The Dream of Memory in Raúl Ruiz’s Memories of Appearances: Life Is a Dream

In this article, I seek to expand the existing research on the debate on post-coup memory in Latin America by highlighting the tension between remembering and forgetting at the level of the individual subject’s unconscious in a feature film by exiled Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz. I argue that Ruiz’s feature film Mémories des apparences: La vie est un songe/Memories of Appearances: Life is a Dream (FR, 1986) shows how the recuperation of memory is obstructed by both internal and external mechanisms of repression. While critics have focused on external censorship mechanisms, such as state repression during the dictatorship or amnesia-inducing images in the transition to democracy, I show how Ruiz uncovers unconscious censorship processes at work in the self. Ruiz makes the radical suggestion that memory-work can function as a displacement mechanism, concealing the grounds and sources of repressive mechanisms at play within the political subject. By using psychoanalytic concepts on dream interpretation, I demonstrate that the subject’s actual wish is to forget, not to remember.

Nevertheless, I suggest that Ruiz’s criticism is not nihilistic, but rather seeks to open new spaces for self-critique and the possibility of engaging with issues of responsibility. To that end, I read Ruiz’s film as a critical intervention on the Spanish baroque play from which the film is adapted, an intervention that refuses to offer the redemptive closure that reinstates sovereignty in the play. Instead of offering narrative closure, Ruiz’s film seeks to de-suture the subject’s wholeness by exposing rather than closing the gap in the subject’s knowledge. In this way, the film offers a critical space from which to reconsider political options that take into account, rather than discount, the subject’s internal censorship mechanisms and unconscious desires.

Background

Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz (1941–2011) has become one of the most important figures in the history of cinema due to his highly prolific career and his innovative style. His first feature films, among them Tres tristes tigres/Three Sad Tigers (CL, 1968) and La expropiación/The Expropriation (CL, 1971), helped establish the New Chilean Cinema. His activity as cinema advisor to President Salvador Allende prompted his exile after the military coup of September 11, 1973. Upon resuming his career in France, Ruiz found creative support and quickly became a critically acclaimed filmmaker. For example, the film journal Cahiers du Cinema dedicated a special issue to his work in March 1983. Recently he has gained wider international appreciation with films such as Le Temps retrouvé/Time Regained (FR, 1999), Klimt (FR, 2006), and, among his last films, Mistérios de Lisboa/Mysteries of Lisbon (PT/FR, 2011).¹

Despite these accomplishments, his vast body of work is little known and explored. The scarcity of scholarship is partly due to the experimental nature of his art and the scarce circulation of his films in commercial circuits.² Beyond festival showings and a few recent DVD releases, his films are very difficult to obtain. This situation speaks to the director’s refusal to participate in the commercialization of his films (a politically motivated lack of interest in the distribution aspect of the film industry), but it also hinders scholarly treatment of his work.³ Nevertheless, a number of recent books and articles speak to Ruiz’s increasing relevance to film studies. This scholarship is primarily located in Chile, with other monographs and critical overviews in France and in online journals.⁴

Two other reasons, less often mentioned, are Ruiz’s iconoclastic treatment of the political processes at work during the Allende years in Chile and his unconventional approach to the exilic experience in the post-coup period. In his artistic productions, he sought to show that a central part of political engagement was the ability for self-critique in order to spur political innovation. During the Allende government, Ruiz was actively involved in the national production company Chile Films, but he was also something of an outsider because his approach to cinema verged on the more...