2009) • A Closed Book [Blind Revenge] (2010) • L'estate breve (2010) • Mistérios de Lisboa [Mysteries of Lisbon] (2010) • Ballet aquatique (2011) • La noche de enfrente [Night Across the Street] (2012)

Raúl Ruiz was born on 25 July 1941 in Puerto Montt. Ruiz held the nationality of Chile and France. Ruiz was educated at University of Chile. Married to: Valeria Sarmiento. Ruiz worked as film director, screenwriter, film producer and actor, and the authority record catalogues a further 1 occupations under the same name, among them writer. Ruiz was active from 1963 to 2011. The fields Ruiz worked in include drama film and surrealist film. Ruiz worked in French. Ruiz is placed by the collections within surrealism.

Ruiz worked for the screen, as film director, screenwriter and film producer. 56 films survive in the institutional catalogues, spanning 1963 to 2017. Among them are La maleta (1963), Three Sad Tigers (1968), The Penal Colony (1970), ¡Qué hacer! (1970), Nadie dijo nada (1971) and The Expropriation (1972). The whole run is set out in the catalogue below.

• Three Sad Tigers tied with three other films for the 1969 Golden Leopard award at the Locarno Film Festival. • 1979 César Award for best plot for a short film, for Colloque de chiens. • Three Crowns of the Sailor won the Perspectives du Cinéma Award at the Cannes Film Festival (1983). • Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts-Film (1983). • Manoel's Destinies won the KNF Award at the Rotterdam International Film Festival (1985). • Three Lives and Only One Death (1996) won the Critics Award at the São Paulo International Film Festival. • Genealogies of a Crime (1997) won the Silver Bear at the 47th Berlin International Film Festival. • Chile's National Prize for Performing and Audiovisual Arts (1997) • FIPRESCI Prize at the Montréal World Film Festival in 2000 "for brilliantly exploring the range of narrative possibilities of the cinema and celebrating and demonstrating the art of storytelling through the ages" in Love Torn in a Dream. • At the Montréal World Film Festival (2002), Cofralandes, Chilean Rhapsody won the Glauber Rocha Award for the Best Film from Latin America and a FIPRESCI Prize "for the director's personal exploration into his homeland, using DV in a rigorous yet playful manner". • Master of Cinema prize at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Filmfestival (2003). • Klimt won the Russian Film Clubs Federation Award at the 28th Moscow International Film Festival (2006). • Master of Cinema prize at the Rome Film Festival (2007). • Mysteries of Lisbon (2010) won the Silver Shell for Best Director at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, the Louis Delluc Prize for best French film and Critics Award for best film at the São Paulo International Film Festival. • Posthumous Special Award at the 2011 New York Film Critics Circle Awards.