Prolific, Provocative Ruiz Has a Triple Bill

Of the many excellent foreign language filmmakers who rarely or never made it to U.S. theaters in the 1980s, one of the most provocative is French/Chilean Raul Ruiz--represented by a strong triple bill tonight at the close of the UCLA Archive’s retrospective. (Call (213) 206-FILM.)

The prolific Ruiz (more than 60 films, long and short, in two decades) is not unknown to U.S. buffs. But his films do have qualities that made him an outsider in the conservative atmosphere of ‘80s U.S. movie distribution. They’re intellectual, full of complex dialogue, symbolism, paradox and narrative and technical trickery--and they open windows on interesting new currents in European art, theater, music, philosophy and literature. All the more reason for audiences that may be starved for offbeat sensibilities to seek him out.

Tonight’s bill includes two of my favorites in the series: the 1980 short, “Snakes and Ladders,” and the somewhat longer 1978 “Hypothesis of a Stolen Painting.” The weakest film, “The Real Presence” (1978), is a disquisition on theater that, apparently, began as a TV documentary on the Avignon Festival and somehow metamorphosed into an intricate mix of report, personal drama and nightmare--centering on the misadventures of an unemployed actor hired as the broadcast anchor.

“Snakes and Ladders,” on the other hand, is a playful little fantasy-travelogue conceived in the Byzantine riddle mode of Jorge Luis Borges, a writer with whom Ruiz is often compared. It’s another assignment-gone-wild: in this case, a promotion film for a cartography exhibit at the Centre Pompidou, turned into a fantastic puzzle-tale. The protagonist, after happening on two strangers playing a board game in a field, immediately realizes, according to the narrator “that he is in a nightmare--and the worst kind of nightmare; a didactic one.” He is dispatched into a larger game in which he is, variously, player, game-piece and dice. Ruiz, a real master in these short, cryptic forms, makes this promo-film a bracingly deadpan fable-myth full of intellectual twists and japes.

“Hypothesis of a Stolen Painting” was co-written with avant-garde novelist Pierre Klossowski--from whom Ruiz adapted “The Stolen Vocation.” Here, the Borgesian rhyme is even louder. The riddle-story is disguised as an art lecture, with a wordy academic actually walking into the paintings of a forgotten and fictitious petit master, “Tonnerre”--as he attempts to unravel for us the mystery behind a strange scandal that supposedly gripped Paris on their first exhibition.

Soon, he--and another narrator--are discovering arcane clues everywhere (mirrors, shadows, glances or smiles). And the apparently simple academic-realistic paintings, with their cliched mythological or family portrait subjects become the reflection of a perverse, violent family sexual scandal and a sinister, perhaps worldwide, conspiracy. Absorbing stuff. Like “Snakes and Ladders,” it makes you wonder what kind of magic Ruiz could weave with more opulent budgets.