Some things never seem to start in the cinema of Raúl Ruiz, and some things never seem to end. His films take place in the fuzzy, indeterminate zone between finding a beginning and reaching a conclusion to the central action. That is, if you can figure what the central action is meant to be.
In La noche de enfrente/Night Across the Street (2012), Ruiz’s last completed work, the central action appears, for much of the film, to center on an old man, Celso Barra (Sergio Hernández), who is anticipating—as he has long anticipated—the moment of his own death. He believes that a hired killer is coming for him, and he patiently awaits this assassin each night, in the parlor of the boarding house where he dwells. Several different prime candidates appear, in the course of the events, who might be about to carry out this preordained act. Eventually, it is Celso himself, as a neat, well-dressed schoolboy (Santiago Figueroa), who shows up with the gun. But a final twist on this plot—just one image—suggests another scenario altogether.
But there is something else, as well: a crime, a mass murder in fact, also in the parlor of the boarding house—a line of corpses that is revealed to us in one of those off-hand visual postscripts to a scene, when the camera moves, that Ruiz loved to append wherever and whenever possible. Is this the real center of the movie, the crime to which everything else provides a scattered, obscured genealogy? Ruiz, especially in the last fifteen years or so of his career, married the generic structure of the murder-mystery (the more old-fashioned, the better) to the often grisly faits divers that filled his experience, and especially his long memory, of his homeland, Chile. Crimes, secrets, murders, bodies in pieces everywhere; so pervasive, in fact, such a mundane occurrence, that they become banal, just part of the texture of a strange, everyday life.
In a Ruiz film, whichever guiding plot you ultimately choose from the available menu of options only ends up being a cover for another logic behind the scenes—an “occult order,” he often called it, but even this was just another fictional ploy (however resonant with the myriad conspiracies of real-world events and institutions). The final, bottom level of mystery in his work—often deliberately impossible to crack—is how any one film has been generated: from which pool of elements, according to which permutational or transformative procedures? Because it is the proliferation of this game-logic—eating up everything it touches upon—that constitutes the main event, the central action, certainly in La noche de enfrente.
NIGHT ACROSS THE STREET
‘Night Across the Street’
Ruiz designed his films like this: you dive in anywhere, find any entry-point you can, and soon (if you are alert and inquisitive) you will feel like you maybe have your hands on a key to the whole. But if you dare re-plunge in at another point, you will experience exactly the same thing, only to arrive at a different conclusion. (An excellent and handy guide to several such interpretive procedures is provided in the forthcoming book from Wallflower Press, Michael Goddard’s Impossible Cartographies: The Cinema of Raúl Ruiz.)
Let me sprinkle the opening moves of several of these journeys into the film. La noche de enfrente is a playful meditation on words and things: which comes first, which generates the other? One example among a hundred: Celso—in the discreet background of an image—has a romantic moment with the secretary from work, Laurita (Valentina Murh). As they kiss, Laurita—who spends much of her time asking for four-letter combinations in crosswords—recognizes the word she has been looking for all along, beso (kiss)…and abruptly exits the love-scene with this gift. More emphatically underlined throughout the film is the fantastical-sounding word rhododendron: it gets successively used or defined as a name (which also becomes other names: Rolo, Rodo Pedro), a horse, a plant, a brig, a fish, a “cowardly killer”.… By the end, you will not be able to remember which one of these signifieds is the “correct” one.
Ruiz often returned, in his work, to the motif of a Book of Life: a text in which everything that will happen has already been inscribed. This Book can take many semiotic forms: spiritual prophecies, popular songs, cryptic codexes, hieroglyphic picture-puzzles. (We see seated readers animated into grotesque gestures by one such literal Book in the short The Film to Come, 1997.) Sometimes, it is precisely this “legend”—stuffed with outrageous stereotypes of every kind—somehow uncovered (often unwittingly) by the characters, that pinpoints Ruiz’s own source for the ludic generation of his film. One such source here is probably autobiographical: set quite precisely in the late 1940s—if we go by the movie posters up at the local “Los Condores” cinema, and by the political chatter (‘a clean sweep!’) pre the re-election of Carlos Ibañez de Campo as President in 1952—the film swells with motifs from Ruiz’s own Chilean childhood, as his producer François Margolin has testified: pirate ships, old radios, tunes…. And here is Long John Silver (Pedro Villagra) himself, providing a clue to the film’s generative puzzle when he alludes to the immortal story (whatever it may be) of the “two brothers of the seashore, and the three guns.…”
I confess that, as a 21st-century citizen, I enjoy having a Ruiz film open on one window of my laptop, with Wikipedia ready to consult in the corner of the screen. You can discover many intriguing things this way, further possible keys: Adamov, for example, mentioned as a suicide in the dialogue. Presumably Arthur Adamov (1908-1970), whose work Professor Taranne Ruiz adapted in 1987; even just glancing at the titles of his literary works suggests a secret pool of initial elements for Ruiz’s use: The Parody, The Invasion, Ping-Pong, The Politics of Rubbish, If Summer Came Again … and he was an editor on a Surrealist magazine (of which I have never previously heard—well, there was only one issue in 1929) titled Discontinuité!
There is a specific body of writing underneath the film, as well. Apart, that is, from the character who reluctantly bears the name of “Jean Giono” (Christian Vadim)—he may or not be the writer of that name but, at any rate, has to live with the equivalence—a reminder of Ruiz’s lush adaptation of Les âmes fortes/Savage Souls (2001). “Freely inspired by the tales of Hernán del Solar,” says the credit of La noche de enfrente (not, as per the subtitle, “inspired by the novel,” although there is a 1952 book of his with this title)—a critic, novelist, essayist, poet and “creator of Chilean stories for children,” 1901-1985, whose work is (as far as I’m aware) completely untranslated into English. It is too little recognized what an original and inventive adapter of literature Ruiz was throughout his career. Adaptation always proceeded, for him, through a kind of rigorous but sideways reading, a little like how a Lacanian psychoanalyst listens in on the speech-flow of a patient: Ruiz sought to pick up the patterns, clues, obsessive motifs that may have escaped the conscious design of the writer (as he also did with the work of filmmaking students he supervised). I have not yet tried to read del Solar, so I cannot say which elements of his were drawn and redrawn in the mix of La noche de enfrente as a film: seagulls, maybe? Whores? The “cursed boarding house,” this splendid house of fiction? The pesky alarm clock of Don Celso that, at one moment in a public bar, begins flying? Beethoven going nuts, like those mythical first spectators of silent cinema, when he encounters the shadows on a movie screen—not to mention a movie that seems to be an intercut mash-up of several releases in different genres?
NIGHT ACROSS THE STREET
‘Night Across the Street’
So, what we seek—by whatever route we can take—is less an interpretive key to than a dynamic matrix of elements: and, as Ruiz regularly proved, it does not really matter which elements you begin with (just as it hardly matters which ‘formative experiences’ or sensations make up a self or a character)—the game can proceed and whip up a storm. Although it can be a facile short-circuit to “explain” Ruiz’s films by reference to his theories (of “central conflict theory” and whatnot, as elaborated in his essays, interviews and Poetics of Cinema books), the ideal he often discussed of secondary elements (props, items of background décor, certain banal but repeated sounds or gestures) rising up, through various strategies, from the background and eventually devouring the whole film, achieves a high degree of realization in La noche de enfrente. Gestures like laughing and crying (often delivered in instant alternation). Details that are easy to miss, like the fact that in the first “back-projected screen” scene (digitally mocked-up), at a certain split-second just before it ends, people start walking and riding backward!
Ruiz also said, often, that his ultimate goal was to arrive at—to master just enough to unleash, like Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master—“specifically cinematographic emotions.” Many viewers of Ruiz (especially first-timers) find it hard to catch the emotion, and detect only the hyper-cerebral, neo-baroque game-playing, of the kind I have tried to sketch above. But it is hard to really name, label or describe the properly cinematographic emotions (neither cognitive psychology nor classical psychoanalysis will help us much here): for any Ruiz fan, La noche de enfrente is saturated with feeling, and headily so, but not only, maybe not at all, feelings associated with the melancholia of aging and sickness, or impending mortality—the biographical facts we are compelled to read into this “testament” film. Ruiz was not one for testaments; or else, like Don Celso, he was fashioning them already, from earliest child