Raul Ruiz's Cinema of Inquiry

This collection of eight carefully thought-out essays and three important interviews covers many aspects of Ruiz's prodigious production. It shows that Ruiz's work cannot be reduced to film-making, no matter how refined or avant-garde; that it is rather, from its modest beginnings to its end, a work on the image whose context is a generalized intermediality and whose thrust is the ongoing, ceaseless production of an image of thought of relentless originality and power. It is an essential supplement to critical bibliography on Raúl Ruiz.

~Alberto Moreiras, Texas A&M University

Raúl Ruiz and Roberto Bolaño are the two most important representatives of Latin American postmodernism. Both were Chilean (Bolaño from a younger generation than Ruiz), both shared the hopes of Allende's Chilean Road to Socialism and the experience of its brutal destruction in 1973 by the military junta, both wrote from the permanent displacement of exile. Both developed their work on the ruins of the project of Latin American socialism, but also against the hegemony of the new reality principle imposed as much in the arts as in politics and economics by the dictatorships and globalization, neoliberalism. Their basic principle: Baroque proliferation negates neoliberal closure (or simply murder). Bolaño is well-known, Ruiz less so. But in recent years, interest in his vast oeuvre has picked up. This is an essential collection about an essential but still under appreciated figure in modern Latin American and world film.

~John Beverley

By refracting the cinema of Raul Ruiz this book offers a rich set of ideas with which to approach his multifaceted, magnificent oeuvre. It represents an original contribution to Ruiz scholarship in English and challenges scholars to be daringly creative as his uniquely dense archive becomes increasingly accessible.

~Laleen Jayamanne

This magnificent anthology goes much beyond the usual Ruiz – the man of exile, irony, surrealism, baroque, diaspora, the portrait of the young artist affiliated with Parra and Borges, or the late stylist of Proust. This book is a multifaceted account of Ruiz the relentless cinematic voyager, the profound philosopher of the image in the hour of new media. In as much, it belongs to aficionados and scholars across the world.

~Anustup Basu