Traces

With his body now devoid of substance and able to fly, N. wanders looking for a way to return to life and reintegrate into the world.

A man comes to visit an acquaintance who is supposed to be sick and talks to his sister while he is waiting.

In 1978, Ruiz was commissioned to make a television documentary about the French elections from the viewpoint of a Chilean exile in Paris’ eleventh arrondissement. But, contrary to the producers’ expectation, the Left lost. Ruiz seized on this anti-climax to make a documentary about nothing except itself – a film whose central subject is forever lost in digression and ‘dispersal’, harking back to his Chilean experiments of the ‘60s. Its political content is deliberately left negligible: it’s hard to tell at the end who did actually win the election, let alone why.

A surreal odyssey in which a melancholic maidservant crosses paths with a homicidal little boy, travels to a tiny island of pirates and encounters a man with multiple personalities.

The tragic story of the many lives of Father Dinis, his dark origins and his pious works, and the different fates of all those who, trapped in a sinister web of love, hate and crime, cross paths with him through years of adventure.

A butcher whose meat is most tender, surrounded successively by ephemeral and delightful cashiers.

A man's wife commits suicide and appears to him as a ghost. The ghost follows him everywhere – under the bed, under tables… After seeing the ghost so frequently, the man begins to resemble her.

Collaborative experimental project on which three director made different films about the Swedish icebreaker "Frej".

The film centers on a Dominican monk named Jérôme (played by one actor in colour and another actor in black-and-white) and his interactions with various higher-ups within the French Catholic Church. Ruiz's intention was to reflect the ideological arguments that plagued Latin American left-wing political parties.

An attorney defends a young man on trial for killing his aunt — a psychiatrist who took him in to study possible homicidal tendencies.

The tragic story of the many lives of Father Dinis, his dark origins and his pious works, and the different fates of all those who, trapped in a sinister web of love, hate and crime, cross paths with him through years of adventure and misfortune in the convulsed Europe of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. (A longer television version of the film of the same name, released in 2010.)

Jim is a small child who lives in an inn run by his parents. The arrival of a strange captain to the Island they live will trouble his existence and tip him into an universe of adventures.

A charming tale of murder, perversity and narrative echoes told through shots of barking dogs and a La jetée-like series of stills.

If any single piece can act as a key to Ruiz, it may be the 1997 short Le Film à Venir (The Film to Come). The titular film is a holy fragment of celluloid that can only be seen by a secret society known as the Philokinetes. They watch it on a loop, somnambulating through a life that is unreal by comparison. It is the belief of the Philokinetes that film has an existence “independent from humans. Cinema, they said, is the primeval soup of a new life form. There from were to emerge pure screening creatures. Which is to say, non-topical beings.” - n+1

In Voyage of a Hand, Ruiz constructs another of his concentric labyrinths that hits us right in the multifaceted center of our confusion. We might decide that what we receive was a story full of intentions; or we might decide that it was a spineless joke empty of sense or direction. In any case, it will be difficult to deny the acid sense of humor that animates the film.

Third and final part of collaborative project Brise Glace. Directed by Raúl Ruíz.