Described originally as a study for Ruiz’s intended Proust adaptation, Dans un miroir deserves rediscovery in its own right as an important contribution to the ‘cinema of textuality’ as pioneered by Jacques Rivette and Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Ruiz’s solution to the problem of the Proustian narrator who is ‘inside’ all the characters is to radically subjectivise space and time. As his camera executes three elaborate sequence shots in the film’s first part around a man and a woman, the texture runs a full gamut from dense black-and white through filtered monochrome to naturalistic colour, undermining any sense of integral realism.

Even more disconcertingly, the film’s second part reveals the first to have been a play, written by the woman’s younger brother, which she then subjects to a critique before throwing it out of the window.

With just three actors, including Anne Alvaro and Melvil Poupaud, this chamber work adapted from a story by the enigmatic writer Louis-René des Forêts was shot in four days ‘borrowed’ from another film’s schedule. But like many of Ruiz’s lesser-known films, it contains some of his boldest and most elegant questioning of conventional dramaturgy.