Film director and academic;
Born: July 25, 1941; Died: August 19, 2011.
Raoul Ruiz, who has died aged 70, was a Chilean-born filmmaker who made more than 100 films in his teeming, international career, and was appointed professor of film and modern thought at Aberdeen University four years ago.
A favourite of cinephiles, Ruiz rebelled against the conventions of moviemaking in an extensive, varied body of work that did not result in a widely known masterpiece, but left behind a vast, labyrinthine collection of experiments, curiosities and innovations.
Ruiz had lived in Paris since fleeing Chile in 1973 to escape the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet but in 2007, after also teaching in the US, he was appointed to the seat in Aberdeen. After visiting the city he was inspired to write a new version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and had hoped to film there.
An avid reader, his filmography is lined with literary adaptations, including versions of works by Franz Kafka (The Penal Colony, 1970), Nathaniel Hawthorne (Three Lives and Only One Death, 1996, starring Marcello Mastroianni), Pedro Calderon (Life Is a Dream, 1987), Shakespeare (Richard III, 1986) and Marcel Proust in Time Regained (1999), perhaps Ruiz’s best regarded film.
Ruiz’s sprawling four-and-a-half-hour Mysteries of Lisbon, based on the 19th-century novella by Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco, was released in New York and Los Angeles earlier this month. The film has drawn excellent reviews and in December was awarded the Louis Delluc Prize for best French film of the year.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy described Ruiz as a man of “immense erudition and infinite curiosity” and a “worthy son of the Enlightenment”.
Born in Puerto Montt, Chile, to a middle-class family and the son of a ship captain, Ruiz studied law and theology at the University of Chile before a Rockefeller Foundation grant in 1962 afforded him the opportunity to devote himself to writing.
He wrote a huge quantity of plays before he was 20 (he boasted that it was more than 100 plays) and worked as a writer on TV novellas. His first feature film was 1968’s Three Sad Tigers.
Later in Europe, he continued to work in French television. He taught film at Harvard and served as the co-director of the Maison de Culture in Le Havre, France, where he was able to produce his own films and those of others.
Few of Ruiz’s films have been available in the United States. He made a handful of American films, including Shattered Image (1998) and The Golden Boat (1990). He also directed 2006’s Klimt, a biopic of Austrian painter Gustav Klimt, starring John Malkovich.
At the time of his death, Ruiz had been editing a film about his childhood in Chile. He was also preparing a film set in Portugal about a Napoleonic battle.
He is survived by his wife, filmmaker Valeria Sarmiento.
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