In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

236 Ruiz Hopping and Buried Treasures Twelve Selected Global Sites 1. Ruiz’s Secret (Iowa City) On a bet, and with the help of a Rockefeller grant, Raúl Ruiz—born in Puerto Montt, Chile, in 1941—wrote one hundred plays between the ages of seventeen and twenty. Or maybe it was between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one; accounts differ. (‘‘It was very easy,’’ he told one interviewer; ‘‘they were not really plays. Some of them were five pages long, others were one hundred pages, but most were very short plays.’’) Many years later, after he became a filmmaker, he decided to make one hundred films by the time he was fifty. How close he’s come to achieving that aim is debatable, depending on how you keep count: Does a serial or a miniseries count as one film or several? And what about videos? But the latest tally of works includes ninety-odd titles, all of them written or cowritten as well as directed by Ruiz. Anyway, Ruiz more recently claims to have reconfigured his ambition; now it’s to make more films than all other Chileans combined. More like a termite than like a white elephant (to adopt Manny Farber’s suggestive terms), he still wants to forge a legend—and he has. How has he managed to do so much? A number of interlocking factors come into play. For one thing, the hundred plays he wrote in his youth provided him with a lot of material to recycle. For another, at some point after moving from Chile to Paris in 1974, five months after the military coup, he began to accept all sorts of state-TV commissions (mainly French, but also German, English, Dutch, Portuguese, and eventually Italian); the idea was to refuse nothing, to keep on working—regarding filmmaking as an artisanal, everyday process. From an auteurist point of view, this creates several ambiguities—especially because many of Ruiz’s TV commissions, no matter how recognizable to his fans, are essentially anonymous works for most of their viewers. Within my experience, Ruiz is the least neurotic of filmmakers; he doesn’t even seem to care whether what he’s doing is good or not (and, as he’s aptly noted, bad work and good work generally entail the same amount of effort). No single film functions as the be-all or end-all of an evolving career but merely as part of an overall process. Example: the 1985 Régime sans pain—one of his films most OTHER CANONS, OTHER CANONIZERS 237 influenced by his friend Jean Baudrillard, and perhaps the one that most calls to mind grade-Z SF—grew out of a commission to direct a music video. Ruiz offered a counterproposal that he direct several music videos rather than one; once this deal was made, he shot enough material to interconnect the various videos until he arrived at a feature. A little later, while serving as the codirector of Le Havre’s Maison de la Culture , Ruiz wound up producing his own films and those of many others—meanwhile producing, directing, and/or writing plays and other theatrical events, writing novels, teaching, and creating museum installations. Over the past year, he’s shot a movie in Taiwan, directed Marcello Mastroianni in his most accessible feature to date (Three Lives and Only One Death, 1996), contemplated becoming a French citizen, directed Catherine Deneuve in another movie (Généalogies d’un crime, 1997), and taught filmmaking for the second time at Duke. If you’re still wondering how he can accomplish so much—and be relaxed rather than frayed or frantic about it—an anecdote he told me a few years back may be more indicative of his secret than any other. During part of the period when he was writing his one hundred plays, he attended the University of Iowa’s famous writer’s workshop program. In a playwriting seminar, after arguing with a teacher who asserted that all drama is necessarily based on conflict, he went to see Kurt Vonnegut Jr., another teacher in the program, for advice; Vonnegut suggested he leave Iowa, and Ruiz did exactly that. (Soon afterwards he had a stint writing melodramas in Mexico. Ruiz to Ethan Spigland in Persistence of Vision, no. 8: ‘‘Mexican melodramas use the structure of nineteenth-century European melodrama, in which the main character never conducts the action but, instead, is moved by the action. It’s a...

Share