The Astonishing Output Of Raúl Ruiz
Adam Thirwell writes: ‘One way of beginning to love the work of the filmmaker Raúl Ruiz is to do some gentle arithmetic. Ruiz, who was born in Chile in 1941, made more than one hundred films (100!)—in a career that ran from 1968, when he made his first feature, “Three Sad Tigers” (a neo-realist portrait of Santiago’s dealers and hustlers), to 2012, when his wife Valeria Sarmiento completed his last movie, “Lines of Wellington” (a tender fresco of the Peninsular War) the year after he died. An average year for Ruiz, therefore, involved making two or three movies—as well as the business of living. And one way of interpreting this monstrous output is to consider a single fact: shortly after Augusto Pinochet, backed by the US, took power in Chile in a coup on 11 September 1973, Ruiz fled across the Atlantic to Paris. He was thirty-two.’
