Raúl Ruiz: An Annotated Filmography

Le Borgne (The One-Eyed Man, 4 episodes, France, 1980)

Christine Buci-Glucksmann

The first visual paradox of Ruiz’s cinema: how to create a second degree baroque, how to show phantoms, those phantoms which haunt, as if repressed, the Latin American imaginary? ‘As soon as something becomes visual it ceases to be fantastic. The moment we see a ghost it stops being a ghost: a ghost is only a ghost if it is barely visible,’ says Ruiz. This invisible edge, this non-visual, almost unreal aspect of the image where the visible must figure the invisible, immediately connects with this ontology of ‘reality’s lack of reality’ which is close to the Baroque elegy to nothingness, with its redundant, proliferating elaborations. Atopic, the Ruizian gaze would find its place at the encounter of the visible-invisible, in the paradox of seeing and thinking, in this great, comic sophistry which unfolds in the parable of the blind man in Three Crowns of the Sailor. Just as Epimenides the Cretan proclaimed that all Cretans are liars, the blind man – the blind look – gives both true and false information to those who disembark from the Funchaleuse. ‘The world is a lie ... But don't believe me ... ’ Does he die from a real bleeding wound, or from a fake one, covered in red paint?

Even more excessively, The One-Eyed Man offers the same scenography and the same sophistic parable of vision. The voice-off announces that everyone is dead and that N., a living-dead like the sailors of the Funchaleuse, sees the world as ‘dead’, a subjective camera following his movements and panoramic gestures. A dead, indeterminable gaze, from the dummy position (as in a bridge game), or again a blind look. N. meets Platinum Brain, the blind man turned clairvoyant post surgery – in keeping with the Calderónian metaphor where seeing gives death and vice versa.

In this make-believe art, this aesthetic of simulacra and artifice proclaimed in a rhetoric of rhetoric, the plurality of viewpoints inherited from the Chilean period and its debates about the cinema of Rossellini and De Sica are such a constituent part of the discourse that the image becomes blurred, uncertain, derisory. Castrated (The One-Eyed Man) or blind, vision deconstructed, ridiculed in its own giddy unfurling, makes way for this amusing dialogue between phantoms:

N: I sense I’m about to materialise.
DR: I am Dr Campbell. I am as blind as soup, but I see where you want to go ...