Poetics of Cinema: Miscellanies

Rating:
Summary: ESSENTIAL READING FOR CINE-TRAVELERS
Review: A collection of writings from Raul Ruiz, maker of 100+ (yes, that's one hundred plus) feature films.

The first paragraph of the preface offers the itinerary: "Here is the first of the three volumes which together will compose this poetics. They will be of no great value to film buffs or professionals. I wrote them with an eye to those who use the cinema as a mirror, that is, as an instrument of speculation and reflection, or as a machine for travel through space and time." The book is comprised of seven chapters derived from lectures with titles like "Images of Images" and "For a Shamanic Cinema".

This is a book I return to again and again, picking up and reading at random; a style of reading most appropriate to the form of Ruiz's writing (vertiginous; anecdotal).

I especially recommend this book to those who have a niggling intuition that the pursuit of new cinematic narrative forms is the source of their fascination with the medium. A bracing and original compilation of ideas about "alternate means of travel".

Rating:
Summary: A (Hidden) Treasure Chest of Mind Games; Much Beyond Cinema
Review: If you have seen any of his films (especially recent work such as Three Lives and Only One Death and Time Regained) you will recognize that he is not only a compelling, puzzling filmmaker, he is also a particularly cunning one.

He is also, if this book is any guide, a magnificient speaker/writer using no less cunning to persuade you of a number of astoundingly "unsound" things about cinema beginning with a repudiation of "central conflict theory" and with it most of western cinema since the rise of Hollywood in the first half of this century.

Obscure and, given his constant return to works like Don Quixote, HIGHLY DUBIOUS as many of his references are, I didn't myself feel out-classed intellectually but rather, given the humility of the writing, was thankful for being introduced to so many unfamiliar ideas/writers/thinkers. I has delighted to find him, at the forefront of Art Cinema, to tease more often than self-aggrandize.

Be prepared for Ruiz to draw quite a bit from Medieval and otherwise pre-modern Christian theology to paint unique pictures not only of film itself, but of existence in a world of images. And, worth the energy you put it, don't neglect the final few chapters where Ruiz builds an argument for the type of cinema he makes.

And be prepared, like I am, for his claims to a second and third book of Poetics to be, perhaps like certain other "Ars Poetica", another elaborate, referential fiction. If there ARE future books, however, I will purchase each and every one.