Responso:
Homage to Huub Baals
(video, work-in-progress, 2004)
Adrian
Martin
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Raúl Ruiz: An Annotated Filmography |
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Responso:
Homage to Huub Baals |
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Introducing the hour-long work-in-process Responso: Homage to Huub Baals at the Rotterdam Film Festival of 2004 – Hubert Baals having been one of the most influential Directors of this event – Ruiz said he wanted to deal with the grief of Baal’s death by making a work which would show that ‘dying is no big thing’. And so this Huub (incarnated by Ruiz regular Jean Badin) passes conversations with his eyes closed, already all at once comically between wakefulness, sleep, contemplation and death. This video recalls Ruiz’s reflection: |
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1. Christine Buci-Glucksmann & Fabrice Revault D’Allones, Raoul Ruiz (Dis Voir, 1987), p. 95 (my translation). |
I try to remember that disparity exists. And that is a good way to remember death. But then death becomes something completely other than accommodating or resigning oneself to dying, something other than melancholy. On the contrary, it becomes a ‘working tool’. In fact, if there is indeed a general kind of death – let’s describe it as an annihilation towards which we are all headed – then there are also other forms of death, like sleep, forgetfulness, blackouts, discontinuities in cinematic montage … Once formalised, these forms of death become rhetorical, audio-visual tools. (1) |
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Responso, accordingly, becomes a reflective essay on the two central motors of Ruiz’s art: storytelling (the film showcases a procession of storytellers and their tales, most spectacularly a Sicilian evoking a battle); and this ‘audio-visual rhetoric’ through which he has often allegorically conjured and dealt with death, signalled in scenes culled from his own work including Life is a Dream (1986) and the long TV version of Chilean Rhapsody (2003). A curious convergence here between and Ruiz at the dawn of the 21st century and the cryptic (in all senses of that word), self-quoting late Godard of the Histoire(s) du cinéma. |
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© Adrian Martin and Rouge 2004. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors of Rouge. |
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