Abstract

Raúl Ruiz’s 2006 movie Klimt offers a sophisticated attempt to translate the visual art theory of Klimt’s Vienna into cinematic form. Reading this film alongside Ruiz’s reflections on film theory, this article explores how Ruiz employed key ideas from this period about ornament, spatiality and “surface effects,” reproducibility, and optic and haptic visuality in his search for a new cinematic language that might offer an alternative to mainstream cinema and the cinema of the “classical” avant-garde.

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