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La noche de enfrente
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Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ Dedicated to the memory of artist/writer Paul Hammond (1948-2020) I
said you wanna be startin’ somethin’ Schiele:
“Death in life”. To live is to die. And to die is to live. To die
a little. But what is that little? Since life is holistic, a fragment
is also the whole. I. 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 (2012), Ruiz’s final completed feature as sole director, (1) the central action appears, for much of the film, to centre 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 parlour 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 parlour 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 centre of the movie, the crime to which everything else provides a scattered, obscured genealogy? Ruiz, especially in the last 15 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. 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. (2) Let me sprinkle the opening moves of several such journeys into La noche de enfrente. 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 – recognises 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 1997 short The Film to Come.) 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: 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 digital 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 Adamov was also 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 – which is a reminder of Ruiz’s lush adaptation of Giono’s Les âmes fortes/Savage Souls (2001). “Freely inspired by the tales of Hernán del Solar” (which Ruiz first read in 1999), says the credit of La noche de enfrente (not, as per the English 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 completely untranslated into English. (He was also the father of Ruiz’s close friend and collaborator, the mathematician Emilio del Solar.) It is too little recognised 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 attempted 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 (Sergio Schmied) 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? So, what we seek – by whatever route we can take – is less an interpretive key 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 realisation 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 sketched 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 ageing and sickness, or impending mortality – the biographical facts we are compelled to read into this “testament film” (a category that critics love too much, methinks). Ruiz
was not one for testaments; or else, like Don Celso, he was
fashioning them already, from earliest childhood. Or the only true
Testament is beyond us, anyhow, already written in the Book of Life.
Over the final credits, we hear the raw sound-take of a scene, and
Ruiz intoning “Cut!”. Is this sad? He always declared that to
him, “death was a working tool”, a poetics, and that every cut
was a productive instance of dying … As he pondered in his diary
(quoted at the head of this essay), the relation between death and
life is also the relation between the fragment and the whole – but
this relation is ever reversible. II. Some things never seem to start, and some things never seem to end. A refrain in the film, endlessly varied in its nominal subject, takes the form of: “It will happen tomorrow, or the day after, or maybe it has already happened”. This is the beguiling temporality of Celso’s death, extensively imagined, in a set of thought-experiment hypotheses, across the entire length of the film: it could suddenly happen, it may take a long time to happen, it may never happen – or it happened long ago, so it’s all over. The spectator waits for the thing to happen – or waits for the explanation of how it has managed to already happen, when we did not know it happened. Ruiz was fond of those passages in murder-mysteries where detectives just wait, passively (that’s about all they ever do in That Day, 2003), for signs of the truth to reveal themselves; or when they begin to declaim their baroque explanations of a suddenly, pre-emptorily “closed book” (the title of his ill-fated 2010 UK production). Ruiz was equally fond – on another social/fictional register – of empty speechifying (he must have sat through a lot of it), one recited speech (or poem or song) after another: the academic-seminar version of this (off which Carl Dreyer had already scored a king-hit in the ‘poet’s tribute’ gala in Gertrud, 1964) gets a work-out in another of his final pieces, Ballet aquatique (2011), just as it does in the closing stages of La noche de enfrente. Whatever the inspiration or the generic source, these are all modes of narrative delay: and no one could attenuate them like Ruiz. There is a gun that is used to commit a crime, a murder, a suicide, whatever, in La noche de enfrente. Generic object. After the event has happened, the gun goes on functioning in the film; it’s not just exhausted as a prop and binned off-screen. That would not be a Ruizian economy. In fact, either this gun grows to gigantic proportions, or the characters shrink to miniscule ones. Everyone we have come to know, it seems, can reappear down the barrel of this gun: a tunnel which frames, at one end, the last glimpse of the nocturnal world (night out the back), and at the other end the blinding white light of another world, an after-life. We even glimpse some new characters, extras who look like they are grumpily off to work, jostling past Celso and the cyclist, Ugalde (Francisco Celhay); we are told that they are “the memories of the pistol, or rather the barrel”. Don Celso also retires from his office job. This retirement is anticipated, discussed a lot. We wait and wait (for 67 minutes), thinking it may never happen (at least not on-screen), but we are eventually rewarded with a farewell dinner (perhaps Ruiz was remembering Edward G. Robinson at the start of Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street, 1944), in a superb five-and-half-minute sequence-shot which is an Ophülsian highlight of Ruiz’s cinema. Retirement is, in Ruiz’s imagination, a kind of “little death”, a prefiguration or metaphor for dying – a full stop that brutally divides active-working life from inactive-leisure years; it’s also like this in reality, for many people around the world, who find themselves rudely superannuated out the door at age 60 or 65. But hang on! When precisely does the demarcation-point of retirement happen here? Celso, we are told, retired long ago; even when he was working, he had retired – he mastered the art of doing nothing (a wonderful joke about bureaucratic office behaviour). “He never stopped leaving us”. Now, on the eve of retirement, he rehearses enigmatic hand gestures while sitting at his desk; he is Bartleby the Scrivener, the “immobile voyager” beloved of Continental Philosophy, with “many busy years of doing nothing ahead of him”. Endings: Ruiz’s films regularly, but deliberately, behave like those interminable Peter Jackson blockbusters that multiply their endings, or seem to be unable to satisfactorily conclude anywhere – always another loose end to tie up. Paul Hammond noted this tendency in Ruiz’s work as far back as 1983, in City of Pirates: “If Ruiz’s film palls in its compulsive retreading of trod ground, in its insistent miracle-working, it is because such desiring fictions are by definition interminable, and autonomous”. (3) There is a keen moment in the formal process of every “desiring fiction” to which Ruiz was especially attuned: what Frank Kermode described in literature as the “sense of an ending”, that first sign which speaks to our conscious or unconscious mind – via an image, a music cue, a change of rhythm – that the end is nigh, that everything is summing up and winding down. Wanna be endin’ somethin’. When Ruiz begins the fold that announces the sense of an imminent ending – when something returns that we have seen before, now as some kind of encapsulation or epiphany – we experience one of those specifically cinematographic emotions he so dearly sought. But then he folds and re-folds, finding different points (all cleverly established earlier) on which to end this ‘retreading of trod ground’. So, beginning about 20 minutes before the final black and the final sound of ‘cut!’, come the endings, announcing themselves with gravity or flair: the marbles; the empty classroom; another radio broadcast; the helicopter shots of the coast from the opening credits; the boarding house – opened up like a labyrinth, from one adjacent room to the next, The Shining-style; and the alarm clock ringing, ringing, like the telephone in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984) … What happens in that fuzzy zone between starting and ending, what fills out Ruiz’s films? La noche de enfrente offers an elegant demonstration of the sort of multi-level construction that quickly slips, slides, and loses its schematism. The first batch of scenes take us, in a smooth, clear way, through specific sites that are going to recur in the film: classroom, street (with back-projection), office, bar … plus a flashback, of sorts: to the young Celso, chatting with Long John Silver; later, his interlocutor is Beethoven. The introduction of the adult Celso’s narrating voice cues another structuring/triggering device: his radio broadcasts. Soon we will be floating freely between past and present, child and adult; eventually, our hero, in his after-life, will come upon Long John, Beethoven and Giono at a table: “Who do they think they are? I invented them. Now they do as they please”. The same goes for himself as a child, who slowly turns from remembered object to creating subject: as always in Ruiz, we reach the properly figural plateau where we can no longer tell whether the adult self is projecting backwards, or the child self is projecting forwards. We meet them both, as equals, in the middle of this psychic space – a space which, for this filmmaker, has precious little to do with purely individual, subjective memory. And this brings us to the vexed question of time. “Night Across the Street” is an attempt to capture in English translation the strangeness of the Spanish title, which does not mean “the coming night” (as it is subtitled during some dialogue) – it is not something up ahead in time – but something more like a physical block of materiality, right in front of you. As he proclaimed at the time of making his Proust adaptation, Time Regained (1999), Ruiz was deeply interested in scientific theories of time as a dimension, more than in its standard definitions as either duration (the Henri Bergson tradition) or as personal recollection (the couplet of time & memory so beloved in studies of Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, etc.). La noche de enfrente is devoted to physical images, embodiments, concretisations of time along such solid, dimensional lines: ships in bottles, marbles on the shore … Closing the eyes is another of those ‘little deaths’ we see often in Ruiz’s films. His characters are advised or directed to shut their eyes – not to sleep, but to be productive, active: to dream, learn, listen, imagine. They frequently move and carry out their tasks in an eyes-wide-shut trance (in his tribute video Responso [2004], Ruiz pictured even the legendary film festival director Huub Baals as constantly in this state, at his work desk). In La noche de enfrente, Giono’s language classes proceed with all students (including the old Don Celso) sitting, alert, with their eyes closed, answering no question which the teacher directs their way; and Long John Silver, likewise, guides the young Celso to shut his eyes in order to see a ship out on the wild seas. But
this clairvoyant kid cannot be fooled: “That
ship’s from a film. I saw it last Sunday”. MORE Ruiz: Dark at Noon, Shattered Image, Three Lives and Only One Death, Three Crowns of the Sailor, The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror, Of Great Events and Ordinary People, Mysteries of Lisbon 1. Ruiz’s productivity has continued well beyond the grave, however! Apart from Lines of Wellington (2012) directed by Valeria Sarmiento from Ruiz’s script, there has been a trilogy of ‘leftover’ films completed by Sarmiento and produced by Poetastros: La telenovela errante (1990/2017), El tango del viudo y su espejo deformante (1967/2020) and El realismo socialista (1973/2023). Still more recently, three films shot by Ruiz to accompany art exhibitions have been uncovered in the archives of the Centre Pompidou in Paris: Dalí (1979), Images de débats (1979) and the unfinished Déclaration d’intention. Une émission sur Öyvind Fahlström (1981). Publications by or about Ruiz have also multiplied since his death; I will mention here only the epic, 2-volume, indispenable Diario. Notas, recuerdos y secuencías de cosas vistas (Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2017), and the Viennale/Austrian Film Museum book accompanying its large 2023 Ruiz retrospective. back 2. An excellent and handy guide to several such interpretive procedures is provided by Michael Goddard, Impossible Cartographies: The Cinema of Raúl Ruiz (London: Wallflower Press, 2013). back 3.
Paul Hammond (1985), “City
of Pirates”,
reprinted online in Rouge,
no. 2 (2004), special Ruiz issue, http://www.rouge.com.au/2/pirates.html. back © Adrian Martin August 2013 / revised October 2023 |
