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Mysteries of Lisbon
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There is something very classical about the beginning of each episode of Raúl Ruiz’s Mysteries of Lisbon: stately music by Jorge Arriagada, accompanying drawn illustrations of characters and scenes that provide a legend to the epic narrative to follow. But by far the most intriguing and charming detail of this modest prologue is, every time, its 21st century touch: the official URL (http://misteriosdelisboa.com/) for the 6-hour series and its shorter film version. A small but telling gesture that reaches out beyond the work itself – a magisterial work, in this case – and to its circulation and place in the worlds of art, culture, history and politics. Between classical painting and the chronicle-novel on the one side (antiquity), and the digital age on the other (post-post-modernity). It’s a common enough game; Tim Burton also plays it. But anchoring the game firmly between those poles, Ruiz holds down what is most essential: cinema (modernity). It’s the cinema-effect, the touch or charge of cinema, that makes Mysteries of Lisbon soar far above most current production in any medium. Was Ruiz drawn to the contemporary efflorescence of long-form narrative television? To the cult of The Wire, The Sopranos, Treme, Carlos and so many similar items of the past ten years? Maybe; after all, he watched everything, and was always on the track of the latest mutations. (When he was preparing a – unfortunately unmade – large-budget medieval saga in 2006, I found him in his apartment closely and avidly studying the digital effects in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings.) Yet dreams of the extended or infinite narrative have shadowed his œuvre since Day One; Manoel on the Island of Marvels (also in different serial and theatrical cuts) is a 1980s masterpiece of this kind, and let us not forget his too-rarely seen long-form creations for Chilean television since the turn of the century, such as the Chilean Rhapsody (2003), which boldly demonstrate the director’s desire to plant a tiny element in the first hour that will only, finally, be answered in the tenth or fifteenth hour. Viewers, pay attention! In many places today, we hear the already tiresome and suspect rehearsal of a certain, very bourgeois logic: that the wonderful gift of long-form narrative television is that it has returned us, in a single blow, to the Golden Age of the Nineteenth Century Novel! Such rich characters, such involved and involving plotting, such in-depth descriptive detail painting a world or a milieu! And yes, of course, Mysteries of Lisbon gives us all this, in fact superbly, overflowingly; but that is not all it gives us, and the usual seductive comforts of the immersive family-romance plot, spanning several generations, are slid across the table to us slyly, deceptively, with a Joker in the pack … What is suspect about the novel-to-TV spiel is the black hole left dead smack in its middle: from novel to TV (for all those fine folk who never want to leave their lounge-rooms), thus conveniently leaving out or indeed erasing the invention of cinema (and its 20th century). Cinema, which once upon a time took you out of your familiar home – and out of your familiar headspace, too. Cinema as the site of transformation and metamorphosis; not cinema as the reconstitution of a stable, singular fictional world (the type that classical novels make us yearn for). The radical ideal of cinema that Ruiz cannot ever let us forget. What about the other extreme pole of the world into which Mysteries of Lisbon falls, and which it shakes up? The digital age. Ruiz has always been into the possibilities of that, too. In 1993 he mused about the kind of new audiovisual object – midway between video game and art-piece – he was beginning to explore: a narrative, a staged scene, or simply a pure mise en scène – some bodies in a room, a space – which could be viewed (at the click of a mouse) from different angles. But each new view would – this being a Ruiz imagining – introduce a new distortion, a new strangeness into proceedings; each alteration would not be there to help reconstitute a given Euclidean space, but to multiply it, question it, explode it. Step by step, little by little. Again, the dream was not a new one within Ruiz’s trajectory: Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978), with its dolls and figures in tableaux vivants, already explored the notion of the scene in just this way. And that, too, was a television commission – TV being the cultural space where, in France or in Chile, with German or Portuguese money, Ruiz has managed to find a remarkably consistent margin of freedom in which to pursue his 1001 experiments. Here again, we can observe that Ruiz takes from this world, and even fully partakes in it – but also hollows out another, shadow-space which is not of that world. What is so striking about Mysteries of Lisbon, from moment to moment, is its very particular conception of mise en scène. This is the marvel of the work. Staging has always been, for Ruiz, an open or infinite question, something provisional, artificial, quotational, diagrammatic, hypothetical, swiftly and easily redrawn. Mise en scène as a matter of parameters that are set out and then tinkered with, floor plans and game plans, open at every second to the philosophical and artistic outside that is opened by montage, by the soundtrack, by associative logic (as in the underrated Klimt, 2006). The opposite, in other words, of mise en scène as dramatic expression, as hyper-coherent world-making, underlining the articulations of a plot and the psychology of fictional characters – which is what almost every other long-form tele-narrative is currently doing, on its triumphant march back to a cosy fantasy of the 19th century. The central stylistic figure of Mysteries of Lisbon is the lateral camera movement that takes us fluidly, from room to room, without a cut – often back and forth, many times, over several minutes in a single unbroken take, as characters appear and disappear, fight and love … Conventional pleasures are not absent from these shots, or indeed from any moment or level of Mysteries of Lisbon, which is one explanation for its surprising commercial success in several countries; there is story, there is drama, there are characters we strive to keep up with as their destiny is revealed to us, out of strict chronology, from episode to episode. Novelistic pleasures, indeed, sort-of-faithfully derived (by Ruiz and screenwriter Carlos Saboga) from the source material by Camilo Castelo Branco. (Ruiz is at once the most inventively faithful and the most slyly treacherous of all literary adapters, as I have argued elsewhere.) Indeed, there are powerful moments and passages – the greatest number of them gathered in Episode 4, for me the highest point in Ruiz’s entire career – where the interplay of mise en scène as parametric diagram and the elaborations of tortured melodramatics reach the level of a Visconti or a Minnelli at their finest. But the ever-tracking camera – in its unusual pacing, in its regard, in its questioning and its distance – also, in the same gesture, takes us out of the immediate fiction, and across and over the sinuous structure of the work as a whole: its quiet (not baroque, for a change) ironies and convolutions, its many unanswered questions, its suggested but unexplored possibilities and complications, its muffled jokes … With Mysteries of Lisbon, Ruiz has managed to completely transform Classicism from right inside its aesthetic, cultural and emotional heart. And, equally, he enriches the often banal game-space of digital culture. I haven’t said much yet, in this short account, about the specific plot details, the characters, the vaulting moves and transformations in Mysteries of Lisbon. I am incapable of doing so after a single viewing, however absorbing and enthralling, however much fun it was, from 6pm to well after midnight one fine, unforgettable day at the Rotterdam Film Festival. I don’t yet understand even half of its plot, and what I did understand I have already half-forgotten, find it hard to put back together coherently or meaningfully. That’s part of what will make me, and many others, want to watch the full series again and again, just as we watched Lynch’s Twin Peaks (which is a far closer approximation, in cinema-TV terms, to Mysteries of Lisbon than any current acclaimed tele-narrative.) In fact, I am the ideal viewer of this work – not because I am a rabid Ruizian (which I surely am) – but in just the way that Ruiz declared himself the ideal screen adapter of Time Regained (1999): because, the moment he got to the end, he realised he had forgotten it all. And the re-viewing of Mysteries of Lisbon, like Ruiz’s painstaking recollection of Proust, is the same act and process that Rainer Werner Fassbinder set free, paroxysmically, in the finale of that other great cine-tele-novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz: the dream of a dream of a novelist’s vision, projected through cinema and then concentrated onto a TV screen, at each stage utterly reworked and then layered (for we lucky spectators) as a palimpsest at once elegant and murky, affecting and mysterious … to which Ruiz and his willing collaborators add yet another tricky level of culture and media: that URL. At the very end, in its ultimate dream of a dream of Castilo Branco, Mysteries of Lisbon reaches back just over a decade in its auteur’s œuvre and, suddenly and unexpectedly, mutates into Time Regained as reworked (and regained) all over again: select images and narrative fragments are replayed as the feverish projections, layered to infinity, of a sick young man – which those bracketing diorama views have been preparing us for, secretly, all along. Not that Mysteries of Lisbon is any sort of simple mind-game puzzle with a revelatory twist at the end (although Ruiz has often quoted and toyed with that handy form, in Three Lives and Only One Death [1996] or The Comedy of Innocence [2000]). Far more profoundly, no fan of this director can miss the nakedly personal, autobiographical force of this ending – since it caps off a work bracketing a time in which Ruiz began to squarely face his own mortality. But, even at its most melancholic, cinema is the realm of immortality, of the phantoms that walk and change and never die: that is the magic and mystery of the movies, and of the century that once contained them in its modernity. Raúl Ruiz, at the dawn of another century, finds a new and dazzling way to reopen the infinite adventure of modern cinema in his brilliant Mysteries of Lisbon. MORE Ruiz: Dark at Noon, Shattered Image, That Day, Three Crowns of the Sailor, The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror, Of Great Events and Ordinary People, La noche de enfrente © Adrian Martin March 2011 |
