Raúl Ruiz: An Annotated Filmography

Genealogies of a Crime
(Génealogies d’un crime, France, 1997)

Maximilian Le Cain

Midway through Genealogies of a Crime, Solange (Catherine Deneuve), a lawyer famed for never winning a case due to her preference for handling lost causes, has lunch with her dotty mother (Monique Melinand) at the latter’s flat. The old lady keeps looking at Solange’s hands, as if constantly on the verge of making a personal remark. The scene begins with a very long static take (atypical for Ruiz) of them seated at table, with the mother facing the camera and Solange in profile, a shot designed to highlight the apparent banality of their conversation. The camera then moves around the table and pulls back to frame Solange frontally. As she comments (in response to her mother’s reaction to her hands), ‘The boy I’m defending has the same tic as me. He hesitates between one object and another,’ the camera rises, invading the sterility of the frame with a shelf of red glass ornaments.

It then tracks back the way it came, back to Solange in profile, but at almost ceiling level so that the top half of the frame is filled with the glass beads of a chandelier. When it reaches Solange it drops to a lower angle dominated by two more ornaments, butterflies mounted in glass. This is quintessential Ruizian framing: objects intrusively defining the foreground of a shot, creating a baroque distance between the viewer and the semi-somnambulant prisoners of narrative that people his films. In this instance it provides a diagram of the heroine’s plight. The outward strength and glamour of Deneuve’s persona is well used to cover with the illusion of substance a character that is in effect a blank slate, a passive shell drifting along on the central flow of plot. She has difficulty choosing between objects but, as the intrusion of ornaments into the frame makes clear, she is only an object herself among many to be ‘chosen’. Her difficulty in deciding what to pick up only reflects that she is incapable of making a choice; she is waiting for whichever variant on the unfolding narrative that happens to be dominant in that particular moment to identify itself by acting through her.

From the outset Ruiz uses mise en scène to establish the reality of Solange’s body as nothing more than the blank focus of turbulent forces of narrativity. She is introduced when the story proper commences asleep in her son’s bed. The camera tracks across a wall design featuring flying cranes, to reveal her in the background of a shot dominated by various ornaments in the foreground. In voice-over she explains that she didn’t know why she had decided to sleep in her son’s room (he being away on holiday). She is, again, an object among many, following an urge that she does not understand, one that seems to impose itself from outside her.

A couple of shots later, a phone call brings the information that her son is dead. The camera pans from her face back across the crane picture, but this time comes to rest on a crane flying in the opposite direction to the others, with the shadow of Solange’s head next to it. The voice-over describes how she didn’t react, just went to sleep until very late the following day. This pan away is more than merely a coy visual metaphor for the loss of her son. Her own feelings are ambiguous and inaccessible, while the objects surrounding her are powerfully imbued with narrative energy. The presence of her shadow implies that the forces these objects represent have somehow appropriated part of her – in Ruiz a shadow is seldom just a shadow, and not necessarily coupled to the body. Later in this film, for example, when she visits the murderer’s bedroom, his shadow as a nine-year-old boy mysteriously appears on a wall.

In Genealogies of a Crime stories and ideas have a life of their own; it is they that control bodies, not people. This view is theorised by psychiatrist Christian Corail (Andrzej Seweryn), who states that everyone is reliving a story already existent, that ‘men think that they live stories; in reality it is stories that possess men.’ Hence he walks through the film obsessively defining everything in terms of literary or historical archetype; yet his short-term memory seems nonexistent. His colleague and rival, Georges Didier (Michel Piccoli) is likewise afflicted with a memory disorder that causes him to forget peoples’ faces. He carries a book of identifying photographs with him to remedy this. If these psychiatrists’ understanding of the controlling forces of Ruiz’s world has led them to recognise the insignificance of an individual’s specificity, what they fail to articulate is the transmissibility of narratives and identities. Solange’s adventure essentially consists of her moving through the various perspectives on a murder case, assimilating and reliving the stories of the different characters as they die, like a giant snowball accumulating more and more snow as it rolls down a hill. Having become both victim and murderer – who were themselves both engaged in a dangerous game of identity swapping – she pronounces herself the ‘universal inheritor’ of all the film’s narratives.

Of the identity swapping game, practiced for psychiatric purposes, Jeanne (played also by Deneuve, or rather reincarnated as her) declares ‘a game gave in a few minutes more results than any treatment given according to the rules.’ Similarly, Genealogies of a Crime can be viewed as an elaborate game with the conventions of film noir that pushes the fatalism of that genre to new and revealing limits: it is explicitly narrative itself that has taken the place of destiny, storytelling owning up for its own cruelties rather than disguising itself in a concept of fate. Yet, however playful Ruiz’s films become, the sense of omnipotent, vampiric events constantly displacing and feeding off helpless, disorientated characters creates a powerful undertow of profound unease. There can very few cinematic creations in which human freedom and self-determination count for as little as they do in the Ruizian universe.