Ruiz Returns: Three Resurrected Films
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
Programme:
The Widower’s Tango and Its Distorting Mirror (1967/2020, 70 min) 16:00
Socialist Realism (1973/2023, 78 min) 17:30
The Wandering Soap Opera (1990/2017, 80 min) 19:15
Raúl Ruiz’s remarkable international career involved frequently improvising and even abandoning projects. Since his death in 2011, his frequent collaborator and widow Valeria Sarmiento has worked with Poetastros in Santiago to recover and recreate some of these films. Three of their acclaimed restorations will be shown at BIMI as an exceptional triple bill.
The Widower’s Tango and Its Distorting Mirror (El tango del viudo y su espejo deformante) is the story of a man haunted by the ghost of his wife after her suicide. Begun by Ruiz in 1967, it was abandoned due to lack of funding before his debut feature Tres Tristes Tigres (1968). After the discovery of the original footage in an old cinema in 2016, this has been restored and dubbed making use of lip-reading.
Socialist Realism (El Realismo socialista) was started during Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government, before postproduction was interrupted by the September coup that overthrew Allende and drove Ruiz and Sarmiento into exile. Ruiz was never an uncritical supporter of Allende, and the film was conceived as a sardonic ‘choral story in which different worlds are brought together’. Inevitably workers, intellectuals and members of the petit bourgeoisie didn’t agree in this turbulent era, but the film survives as a poignant document of its aspirations. Chamila Rodríguez and Galut Alarcón of Poetastros managed to gather scattered material, and with the support of the Belgian Cinematheque Royale and Duke University, enabled Valeria Sarmiento to direct what amounts to a posthumous collaboration, which had its world premiere at the San Sebastian festival in 2023
The Wandering Soap Opera (La telenovela errante, 80 min). Filmed in Chile in 1990, this was completed by Sarmiento using additional footage in 2017, when it had a successful world premiere at the Locarno International Festival. Illustrating Ruiz’s playful and satirical attitude to his native country, it’s based on the assumption that there is no Chilean reality except in its popular television soap operas. War threatens to break out between four of these ‘in a fictional jelly divided into evening episodes’.
The Ruiz-Sarmiento trilogy will be introduced by Malcolm Coad, a journalist and writer long resident in Chile, who knew Ruiz well and appears in his Cofralandes: Chilean Rhapsody.
Contact name:
Matthew Barrington