A little fiction: person, time and dimension in Raúl Ruiz's figural cinema

Abstract

When Chilean-born Raúl Ruiz (1941–2011) came to adapt Proust's Time Regained in 1999, he hit upon the idea of using three actors to play three Prousts (as child, as adult and as narrator), and to combine them, at times, in the same frame. This was, in fact, the fruit of long-term exploration in his career: already a key element in his television series Manoel on the Island of Marvels (1984), and persisting to his final work, Night Across the Street (2012). Ruiz had an unusual conception of time, actuality and character: such multiple incarnations had little to do with subjective memory, and everything to do with experimental physics on one hand, and modernity on the other. This article will explore, through several examples, the profoundly figural conception of character in Ruiz's cinema.