Fértil provincia y señalada: Raúl Ruiz y el campo del cine chileno ed. by Verónica Cortínez

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fértil provincia y señalada: Raúl Ruiz y el campo del cine chileno ed. by Verónica Cortínez Andreea Marinescu Cortínez, Verónica, ed. Fértil provincia y señalada: Raúl Ruiz y el campo del cine chileno. Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2018. 265 pp. This edited collection seeks to bring Raúl Ruiz's filmic work into conversation with the field of Chilean cinema. Ruiz (1941–2011), exiled to France since 1973 after Pinochet's military coup, is a towering presence in the field of global cinema, his importance attested by numerous scholarly works dedicated to his prolific and multifaceted artistic production, as well as by captivating cinephiles and inspiring independent filmmakers around the world. In fact, the Prologue to the collection states that the critical attention received by Ruiz threatens to eclipse other Chilean independent films. Indeed, it is a worthwhile effort to both consider Ruiz's work in the context of Chilean independent film production and to pay attention to other independent films produced in the past decades. The book is divided into two parts: "Raúl Ruiz: un chileno en el mundo" is comprised of four chapters on Ruiz while "Fértil provincia: el mundo chileno en el cine" features another four chapters on several Chilean-made independent films. The first chapter, "El cine chileno en el contexto mundial: Raúl Ruiz en Locarno," by Manfred Engelbert, offers a necessary corrective to the dominant claim that European cinema shaped Latin American cinema, and seeks to demonstrate how Ruiz's original films were an integral part of a world phenomenon of new filmmaking and provided an important reference for the development of European cinema. The second essay, "Las funciones del plano según Raúl Ruiz," by Cortínez, discusses Ruiz's work as a film theorist, tracing the trajectory of his ideas on the relative autonomy of the shot through several books, interviews, and films. Ruiz's practice anticipates its theorization; it is a way to conceptualize his own filmic praxis. In the third essay, "Cuatro guiños para Ruiz," Roberto Castillo Sandoval develops the theme of death—or, more accurately, the constant interaction among the living and the dead—as a constant feature throughout Ruiz's work, as a means to express a certain way of being in the world, allowing him to move with facility from the experimental realm to the popular culture realm. The last piece in this section, "La amistad es un misterio insondable," is provided by filmmaker Miguel Littín, who recounts memories from his longstanding friendship with Ruiz, defined by early activism and a shared iconoclastic filmic style during the New Latin American Cinema, exile, and ultimately death. This first part offers a variety of texts developing specific aspects of Ruiz's work; however, the overreliance on Tres tristes tigres (1968) in the first two essays undercuts the more expansive claims and this first section as a whole does not cohere into a unified thesis. Unfortunately, the second part suffers from similar problems as well as new issues. Providing an abrupt departure from Ruiz, it is dedicated to a number of independent Chilean films made several decades apart from each other. The loose theme that unites them is an implied sense of "Chileanness," mainly based on the evocation of the countryside and rural popular culture. Two scholarly essays in the second part provide valuable analyses of two intriguing documentaries. The first, "Mimbre: Sergio Bravo y Violeta Parra" by Claudio Guerrero y Alekos Vuskovic, highlights the 1957 legendary collaboration [End Page 298] of Bravo and Parra, two foundational figures of the Nuevo Cine Chileno and the Nueva Canción Chilena. The 10-minute documentary is an ethnographic and aesthetic study of Manzanito, a wicker-weaving master representative of a newly found appreciation for popular art by urban intellectuals and artists at the time. Even though the problematic potential of this fascination with popular art is not examined, the essay analyzes and highlights the impressive merits of this early experiment in filmic montage and musical improvisation. Hernán Delgado's piece, "Luchando por el derecho de un suelo para vivir: Cine documental regional y memoria hist...