One of the great cinematic troubadours, Raúl Ruiz embarked on a lifelong quest to find new ways to tell old tales. A restlessly prolific spinner of ingeniously sprawling yarns with over a hundred films to his name, Ruiz couldn’t resist the pull of a great story. Whether adapting literary masters or casting a net to catch salty, seafaring tales, the Chilean fabulist brought a touch of magic realism to his elegantly serpentine, nesting doll narratives.

A leading figure in Chile’s short-lived new wave of the late ‘60s and early ’70s, Ruiz made most of his films in exile in France, having been forced to flee his homeland during the coup d’etat of 1973. While he never surrendered the playfully ironic experimentalism of his early avant-garde works, larger budgets and casts drawn from the roster of European greats allowed his expansive vision for the possibilities of storytelling to flourish. His adaptations invariably forgo respectful homage, opting instead for digressive paths that lead to the very essence of the work in question. Attempts to pin Ruiz down via stylistic generalizations are futile—here is a filmmaker who could work with any budget, large or small, and would leap from showmanship worthy of Orson Welles to painterly classicism, often in the same year, and sometimes in the same film. One constant is the presence of composer Jorge Arriagada, who scored more than forty films for the director across as many years. Following in the footsteps of Latin America’s postmodern literary minstrels Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, for more than half a century Raúl Ruiz fashioned a singular corpus of ghosts and pirates, romance and revenge, of buried secrets and stunning revelations, steering his labyrinthine tales into the half-remembered realms of legend and rum-headed dream.

Tom Palazzolo

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