The Wandering Soap Opera
The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced the second part of the retrospective series 'Life Is a Dream: The Films of Raúl Ruiz,' which will take place February 9-18 in New York City. Following the first part in December 2016, the Film Society of Lincoln Center presents the next edition of an ongoing retrospective devoted to Ruiz, among the great visionaries in film history and perhaps its most intrepid explorer of the unconscious.
Arguably Chile’s most internationally renowned and prolific filmmaker, Raúl Ruiz completed over 100 movies in numerous national cinemas. His mind-bending works are obsessed with questions of theology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, and visual expression; wildly experimental and slyly humorous; surrealist, magical-realist, gothic, and neo-Baroque.
To see one of Ruiz’s films is to go on an adventure full of humor, intellectual curiosity, and artistic daring; to see several is to land on a new continent, where his many obsessions find their delirious expression in the most surprising ways and where reason and madness are delightfully, terrifyingly indistinguishable.
Part two features a weeklong revival run of one of Ruiz’s most beloved films, Time Regained (1999), a “sumptuous adaptation of the greatest modern French literary work, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time” (Richard Brody, The New Yorker). Back by popular demand after a sold-out afternoon show in part one, the film will screen in a new digital restoration. Other highlights include the North American premiere of The Wandering Soap Opera (1990/2017), a recently rediscovered relic edited and completed by Ruiz’s wife; collaborations with international stars like Isabelle Huppert (Comedy of Innocence) and John Malkovich (Klimt); and a host of rarities such as rights-locked Dostoevsky adaptation Fado, Major and Minor (1994), Mammame (1986), an experimental reproduction of a Jean-Claude Gallotta ballet, and many more.
