Raúl Ruiz's Cinema of Inquiry

Investigates the work of global filmmaker Raúl Ruiz.Most widely known for his filmic productions, Raúl Ruiz (1941–2011) was a highly prolific, erudite, and innovative artist, whose work is located at the intersection of diverse locations, languages, and aesthetic traditions. Ruiz’s eclectic body of work includes over one hundred films (among them features, shorts, television serials, and videos), books on the theory of cinema, genre-defying fiction books, plays, a radio show, and a multimedia installation. Raúl Ruiz’s Cinema of Inquiry posits the unity of Ruiz’s body of work and investigates the similarities between his very diverse artistic productions. Ruiz’s own concept of ""cinema of inquiry"" provides the lens through which his films and poetics are examined.Ruiz’s relevance to cinema and the growing interest in his work are due to his legacy as a global filmmaker. Viewers, filmmakers, and film scholars continue to return to his works because his films consistently pose the question of what cinema can be, especially at a time when cinema is increasingly seen as displaced by television and new media. Ruiz expanded the domain of cinema itself, incessantly probing the interstices between cinema and other arts. Editors Ignacio López-Vicuña and Andreea Marinescu, with six other scholars, explore different aspects of Ruiz’s work, with special attention paid to the transnational aspects of Ruiz’s films, critical regionalism, and political and aesthetic interventions. Raúl Ruiz’s Cinema of Inquiry includes close readings of important yet understudied films, as well as two extensive previously unpublished interviews with Ruiz. Students and scholars of film and media studies will find great value in this collection.

By refracting the cinema of Raul Ruiz this book offers a rich set of ideas with which to approach his multifaceted, magnificent oeuvre. It represents an original contribution to Ruiz scholarship in English and challenges scholars to be daringly creative as his uniquely dense archive becomes increasingly accessible.-- (09/11/2017), Ra?l Ruiz and Roberto Bola?o are the two most important representatives of Latin American postmodernism. Both were Chilean (Bola?o from a younger generation than Ruiz), both shared the hopes of Allende's Chilean Road to Socialism and the experience of its brutal destruction in 1973 by the military junta, both wrote from the permanent displacement of exile. Both developed their work on the ruins of the project of Latin American socialism, but also against the hegemony of the new reality principle imposed as much in the arts as in politics and economics by the dictatorships and globalization, neoliberalism. Their basic principle: Baroque proliferation negates neoliberal closure (or simply murder). Bola?o is well-known, Ruiz less so. But in recent years, interest in his vast oeuvre has picked up. This is an essential collection about an essential but still under appreciated figure in modern Latin American and world film.-- (09/11/2017), This collection of eight carefully thought-out essays and three important interviews covers many aspects of Ruiz's prodigious production. It shows that Ruiz's work cannot be reduced to film-making, no matter how refined or avant-garde; that it is rather, from its modest beginnings to its end, a work on the image whose context is a generalized intermediality and whose thrust is the ongoing, ceaseless production of an image of thought of relentless originality and power. It is an essential supplement to critical bibliography on Ra?l Ruiz.-- (09/11/2017), This magnificent anthology goes much beyond the usual Ruiz - the man of exile, irony, surrealism, baroque, diaspora, the portrait of the young artist affiliated with Parra and Borges, or the late stylist of Proust. This book is a multifaceted account of Ruiz the relentless cinematic voyager, the profound philosopher of the image in the hour of new media. In as much, it belongs to aficionados and scholars across the world.-- (09/11/2017)

Ignacio López-Vicuña is associate professor of Spanish at the University of Vermont. He has published articles on Southern Cone writers and filmmakers, including Roberto Bolaño and Raúl Ruiz. His work has appeared in journals such as Latin American Research Review, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, and Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.Andreea Marinescu is associate professor of Spanish at Colorado College. She has published several articles on the relationship between politics and art in the works of Roberto Bolaño and Raúl Ruiz.