Celebrity Biographies
Faoul ruiz
The Chilean director residing in France Raúl Ruiz has died at the age of 70 in Paris due to a lung infection, the last of the complications arising from a liver transplant due to the cancer he suffered.
In 2010 he had been recognized as best director at the San Sebastian Festival for what would be his last film, the excellentMysteries of Lisbon , although he leaves two unfinished films, La noche de frente , in the editing phase, and As linhas de Torres .
Raúl Ruiz –or Raoul Ruiz, his Frenchified name– was born in Puerto Montt, Chile, on July 25, 1941. His establishment in France was motivated by the military coup of Augusto Pinochet in 1973, and exile would mark his cinema; however, at the wish of his family, the filmmaker will be buried in his Chilean hometown. Previously, on August 23, a funeral will take place in the Parisian church of Saint Paul.
A restless man, Ruiz studied theology and law, and at Fernando Birri’s documentary school in Santa Fe. A prolific artist, his creation began in adolescence with avant-garde theater, to the point of writing more than a hundred plays between 1956 and 1962. In addition, to earn a living, he rewrote scripts for Mexican television series. He would soak up movies through film clubs. After directing a couple of shorts, he made his debut as a feature film director with Tres tristes tigres (1968), the first of more than seventy cinematographic works of various kinds, always risky in conception and aesthetic treatment, seeking to innovate in filmic narrative modes, experimenting without neglecting realism, playing with humor and the absurd. So a title likeStolen Square Hypothesis (1979) does not leave indifferent those who are looking for a non-accommodating cinema.
Ruiz draws on the literary tradition -from William Shakespeare to Robert Louis Stevenson passing through Calderón de la Barca and Camilo Castelo Branco and reaching Frank Kafka and Marcel Proust- , but without falling into academicism, risking interfering with long sequence shots or adapting magical realism to his films. A regular at the Cannes Film Festival, The Sailor’s Three Crownsobtained in 1983 a well-deserved award. Also in Berlin they wanted to give her a special award in recognition of her long career. Honorary doctorates from various universities give an idea of his enormous artistic and intellectual prestige, his very personal cinema enjoyed recognition but not popularity. An undeniable example of an author, revered to the extreme by the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma, some of his best-known titles areGenealogy of a crime (1997) andThe comedy of innocence (2000).
The filmmaker is survived by his wife Valeria Sarmiento, editor of many of his films, to whom he was married since 1969.