Raúl Ruiz: An Annotated Filmography

La Querelle de jardins
(Quarrel of Gardens, short, France, 1982)

Christine Buci-Glucksmann

In the cinema of Raúl Ruiz, effects – technical artifices, hyperbolic exaggerations of seeing, filmic citations refilmed – permanently generate affects and ambiguous beings, to the point where the spectator-in-exile slides from narrative to narrative and into the resulting form of an archipelago, maze or spiral, where a cinema lives, practising as its own visual syntax the great baroque rhetorical figures derived from Gracián or Tesauro. For this baroque eye of the camera, a mechanical and artificia1 eye, always places us in the redundant, deceitful perplexity of a multi-faceted vision that is multiple, double, anamorphic, reflective. Like the two intercut stories in Suspended Vocation, each with their own method of filming (alternately black and white then colour), which end up as only one story – but which one? ...

Or like, conversely, the prosaic tale of a young cuckolded husband, unfolding in two places and two different cinemas, arousing a veritable Quarrel of Gardens. The Versailles of the woman and the lover, in its cold operatic pomposity, its noble contemplative style, its large frontal shots of clearly arranged gardens à la française. And then the other garden, the husband’s, this time an English garden, with its secrets and shadowy areas, its exploratory camera, its slow and then fast panning shots. A story, a voice-off, but two cinematic styles, in a game of hiding and revealing which reconstructs the love quarrel.