The Cinema of Raul Ruiz: Impossible Cartographies [Paperback]

Michael Goddard is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Salford, UK. His recent research centers on audiovisual media cultures and media theory; currently he is researching radical media ecologies in the 1970s.Raúl Ruiz, while considered one of the world's most significant filmmakers by several film critics, is yet to be the subject of any thorough engagement with his work in English. This volume sets out on this task by mapping, as fully as possible, Ruiz's cinematic trajectory across more than five decades of prolific work, up to his death in 2011; ranging from his earliest work in Chile to high-budget 'European' costume dramas culminating in Mysteries of Lisbon (2010). It does so by treating Ruiz's work—with its surrealist, magic realist, popular cultural, and neo-Baroque sources—as a type of 'impossible' cinematic cartography, mapping real, imaginary, and virtual spaces, and crossing between different cultural contexts, aesthetic strategies, and technical media. It argues that across the different phases of Ruiz's work identified, there are key continuities such as the invention of singular cinematic images and the interrogation of their possible and impossible combinations.Michael Goddard's erudite new book is among the finest of contemporary film director studies to be published in recent years. It is a bold, authoritative and compelling survey of a career famously difficult to capture. Combining important and enriching context, engaging film analysis and a convincing central thesis, Goddard delivers his survey with a brio of which its subject would surely approved. The result is a nuanced and detailed portrait of the work of one of cinema's most fecund and engaging minds. The author succeeds in proposing on the one hand a scholarly periodisation and on the other some unifying theoretical concepts (principally cartography) which, against the odds perhaps, will leave the aficionado with ală5