Raúl Ruiz: Mémoire des apparences

Like many of his other films, Ruiz’s Mémoire des Apparences begins with a fixed set of premises – in this case, the Chilean resistance, Calderon’s play, and a fruit salad of trashy movie genres (vestiges of science fiction, western shoot-outs, the swashbuckler or bourgeois melodrama) glimpsed in a provincial cinema – and winds up somewhere left of the stratosphere, indulging in a kind of free-fall of the imagination that puts these initial premises through kaleidoscopic transformations.

The important thing to keep in mind is that… Ruiz is basically out to have fun, and as one of the supreme visual stylists of contemporary cinema, he can guarantee more visual surprises and bold poetic conceits than we are likely to find crowded together anywhere else. Cheerfully indifferent to the modernist notion of a masterpiece, he conflates the profound with the tacky in a liberating manner that turns both into a witty carnival of attractions.

Ruiz’s films are hardly puzzles to be solved or strenuous exercises to be mastered, but esoteric pleasure machines that provoke laughter and reveries in relation to Ruiz’s campy sense of irony and metaphysical flights of fancy.” (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

“Watching Mémoire des apparences, one is repeatedly assailed by the suspicion that, on a formal level, Raúl Ruiz is currently the most inventive filmmaker working anywhere. This dude with the B-movie monicker, Raúl Ruiz is the Godard of the 80s, Mister early-Borges plus middle-period-Welles, a Barthesian Buñuel, the Edgar G. Ulmer of the European art film, a Third World H. Rider Haggard, the Garcia Marquez of French TV, and so forth.” (J. Hoberman, Village Voice)

Mémoire des apparences has only been made available on a bad VHS many decades ago and is impossible to watch in decent quality today. A rare 16mm copy of the film will be live subtitled in English.