Critical Arts

South-North Cultural and Media Studies

ISSN: 0256-0046 (Print) 1992-6049 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcrc20

A little fiction: person, time and dimension in Raúl

Ruiz's figural cinema

Adrian Martin

To cite this article: Adrian Martin (2015) A little fiction: person, time and dimension in Raúl
Ruiz's figural cinema, Critical Arts, 29:5, 689-701

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2015.1125098

Published online: 17 Feb 2016.

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 A little fiction: person, time and
dimension in Raúl Ruiz’s figural cinema
Adrian Martin
Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 06:41 17 February 2016

Abstract
When Chilean-born Raúl Ruiz (1941–2011) came to adapt Proust’s Time Regained in 1999, he
hit upon the idea of using three actors to play three Prousts (as child, as adult and as narrator),
and to combine them, at times, in the same frame. This was, in fact, the fruit of long-term
exploration in his career: already a key element in his television series Manoel on the Island
of Marvels (1984), and persisting to his final work, Night Across the Street (2012). Ruiz had
an unusual conception of time, actuality and character: such multiple incarnations had
little to do with subjective memory, and everything to do with experimental physics on one
hand, and modernity on the other. This article will explore, through several examples, the
profoundly figural conception of character in Ruiz’s cinema.

Keywords: character, Chile, cinema, Proust, Raúl Ruiz, time

Fiction and its Other

At the beginning of Lost Domain (2005) – one of the most beguiling and poetic of the
low-budget feature-films made by Chilean-born director, Raúl Ruiz (1941–2011), in
what was to be the last decade of his life – we see a ship, seemingly unoccupied,
static in the water, close to a shore. We view it in eight different aspects, across eight
different shots, the changing light tracing an arc from day to night. On the soundtrack,
a very familiar Ruiz-style voice-over narration evokes, in a rush, a complicated story
of phantoms, time and memory, history and fantasy … And so, quite naturally as
film spectators, we begin to ‘read in’ this entire, fantastical story into the images of
Adrian Martin is Professor of Film Studies at Goethe University, Frankfurt, and Monash University,
Melbourne. adrian.martin@monash.edu

ISSN 0256-0046/Online 1992-6049

pp.689–701
29 (5) 2015 © Critical Arts Projects & Unisa Press
DOI: 10.1080/02560046.2015.1125098

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 Adrian Martin

the deserted ship; we are unlikely to recall those images without such overflowing,
novelistic associations.
This may well be the most familiar stylistic device or trope in the whole of
Ruiz’s cinema: simplicity of image-track, abundance of sound-track, and a complex
counterpoint or ‘third meaning’ created in the relation between them. It is, on one
level, a brilliant trick learnt from the B cinema of (for example) Edgar G. Ulmer,
whom Ruiz much admired, or from the avant-garde comedy extravaganzas of George
and Mike Kuchar: ‘poverty row’ images can be enhanced by sound supplements,
whether a babble of voices, radiophonic sound effects or grand, symphonic music
(whether composed or sampled). And Ruiz used this trick often, particularly when it
was a matter of suggesting things that could not to be strictly depicted or represented:
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a scene involving the falling of hundreds of dead birds onto the deck of another
phantom ship (and their reincarnation in another form) in The Three Crowns of the
Sailor (1982) is another prime example, among literally hundreds in his œuvre.
But, on another level, such scenes insist precisely on their own two-step illusion,
and on the total discrepancy between image and sound: the tracks or elements can
remain autonomous, pursuing utterly different paths. One particular lesson of this
game might be that fiction tends to invade everything, every level, but, at the same
time, it does not strictly need to – hence, let us isolate it as in a chemical experiment,
and see precisely how it works and interacts with the other, equally autonomous
elements. Thus, fiction is not the be-all and end-all of cinema – and certainly not
of Ruiz’s cinema. There is fiction in his work, and then there is fiction’s ‘other’, its
shadow realm, as Ruiz might say. My essay sets out to explore this terrain of otherness
in Ruiz’s cinema, with particular attention paid to its proper figural dimension, and
all that this implies in his work.
Ruiz has often been described as a master storyteller – and, in many media,
including the oral form of conversation, this was certainly the case. For his best-
known period of work – roughly from The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978)
to Life is a Dream (1986) – this description seems perfectly apt. The run of films
that includes Three Crowns of the Sailor, City of Pirates (1983) and Treasure Island
(1986) bursts with colourful, proliferating, overlapping tales of pirates, ghosts,
zombies, dreaming children, multiple and parallel lives, and time-travel paradoxes –
often within pregnant physical sites like Gothic houses, fantasy islands and picture
palaces, where stories are going on everywhere, in a perpetual cycle, the phantom
characters easily jumping (or getting shunted) from one parallel story-world to
another. And yet, to yoke Ruiz exclusively to the expansive, energetic storytelling
tradition that includes (in literature) Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Stanislaw Lem,
Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie risks barring from view much else that
Ruiz has explored both before and after that vivid stretch from the late 1970s to the

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mid-1980s. It also risks missing things that are already stirring even within those
best-known films.
Ruiz is an artist capable of inspired turning points, but also of narrative delays,
eternal digressions, dead-end lures. ‘This book is a journey,’ he warns at the beginning
of his Poetics of cinema, ‘and travellers should be aware that paths leading nowhere
are also part of the trip’ (Ruiz 1995: 8). Storytelling is an energy both gleefully
drawn upon and deliberately defused in his work; we receive only half the picture if
we celebrate one side of this process at the expense of the other. In many ways and
on many levels, Ruiz always railed against the tyranny of a storyline – even a busy,
modernist, multiple storyline: Mysteries of Lisbon (2011) was his ultimate Trojan
Horse wheeled in to sabotage the tight, tidy conventions of a ‘well-told’, epic story.
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A bridge between worlds

Ruiz often insisted that his ultimate goal was to be able to wander freely from story
to story or world to world, to find the bridges between one imaginary space and
another. Thus, he is as interested in stasis, interruption, hesitation and irresolution as
in the dizzy connections of narrative free association. The real presence (1984), his
meditation on theatre, offers an example of this, as indeed do many of his theatre-to-
film pieces, such as Bérénice (1983). Ruiz’s cinema is, in a profound way, a cinema
of gnawing, infinite suspense.
Fiction has a prestidigitational, magic-show aspect in Ruiz – part of the Orson
Welles legacy in his work, as is the taste for radio-play soundtracks. Pure fiction
can be, as already indicated, a conjuring from almost nothing, from the suggestive
collision of a few vivid words and an image that seems to illustrate one small facet
of what those words describe, as in our opening example from Lost Domain. Hence
the story of the twinkling fairies who eat time in Three Lives and Only One Death
(1996), or the many fanciful short fictions from Le Jeu de l’oie (1980) to The Film to
Come (1997) that project themselves over large expanses of time and/or space, and
burst with transformations and mutations of every kind – while hardly ever showing
more than a few of the director’s friends (such as critic-screenwriter Pascal Bonitzer)
gesticulating modestly in a bare room, against a wall, accompanied only by a shadow
or a toy or an item of costume.
Shattered Image (aka Jessie, 1998) – a film that Ruiz referred to as his ‘American
thriller’, and which requires, on the viewer’s part, a vivid appreciation of Ruiz’s
source in trashy telemovie erotic thrillers, mined again later in A Closed Book (2010)
– offers another kind of internally disjointed fiction. It sets in place an undecidable
narrative dispositif in which one story moves along until it jumps, with a jolt, into
its ‘double’, its literal other. A woman, Jessie (played by Anne Parillaud) seems
to exist in two, incommensurable, parallel plots or worlds, as two quite separate
people whose trajectories never cross. This doubled figure is a repressed, troubled

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newly-wed in one strand of the film, and a steely, expert killer in the other. But the
status of these stories, and the relationship between them, remains uncertain, entirely
ambiguous: we never know if it is Jessie 1 who is dreaming the exploits of Jessie
2, or vice versa. So there is no ground in this story, no stable reference point of
narration. There is only an unleashed riot of possibilities, speculations, virtualities
– with Ruiz playing on a particular legacy of the modernist cinema of the 1960s
and 1970s, what I have elsewhere called the ‘mobile suspension’ of large, narrative
pieces or levels (see Martin 2015).
Ruiz gives us another clue about the varieties of fiction in his fond eulogies to
Mexican melodrama, a form in which (according to him) characters do not lead the
narrative, but are led by it. As he loved to encapsulate this storytelling form: a girl
on the street selling flowers is spotted by a talent scout, and immediately becomes
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a fabulous movie star; but, by the final scene, remarkable and unforeseeable twists
of cruel fate have deposited her, penniless, back on the street. Passivity rules:
things happen to characters, they do not cause events through either their will or
their inner, drive-oriented psychology. This is the exact opposite of the supreme
Hollywood storytelling maxim that decrees that action is character driven (what a
person wills and decides to act upon), and that character is defined by action. It
also explains Ruiz’s attraction to certain filmic genres: forms (like mystery-thriller
or horror) so codified that the narrative ‘moves’ are given well in advance of any
specific characters and their motivations. At any rate, the ideas of character and
psychological behaviour never completely disappear from Ruiz’s cinema: rather,
they are replaced by something more mysterious, ‘dark and oceanic’, which is how
the director philosophically viewed the category of human will (Ruiz 1995: 11).
Once the traditional link between character and action is loosened, anything
goes: the plot can emerge from anywhere, from a spaceship landing or a newspaper
headline glimpsed on the street – and it can head off anywhere. Narrative drive in
its tense, impelled, often desperate Hollywood sense is replaced by something more
like a narrative stroll or cruise, a more peaceful, quizzical, meandering sort of drive.
My research question is: What other realms of cinema does this narrative cruise open
up, or highlight, that are beyond the strict paths of narrative itself?
Ultimately, Ruiz’s work should not be thought of, exclusively or primarily, as
either narrative or anti-narrative. It frees us into the rich play of unbound metaphor,
of free-associative contagion; the doors open onto the many virtual realms that Ruiz
found dormant in each and every shot of a movie (his motto: ‘If there are three
hundred shots, there are three hundred films’, see Ruiz [2004]). The Lost Domain
prologue with which we began points to this direction in Ruiz: now the film’s
elements can be unhooked, made to circulate in our minds as we watch and in our
imaginative memories afterwards. Motifs wander: like all those mobile phones in Ce
jour-là (2003), obsessively proliferating in Ruiz’s recent films as they do in life, on

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the streets of Paris or Geneva or Santiago, their ringing tones at one point marrying
in union to form a superb Jorge Arriagada waltz.

Talking to oneself
I propose that the most characteristic trait of the cinema of Raúl Ruiz over the last
30 of its 50 years is neither a specific, stylistic trope (its baroque element), nor a
particular type or structure of narrative (surrealistic or postmodern) – aspects that
are illuminated in depth in Michael Goddard’s recent book on the director (2013).
Rather, in my view, this trait we seek is a recurring situation that forms a figural
ensemble: the propensity for his characters to talk to themselves.
I do not mean that they talk aloud, as if distracted or insane (although that can
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happen); or that they speak into a mirror; or that the film delivers us their inner
thoughts on a voice-over channel. I mean literally that they encounter themselves
in another body, and proceed to have a conversation – often of a deliberately banal,
everyday kind. But not always banal: in the literally sublime, final moments of
Shattered Image, the central woman played by Parillaud ultimately, on impulse, fires
a gun into a bathroom mirror, and then she sees her double – her self. These figures
silently stare at each other, in immortal shot/reverse shot, then framed tighter in,
until the film fades out. It is among Ruiz’s gravest, most mysterious finales – an
unexpected cap-off to a film that hitherto seemed mainly a breezy game with genre
clichés and mainstream stylistics. Even the most evidently light and playful of Ruiz’s
films can take us by surprise like that.
Usually, in this encounter of self and self, there is a notable age discrepancy: the
character as a child meets himself or herself as an older or very old person, or vice
versa. This event began in his cinema with the three-part TV mini-series Manoel on
the Island of Marvels (1984), also known (in its feature film cut) as The Destinies
of Manoel (1985); it reaches its peak in his adaptation of Marcel Proust, Time
Regained (1999), where three separate incarnations of Proust – child, adult, old man
– intermingle in the same space throughout the film’s final shot, like in an Ophulsian
mise-en-scène dance. This motif receives an ultimate, very comprehensive treatment
in the final film Ruiz shot, in his native home of Chile, La noche de enfrente (2012)
– when the old, sad hero’s younger self first appears as his own seemingly destined
assassin; and later when they are both tiny figures, not in a tunnel or a pipe, but in
fact in the giant barrel of that same gun which the child carries around everywhere
(see Martin 2013).
Night Across the Street is a weak translation of the Spanish, La noche de enfrente.
‘The Night in Front’ does not mean there is a time waiting up ahead of you once the
clock ticks on further – rather, and in a quite contrary sense, it refers to a physical block
of night, right up against you, in space. This paradox of a time that becomes space

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is among the keys to Ruiz, and I want to trace here the very particular speculation,
reasoning and aesthetic experimentation that led Ruiz to it.

Detour through the figural

Was there ever a more figural filmmaker than Ruiz? His cinema was devoted to
mise en scène – to admirable performing bodies placed and moved in sometimes
sumptuous sets, in relation to the changing perspectives cast upon these elements by
lighting, lenses and camera movements – but it was not a classical cinema. He heaved
and shifted and subverted classical mise en scène from within: from very early in his
career, with his exploration of elongating, choreographed shadows; and, not least
so, when he started, in the mid-1990s, to put everyone and everything on moveable
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floor panels that could be slid and manipulated in counterpoint to the mobile camera,
creating many memorable and puzzling distortions of space and point-of-view. Ruiz
(1999: 82 – all translations from this source are mine) called these effects evidence
of the ‘instability of time and space’.
Ruiz (ibid: 84) remarked, of his process of adapting Proust, that, in general, ‘the
best way to adapt something to film is to dream it’. This is so because what Freud
(1965) outlined as the mechanisms of the dream-work – condensation, displacement,
metaphor and so on – are, for Ruiz, the very operations of mise en scène itself; in
a striking formulation, he calls the Freudian dream-work ‘the mise en scène of the
dream’ (Ruiz 1999: 84). And hence all mise en scène, for him, no matter whether it is
working on the most obviously dreamlike or the most seemingly naturalistic material,
always has the function of ‘producing displacements of intensity, and condensations’
(ibid.). It stresses and warps the scene, twisting it into this strange shape, or into that
unforeseen orientation. Sometimes, literally so, as with his use of the warping lens
known as a mesmeriser; but also subtly so, in a hundred different ways, in his frames
both baroque and minimal.
An emotional mise en scène, then, a mise en scène of affect as much as concept
– but not tied at all, necessarily, to the fictional emotions of characters, or even the
strictly unfolding plot events laid out in the syntagmatic chain (see Martin 2014). In a
sense, we in film studies have known this radical idea of mise en scène as the dream-
work of intensities for a long time, or we once knew it well, from the melodramas of
Vincente Minnelli, Douglas Sirk, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, or Rainer
Werner Fassbinder; but Ruiz brought this knowledge back to us, and powerfully
so, in his magisterial Mysteries of Lisbon, which I prefer in its longest, six-hour
television version, even more grandly melodramatic than the widely distributed
feature-length cut.
Figures in a scene: this was Ruiz’s chosen terrain. Here I make use of distinction
drawn from the theory of figural thinker Jean Louis Schefer – a crucial theorist of
the image and narrative with whom Ruiz collaborated on several made and unmade

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projects in the 1970s, and who went on, after the director’s death, to write two
remarkable, testimonial texts (Schefer 2011 and 2012) on Mysteries of Lisbon. It is
the distinction, covering all the arts of the image, between their tableau aspect and
their narrative aspect.
This distinction was key for Ruiz – indeed, it was something that, as he proclaimed,
he (like Proust) had always instinctively or intuitively worked on in his artistic
practice, before encountering the theorisation of it. Ruiz (1999: 78) describes the
notion: ‘In a film, the tableau aspect is constituted by the historical period, by the
sets and the actors; while narrative, obviously, is what happens.’ So, on one side, the
tableau aspect is what stands there, what can be painted, caught in an image; while
the narrative is given over to action, to transformative events. We see this in Ruiz’s
cinema at least since Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting, with its constant switches
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between representational media (such as photography and painting) that hold untold
stories, and tableaux vivants that come alive, or at least alive enough to be scrutinised
by a roving, old, art historian. But then there is a conceptual twist:
I had the impression that, in Proust, these parameters were inverted: the narrative had
become a tableau, and the tableau a narrative, because – setting aside World War One,
which produced this tableau effect in the novel – nothing really important happens.
Everything goes back to the point of departure, because we constantly return to
childhood, to a detail or experience that possesses the signs of a repetition – those
cyclical elements which form, ultimately, the substance of the tableau. So that’s how I
filmed Proustian narration: as a tableau. (ibid.)

In the same interview, Ruiz went on to reflect on his own, lifelong practice as a
filmmaker in this light:
These narrations [in Proust], brief and fleeting, of no importance, end up creating
an image without movement. Rather, it is in the Proustian descriptions – particular
elements of environment, costume, character – that we can find, if I can put it this
way, the action. Shifts, movements, incidents, sidelong details – all of these are in the
tableau; while everything that is static, even ecstatic, is in the narrative. (ibid: 79)

Ruiz’s remarks open up a fertile way to see, or re-see, his film of Time Regained.
Scenes from the novel are indeed rendered, very often, as painterly tableaux, with
figures that are stiffly posed, frozen, statuesque, mere reflections, shadows, or
pale ciphers – ghostly apparitions, walking palimpsests of multiple, condensed
figures. And history – the historical narrative of the War – arrives via the incursion
of every kind of pictorial, visual medium of representation that the film plunders:
photo, optical toy and cinema. The flickering of these audiovisual machines, the
hallucinations they prompt, the reveries of alternating light and dark, of frames in
motion, are the only real forward-motion of the plot, such as it is.

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As Cyril Béghin remarked in the special issue of Rouge magazine devoted to Ruiz
on the occasion of a major International Rotterdam Film Festival retrospective in
2004: ‘It is photography or cinema which, each time, clinches the resonance between
interior events and world events.’ Examples of this process include the young Marcel,
goaded into looking into a seemingly static, innocuous optical toy, which shocks him
with the animated image of a dying horse; adult Marcel, who looks out the picture-
frame of his train window in motion to see himself as a child flecked with snow, as
in a cinematic image; and the scene in which both Marcels (the child incarnation
working a movie projector) float serenely in front of newsreel footage of the war.

Storm on the horizon

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Ruiz’s Proust, as I have mentioned, is a figure split in three: child, adult, and old,
sick man – plus a fourth, the narration voiced by Patrice Chéreau. Again, in terms of
figural theory, one is struck by the resonance, or consonance, with Erich Auerbach’s
notion of figura in literature, such as in his great book Mimesis (2003), originally
written in 1946. This refers to the process whereby certain figures are laid out across
the time of a narrative, or multiple, serial narratives – in order, in a sense, to meet
or mirror themselves in stages, to reach what Auerbach (and others after him) have
termed figural fulfillment. This is when the past is completed in the future, and the
future finds its embryo or seed in the past – but neither is ever complete in itself,
for they always exist in relation, in symbiosis, doubly haunted both backwards and
forwards. Auerbach found this strange, ghostly structure operating in many kinds
of narrative, including, very prominently, biblical narrative – but he had no way of
knowing how vital this type of split narrative structure would be in cinema beyond
his death in 1957, from Jacques Rivette and Masao Adachi to Ruiz and Leos Carax,
to name only a few (see Martin 2012a).
The narrative is a tableau: Ruiz’s close reading of Proust, in preparation for his
cinematographic adaptation of it, merely confirmed his own approach. Narrative
here is not a linear movement forward, but rather a cluster of figures, objects and
incidents caught in the ghostly cycles of eternal return (an update of the Nietzschean
idea he picked up from Pierre Klossowski in the 1970s; see Klossowski [1997]) – a
phantasmic logic in which these figures and objects, the utterances they make or the
light they give off, can swiftly circulate and redistribute themselves, changing their
positions. Everything goes backwards, forwards and then backwards again, over and
over, and very often to childhood – but never to designate a hyper-meaningful origin,
Rosebud-style. According to Béghin (2004):
His narratives designate not an origin (there is neither past nor future) but a nucleus.
[…] The narrative division in Ruiz’s work never proceeds without a moment or point

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where everything gathers to form a horizon of meaning – or the eye of a storm: unison,
synchronicity, simultaneity are properly Ruizian obsessions.

More, in my opinion, the eye of a storm than a horizon of meaning: Ruiz’s fractured
biopic Klimt (2006) is very clear in establishing that the swirl, the nucleus of lived
perceptions that make up the immanence of a life (in the sense given by Gilles
Deleuze [2001]) is, in a very real sense, indifferent: their content does not matter.
Whatever a person has lived or witnessed, misremembered or overheard, processed
or repressed – anything (and no one can choose which things) goes into the blender
of that nucleus. Silly and trivial things, as well as weighty, historical things; matters
of life and death, as well as every tiny, fleeting, ephemeral pleasure. This is what
Ruiz’s final work, La noche de enfrente, is centrally about.
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What is important is that this nucleus is impersonal, or transpersonal. It is not

locked up in a single subjectivity, not even Ruiz’s own. The nucleus does not have
its centre in the self, so it is not based in the Proustian experience of epiphany; it
completely rewires this structure of recall (for further discussion see Béghin [2004]).
The omnipresent figuralism of Ruiz’s work points to just such a transformation.
But Ruiz was also shooting, beyond aesthetics and philosophy, for the new
sciences: he was already collaborating with neurobiologists at Aberdeen University
in Scotland, years before we film theorists scurried, grant applications in hand, to
such a hopeful rendezvous. One of Ruiz’s closest friends and interlocutors was a
Chilean mathematician, Emilio del Solar – a theorist of ‘infinitistic metamathematics’
(he studied under Andrzej Mostowski, himself a somewhat Ruiz-like figure, in mid-
1960s Warsaw), as well as Spanish translator of F.P. Ramsey’s The foundations of
mathematics (1931) – who led Ruiz to his aforementioned re-reading of Freud’s The
interpretation of dreams in the light of cinematic mise en scène. (For detail on Del
Solar and Mostowski, see Ehrenfeucht, Marek and Srebrny [2007]).

Dimensional time
Let us work through Ruiz’s variegated conception of time in Proust. It is not the
familiar couplet in film studies of ‘time and memory’ – that is, time wedded to
subjectivity, to personal recall. In Ruiz, time is rendered or figured distinct from
subjective memory. In the 1999 interview that I am using as a text for close reading,
Ruiz outlined his research into theories of time during his preparation for directing
Time Regained.
Ruiz distinguished, first, time as a transcendental category, which he associated
with the concepts of Newton and Kant; second, time as duration, durational time,
which he describes as a properly Oriental concept, as well as a feature of Henri
Bergson’s philosophical system, which was one key source for Proust himself (Ruiz
drew here upon a 1946 article by Jacques Bourgeois); and third, dimensional time,

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time as a dimension – and it was this idea that Ruiz most connected with, enabling
him to unlock an approach to adapting and filming the novelistic work.
Here, Ruiz is referring to Albert Einstein – not much a figure of reference in film
theory, despite his evident popular celebrity – and more particularly to the Austrian-
born Kurt Gödel, mathematician, logician and philosopher. Ruiz’s imagination was
especially fired by Gödel’s 1949 paper ‘A remark about the relationship between
Relativity Theory and idealist philosophy’, which indeed makes for fascinating
reading today. Gödel’s work was admired by Mostowski, and hence imbibed by
Ruiz’s friend Del Solar. According to Ruiz’s gloss of this scientific discussion, Gödel
picked up on Einstein’s musing:
If time is a dimension, why can’t we see it, just as we see depth, breadth or length? Why
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can time – which is also a dimension like the dimensions that comprise space – [be?]
seen only in snatches? However, at certain moments, it seems that some mystics were
able to have a perception of time as a totality. Not that they were outside time, as such a
position cannot exist; on the contrary, they were absolutely inside time, seized by time,
as a dimension. (Ruiz 1999: 75–76)

Gödel speculated on the possibility of travelling within the dimension of time, and
what this could mean in terms of triggering a ‘sort of uncontrollable vertigo’ (ibid:
76) in which modifications of our past modify our present, causing us go back and
re-modify the past, which re-modifies the present … and so on. Of course, Ruiz
(ibid.) adds that the Back to the Future trilogy (1985, 1989 and 1990), not to mention
Looper (2012) or much popular science fiction, represent the ‘exact banalisation of
this proposition’.
So, in Ruiz’s re-vision of Proust, time is not memory, or duration, or metaphysical
transcendence: it is a physical, or hyper-physical dimension – paradoxically,
according to Ruiz (referring to Anne Fremantle’s The Protestant mystics [1964] as
introduced by W.H. Auden), it is the physics that only the mystics have seen or
intuited (Ruiz 1999: 77)! In figural terms, we can say that Ruiz’s cinema is devoted
not to ‘figures in a landscape’, but ‘figures in a dimension’: dimensional time. A
dimension is a space, and it is the space de enfrente, the concrete block of time right in
front of you. And it is precisely dimensional time that makes people see themselves,
shoot into mirrors and have conversations or encounters with themselves – not any
mental process like dissociation, hallucination or memory-trauma, the type that fill
contemporary ‘mind-game’ movies (see Buckland 2009).
Ruiz’s films, in fact, trip in and out of various dimensions, finding the triggers,
frames, figural poses to allow this movement, this bridge between worlds, to occur
– just as Marcel, in one of Time Regained’s greatest sequences, first jumps forward
in editing-time (feet striding like Maya Deren’s in At Land [1944]), then trips when
his shoe catches on the pavement, freezing in this pose. Time is thus freed to do its

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dimensional whirl, one more time: after Marcel’s younger self passes by and glances
quizzically at him, adult Marcel begins to glide, on an unseen roller, through various
spaces and moments.

What’s my angle?
In a parenthetical aside during his explication of Gödel’s reflection on relativity and
the possibility of time travel, Ruiz wonders how we would actually see ourselves,
our lives, if we could – meaning, literally, from what specific angle or perspective.
‘Would we see it as a museum, or as we lived it?’ (Ruiz 1999: 76). In other words:
Would we see it as a tableau, from an external vantage point, like a spectator; or
would we live it as unfolding narrative, through a first-person POV shot – a little like
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Pier Paolo Pasolini’s idea (2005) of a person’s life in savage reality amounting to one
continuous, unbroken camera take?
The question of angle – and the status-ambiguity of every angle within the given,
physical ‘instability of time and space’ – is another key to the cinema of Raúl Ruiz.
In recalling his work on Shattered Image, Ruiz (1999: 84) lists what he calls the
‘nomenclature of shot-types in the United States’. The list starts with familiar,
standard types: establishing, master, medium and single shots. Then it gets weirder:
for there are also special shots, beauty shots, nobody’s point-of-view shots and limbo
shots. I confess that, when I first read this, I thought Ruiz was making it up, or
having us on. But all these are, indeed, bona fide categories in industrial, mainstream
lexicons of cinematography, as I quickly discovered via Google. Ruiz was especially
drawn to the possibilities inherent in nobody’s point-of-view shots – for all his films
are full of those – and limbo shots.
What is a limbo shot? It is a shot without a strictly or completely built, dressed set;
but it has mise en scène, all the same. It is the kind of shot where, in a studio, very
economically, one might set up a blowing curtain, one item of prop furniture, and an
actor, all in moody, obscure lighting. Of Shattered Image, Ruiz declared: ‘I avoided
master shots and used only limbo shots’ – a slight exaggeration, but true to the spirit
of the film – in which he could ‘integrate a close-up, while adding perfectly ordinary
objects. I could thus have a camera movement focused on this secondary element
[i.e., the object], neither necessary nor arbitrary’ (ibid.).
Two years previously, in his psychoanalytic comedy Genealogies of a Crime in
1997, Ruiz perfected this play on what he calls the secondary elements in a scene, or
in a mise en scène (see Martin 2004, 2012b). Ruiz dreamt, for instance, of making a
film in one continuous shot in which all the elements would be utterly transformed
from start to end – where the characters and plot would be perfectly consistent, but
the film would ‘begin in the time of Ivanhoe and end as a Western’ (Ehrenstein 1986:
7). Likewise, in a very low-budget teaching exercise made as a video feature, The

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Vertigo of the Blank Page (2003), he realised a related idea: to have a secondary
story rise up and devour the primary plot.
Genealogies of a Crime develops, right from its beginning, an elaborate system of
visual digressions within shots – curtains, fabrics, patterned cushions, an embroidered
writing desk, painted portraits on walls, ornate tablecloths – that pull us away from
the main through-line of the complicated narrative. At a certain moment, wholly
unmotivated by the character dialogue taking place, the film explodes into a riot of
no less than five, consecutive limbo shots starring the secondary elements – until,
finally, literally ‘racking focus’, it returns our attention to an object that will, once
more, move the story forward.
Is there any better or faster path to the kind of mise en scène evoked earlier –
the mise en scène of the dream-work, intense, condensed, displaced – than through
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this open sesame of the limbo shot, which Ruiz found in the most conservative,
conventional setting of American film crews? He discovered, to his glee, that what
every critic had been calling the neo-baroque, postmodern, Ruizian shot had a
perfectly respectable, everyday name – and this name was limbo. So everything,
as in Proust, brought him back to his origin. But that origin, as you will recall, is a
nucleus – and we can all be spinning around somewhere in that nucleus.

Theory-fiction
There are two remarks by Ruiz from his discussion of Time Regained that I
particularly treasure today, in the wake of his death. First is his account of how he
researched and thought through his ideas on time and relativity: ‘I wrote a little
fiction, a kind of fable, in order to work on this question’ (Ruiz 1999: 76). Second is
his remark on time travel, and the speeds we would need to reach (seven and a half
times the speed of light) to make this happen: ‘This is something that is impossible
from an experimental point of view, but not from a theoretical point of view’ (ibid.).
Of course, Ruiz is talking about the role and definition of experiment and theory
in the sciences, specifically in physics. But let us hijack this novel distinction for
aesthetics as well. We tend to proceed, in film studies, on the assumption that what is
deemed not possible, or only virtual, in one kind of cinema – straitjacketed, classical
cinema – is likely to be possible or actualisable only in another kind of cinema:
liberated, experimental film, expanded multimedia cinema, or today’s digital media.
This assumption has led to much lively film theory, not to mention innovative
filmmaking, since at least the 1960s.
But Ruiz was operating, in his mind, with another sense of the virtual. It is the
virtual we reach only by imagining fictions and fables – not storytelling in the grand
sense, but ‘a little fiction’, in carefully prescribed doses; it is the theory that reaches
still beyond the grasp of practical experiment (his own experiments included). And

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it is the theory of film – a limbo theory of film – that we have yet to fully imagine,
speak or write.

References
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Béghin, C. 2004. Time regained. Rouge 2 (January). http://www.rouge.com.au/2/time.html
(accessed 6 June 2014).
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Buckland, W. 2009. Puzzle films: complex storytelling in contemporary cinema. London:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Deleuze, G. 2001. Pure immanence: essays on a life. New York: Zone Books.
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Ehrenfeucht, A., V.W. Marek and M. Srebrny. 2007. Andrzej Mostowski and foundational
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Martin, A. 2012a. Last day every day: figural thinking from Auerbach and Kracauer to
Agamben and Brenez. New Jersey: Punctum Books.
Martin, A. 2012b. Hanging here and groping there: on Raúl Ruiz’s ‘The Six Functions of the
Shot’. Screening the Past 35(December). http://www.screeningthepast.com/2012/12/
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Martin, A. 2014. Mise en scène and film style: from classical Hollywood to new media art.
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