Biography for
Raoul Ruiz More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

25 July 1941, Puerto Montt, Chile

Date of Death

19 August 2011, Paris, Ile-de-France, France (lung infection)

Birth Name

Raúl Ernesto Ruiz Pino

Mini Biography

Chilean director Raúl, or Raoul, Ruiz (1941-2011) was one of the most exciting and innovative filmmakers to emerge from 1960s World Cinema, providing more intellectual fun and artistic experimentation, shot for shot, than any filmmaker since Jean-Luc Godard. A guerrilla who uncompromisingly assaulted the preconceptions of film art, this frightfully prolific figure -he made over 100 films in 40 years- did not adhere to any one style of filmmaking. He worked in 35mm, 16mm and video, for theatrical release and for European TV, and on documentary and fiction features and shorts. His career began in avant-garde theatre where, between 1956 and 1962, he wrote over 100 plays. Although he never directed any of these productions, he did dabble in TV and filmmaking in the early 1960s. In 1968, with the release of his first completed feature, the Cassavetes-like Tres tristes tigres (1968), Ruiz became one of the key Chilean directors of New Latin American Cinema. A committed though critical supporter of the Marxist government of Salvador Allende, Ruiz was forced to flee his country after the fascist coup of 1973. Living in exile in Paris from that time onwards, he found a forum for his ideas in European TV and was championed by the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma, several of whom appeared in his first European successes, The Suspended Vocation (1978) and The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1979), two enigmatic Pierre Klossowski adaptations. Between 1980 and his death in 2011, Ruiz was one of the world's most productive but least known auteurs, in part through a long-term working relationship with Portuguese producer Paulo Branco. Other regular collaborators included Ruiz's wife and editor Valeria Sarmiento, composer Jorge Arriagada, cinematographers Sacha Vierny, Henri Alekan and Ricardo Aronovich, writers Gilbert Adair and Pascal Bonitzer, and actor Melvil Poupaud. Key early works from this period included the surrealistic masterpieces Three Crowns of the Sailor (1983), City of Pirates (1983) and "Manoel's Destinies" (1984), three of his many French-Portuguese co-productions perversely yet charmingly addressing the recurring Ruizian themes of childhood, exile, and maritime and rural folklore. In the 1990s, Ruiz embarked on larger projects with prominent actors such as John Hurt, Marcello Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert and John Malkovich, alternating this sporadic mainstream art-house endeavour with his usual low-budget experimental productions and the teaching of his Poetics of Cinema (two volumes of which he published in 1995 and 2007). In the 1990s and 2000s, he also shot several films and TV series' in Chile, though usually without Chilean funding. Ruiz is beloved among cinephiles as a poet of oneiric imagery and a fabulist of labyrinthine stories-within-stories whose films slip effortlessly from reality to imagination and back again. A manipulator of wild intellectual games in which the rules are forever changing, Ruiz's techniques were as varied as film itself; a collection of bizarre angles, close-ups and deep-focus compositions, bewildering POV shots, dazzling colours, and labyrinthine narratives which weave and dodge the viewer's grasp with every shot. As original as Ruiz was, one can tell much about him by the diversity of his influences; he was clearly inspired by Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Louis Stevenson, Orson Welles, "Left Bank" New Wave directors such as Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, and baroque low-budget Hollywood B-movie directors like Edgar G. Ulmer, Ford Beebe and Reginald Le Borg. His erudition also extended to medieval theology, Renaissance theatre and quantum physics. Ruiz remains a much-admired auteur on the European continent, having won prestigious prizes at Cannes, Berlin, San Sebastián, Locarno, Rome and Rotterdam. He is little-known in his native Chile, however, despite having made the widely seen Palomita blanca (1973), receiving several major arts prizes and having a National Day of Mourning dedicated to him on the day of his burial there. In the English-speaking world, only a handful of Ruiz's films have been distributed and it is on these few films that his reputation there is built: most notably, major art-house fare such as the Ophüls- and Visconti-inspired Marcel Proust's Time Regained (1999) but also Comedy of Innocence (2000), Klimt (2006) and Mysteries of Lisbon (2010) and straight-to-video thriller pastiches like Shattered Image (1998) and Blind Revenge (2010). Little of his huge oeuvre is available on DVD. The works that are, however, bear witness to the unique genius that informs his entire body of work.

IMDb Mini Biography By: Anonymous update of original Ruiz bio by Daniel Yates <kamerad76@hotmail.com>

Spouse

Valeria Sarmiento

(1969 - 19 August 2011) (his death)

Trivia

Retrospectives of his work have been held in Paris (1983), Alcalá de Henares (1983), New York (1989), Melbourne (1993), Mannheim-Heidelberg (2003), Rotterdam (2004), Buenos Aires (2004), Geneva (2005), Rome (2007), Valdivia (2008), Buenos Aires (2009) and Santiago de Chile (2011).

Member of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002.

Became co-director of the Maison de la Culture in Le Havre (August 1985).

Awarded the title of Docteur Honoris Causa by the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (2005), Professorship by the University of Aberdeen (2007) and Doctor Honoris Causa by the Universidad de Valparaíso (2011).

Received several honours in his native Chile, including the National Prize of Arts of the Representation and Audiovisual (1997) and the Art Critics Circle's Bicentennial Award for cinema (2010), sharing the latter with Valeria Sarmiento.

Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (for Creative Arts-Film) in 1983.

He was born in Puerto Montt, Chile and raised in Valparaiso, Chile where his father was a merchant marine whom he sailed with whom on his summer vacations around the world.

He studied law and theology at the University of Chile before he studied film especially with the university film club and experimental film. He spent a year at the film school by Fernando Birri in Santa Fe, Argentina where he worked as an editor on television news program in Chile and as a scriptwriter for a soap opera in Mexico produced by Televisa. He was employed by Chile Films, a state film agency.

He and his wife left Chile in 1973 after Allende's overthrown government for Paris, France where he remained for the rest of his life.

He was appointed director of the House of Culture in Le Havre, France by Jack Lang, the French cultural minister.

Personal Quotes

On his film, Tres tristes tigres (1968) (aka "Three Sad Tigers"); a film without a story. All elements of a story are there but they are used like a landscape and the landscape is used like a story.

Where Are They Now

(December 2008) Aberdeen, Scotland: Teaching film at the University of Aberdeen.

(November 2009) Portugal: Shooting Mysteries of Lisbon (2010).

(July 2010) Lisbon, Portugal: Recuperating after undergoing life-saving surgery for liver cancer (and breaking one of his legs).

(September 2010) Spain: Presenting Mysteries of Lisbon (2010) at the San Sebastián International Film Festival.

(December 2010) Santiago, Chile: Directing his stage play "Amledi, el tonto" for the Santiago a Mil International Theatre Festival.

(March 2011) Chile: Shooting La noche de enfrente (2012).

(March 2011) Valparaíso, Chile: Receiving Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Valparaíso.

(May 2011) Paris, France: Participating in "Une semaine avec Raoul Ruiz et ses invités" France Culture radio programmes (guests included Catherine Deneuve and Pascal Bonitzer).