Raoul Ruiz

Films of Raoul Ruiz:

• The Blind Owl (La Chouette Aveugle) - Raoul Ruiz (1987)

“The Blind Owl” - Raoul Ruiz (1987)

The Blind Owl (La Chouette Aveugle, 1987) is a French film by noted Chilean director Raoul Ruiz.  The prolific Ruiz (1941-2011), who directed more than 100 films in his career, fled Chile in 1973 after the coup d'état led by dictator Augusto Pinochet and settled in Paris, where he became something of a cult figure among the intellectual cineastes there.  Ruiz’s preference for making low-budget, but intellectually complicated and obscure, films suited their tastes, and in fact he once said that he liked to make films that

“would have to be seen many times, like objects in the house, like a painting. They have to have a minimum of complexity.” [1].

And certainly The Blind Owl is a good example of Ruiz’s penchant for obscurity. 

The film was loosely based on Sadegh Hedayat’s famous Iranian novella Boof-e Koor (The Blind Owl, 1936), which itself is dark and cryptic.  But Ruiz complicated things further by only adapting certain parts of Hedayat’s work and by also incorporating elements from the 1624 Spanish drama El Condenado por Desconfiado (Damned for Despair) by Tirso de Molina (Gabriel Téllez) and by introducing his own ambiguities.  The result is almost a game of complexity, and this will only appeal to the tastes of some viewers.  In fact noted French film critic Luc Moullet, who did like the film, remarked that

“I’ve now seen The Blind Owl seven times, and I know a little less about it with each viewing.” [2]

(There was an earlier, Iranian-made film of Hedayat’s novella that was directed by Kiumars Derambakhsh, Boof-e Koor (1975), and which was more faithful to Hedayat’s original text.  See also my review of another Iranian film based on a Hedayat story – Dash Akol (1971), directed by Masoud Kimiai. [3])

In fact I don’t believe that Ruiz’s film of the story even has a coherent plot, and instead it offers merely a sequence of suggestive fragments that were inspired by Hedayat and that point to the complexities of human experience at the existential level.  In this respect, even though the film only very loosely follows Hedayat’s novella, it might be best to begin our discussion there.

Hedayat’s work starts with what apparently is a horrific nightmare of a man who is visited one evening by a dark and beautiful woman.  She silently enters his room and gets into his bed, but before long the man notices that she is dead.  For obscure reasons he cuts her corpse up into pieces that he puts into a trunk and then meets an eery and repulsive old man who may be his uncle and who offers to help the man bury the trunk.  All of this is told by a narrator whose obsessive and repetitive phraseology suggest that he is insane.

In the second part of Hedayat’s work, the narrator, still obsessed but here immersed in an ordinary world, talks more about his tortured married life with a woman he loves but calls “the whore”.  She sleeps with a wide variety of lowlifes but won’t let him even kiss her on the cheek. 

The weird and ambiguous plot elements of Hedayat’s Boof-e Koor have induced a wide variety of interpretations, some associated with social issues at the time (the novella was published in Bombay in 1936 when Hedayat spent a year there, and it was banned in Iran).  But I would say that the core themes underlying the tale are far more elemental and lie at the heart of human existence – inner guilt, fear of death, and loneliness.  Hedayat conjures up these feelings with constant references to acrid tastes and smells and repugnant images of decay and deterioration.  These innate concerns are overlain with the deep mysteries of life that are somehow mysteriously embodied by woman.  And this is all connected with the horror of having one’s core, essential personhood rejected (when the rejection is by a woman, the denial is more fundamental) and its associations with the fear of annihilation.  In short, there is a pervasive ambience of fear, anxiety, and depression, but also of a compulsive attraction (to the feminine mystery).  An example of Hedayat’s imagery concerning the feminine mystery is the following passage, which refers to the narrator’s mother [4]:

“They were slanting, Turkoman eyes of supernatural, intoxicating radiance which at once frightened and attracted, as though they had looked upon terrible, transcendental things which it was given to no one but her to see.  Her cheekbones were prominent and her forehead high. Her eyebrows were slender and met in the middle. Her lips were full and half-open as though they had broken away only a moment before from a long, passionate kiss and were not yet sated.  Her face, pale as the moon, was framed in the mass of her black, disheveled hair and one strand clung to her temple.  The fineness of her limbs and the ethereal unconstraint of her movements marked her as one who was not fated to live long in this world.  No one but a Hindu temple dancer could have possessed her harmonious grace of movement.”

Hedayat’s expression of these themes predate Sartre’s La Nausée (1939) and Camus’s L’Etranger (1942), but they lie at the core of Existentialist artistic concerns (and may have even directly inspired later authors).  Ruiz, I would say, drew inspiration from Hedayat’s existentialist themes and used his plot elements only as instruments to create his own cinematic form.

In this film by Ruiz, there are also two parts, but their connectedness and coherence is even more mysterious than in Hedayat’s novella.  In particular Ruiz introduces and extends complications associated with the mixture of identities – sometimes the identities of separate characters in the story are merged or mixed.  Things are even more complicated by the fact that there is a mixture of multilingual and multicultural overlays involving French, Spanish, and Arab (hence Muslim) cultures. 

The first part of the film is directly inspired by the first part of Hedayat’s novella and involves a nondescript young Frenchman (whom, for brevity, we will refer to as the “hero”) getting a job as a projectionist at a Parisian movie theater that shows Arabic-language films.  He works with a mysterious and sullen co-projectionist, Kassem, who hides his disfigured face by always wearing a balaclava that covers everything but his eyes and mouth.  Both the hero and Kassem have boarding rooms at the cinema, so they spend much of their time there.  Kassem’s beautiful girlfriend, Fatima, is also shown, and she has some friendly interactions with the hero.

The hero almost never watches the Arabic language films that he projects, but on one occasion when he happens to glance at the screen, he becomes transfixed by the sight of a beautiful and scantily-clad court dancer.  This woman later emerges from the film and comes to the hero’s room, gets into his bed, and silently dies – similar to the sequence in Hedayat’s story.  Also gruesomely following Hedayat’s narrative, the hero cuts her body into pieces, and with the help of an old man who appears and claims to be his uncle, puts the body pieces into a trunk and looks for a way to bury the corpse.  They eventually manage to cast the trunk into the river, but there are later disturbing images of the girl’s body parts floating in the stream.

The second part of the film moves further towards an immersion into the Arabic films that are being projected at the theater and that are apparently set in Cordoba Spain. There are two intermingled narrative threads in this section – one concerning a man whose job it is to behead sinners (not a part of Hedayat's story), and another thread about twin brothers who are madly in love with the court dancer (this second thread is derived from Hedayat’s tale). 

As the story progresses, there is further mixing of the outer story and the film-within-a-film elements.  There are also further identity mergings and confusions:

• Fatima and the court dancer seem to merge identities at some points
• The hero,’s alleged nephew, whose identity also appears in the film-within-a-film, at times merges his identity with that of the hero.
• The hero’s identity also sometimes merges with that of his nasty old uncle.

All of these identity interminglings may remind us that our personal identities are essentially known to us only by the narratives we naturally construct about our experiences during the course of our lives.  We also intuitively construct narratives about the people we encounter, and these identities are, since they are our own constructions, also secondary parts of our own identity.  So Ruiz seems to be suggesting that these identity constructions can sometimes be mixed and confused within us.  We never really know who we truly our, and we only cling to these self-constructed narrative fragments to identify ourselves and others. 

However, I don’t entirely go along with the above, somewhat intellectual, assessment.  I think we always have some existential (i.e. phenomenologically primordial) certainty about our own conscious identity and our sense of personal autonomy.  This sense of personal identity is more fundamental than the schemata we construct that structures what we know about ourselves.  Nevertheless, these narrative notions are tied to the film’s ultimate message or experience.

The fundamental problem with this film is that the overall narrative scheme is not compelling.  The individual narrative fragments, though sometimes bloody and gruesome, don’t come together  into an intuitive and unifying narrative journey.  This problem contrasts with Hedayat’s tale, which does have a hypnotic narrative continuity.  We enter into the narrator’s consciousness in Hedayat’s story, but we don’t get into a sympathetic or empathic relationship with Ruiz’s hero.  The hero in Ruiz’s film is relatively passive, and I was unable to develop any feeling for what the hero wanted – his external world is there, but his internal feelings, desires, and directions are blocked from  us.

There are scattered fascinating images, though, and these seemed to be enough for Luc Moullet [2]:

"And rarely has a film’s ending provided such a succession or simultaneity of contradictory elements – mixing the extremes of pessimism and joy – or a summit quite so bewitching and extravagant. This finale is part of what makes The Blind Owl French cinema’s most beautiful jewel of the past decade.”

Not having yet, myself, seen the film seven times, though, I have, despite its fascinating inspiration, much more moderate feelings about its overall virtues.
★★½

Notes:

1. Carole Ann Klonarides, “Raul Ruiz”, BOMB Magazine (Winter, 1991).    
2. Luc Moullet, “The Blind Owl”, (excerpted from Trafic, no. 18, Spring 1996), Rouge Press (English translation, 2004).   
3. The Film Sufi, "’Dash Akol’ - Masoud Kimiai (1971)”, The Film Sufi, (12 April 2017).   
4. Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl (1937/1957), (English translation by D. P. Costello),  Grove Press, New York, pp. 26-27.

“Little White Frock”, AHP, Season Three: Episode 39 - Herschel Daugherty (1958)

“Little White Frock", the final episode of  Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 3 (1958), is a quieter and more contemplative drama than the usual offerings of this series.  Based on a story by Stacy Aumonier and scripted by Stirling Silliphant, this episode was directed by Herschel Daugherty.  The story centers around how the emotive expression of heartfelt feelings can affect  us and evoke our sympathies.  It also concerns the nature of playacting.

The tale begins with newly emerged star playwright Adam Longsworth (played by Tom Helmore), along with the play’s director, having difficulty with the casting of his latest play that is set to open soon.  Later at a cocktail lounged he and the director are approached by an elderly, formerly well-known stage actor Colin Bragner (Herbert Marshall), who hasn’t appeared on stage for years.  The meeting is cordial, but Longsworth suspects Bragner is buttering him up in hopes of getting a part in the upcoming play.  Nevertheless Bragner insists that Longsworth and his wife Carol (Julie Adams) be his guests for dinner that night.  Despite Adam’s resistance, Bragner manages to convince Carol to accept the invitation.

That evening as they are chatting over drinks, the Longsworths notice a little white frock draped over a chair, and Bragner launches into a long story about it.  It turns out that the frock is associated with Bragner’s long lost love, back when he was an emerging star actor.  Bragner’s tale is intricate and ultimately tragic – a story of dedicated and unfulfilled passions.  The emotional flavor of the telling is immeasurably aided by the soothing, dramatic tones of actor Herbert Marshall’s famously mellifluous voice.  The Longsworths are moved to tears by Bragner’s sad account.  At the end, though, we (and the Longsworths) learn that there is a surprise twist concerning Bragner’s tale.

There is an interesting multi-level aspect to this narrative:

• Level-0.  We could say there is a ground level – the real world that we occupy along with Hitchcock’s dramatic performers and production staff.
• Level-1 is the base fabula world evoked by the production.  This is the world inhabited by Bragner and the Longsworths.
• Level-2 is the fabula world created by Bragner when he tells his story.

We the viewers are aware of all three levels, but we are moved to suspend our disbelief in these fabula worlds as we enter them.  This is the business in which the fictional Adam Longsworth and Colin Bragner are engaged. It is also the business in which the Hitchcock production staff are engaged, and requires even more subtlety when the multiple levels are involved.

Note that Hitchcock’s TV episodes often feature a fair dose of malice.  There is often a murder; or if not a murder, a death; or if not a death, then a crime.  And these episodes also often have disturbing endings.  The “Little White Frock” episode is an exception to all this.  There are no murders, deaths, or crimes..  And the story concludes with a happy ending.  Remember this if you are looking for a relatively more upbeat Hitchcock TV tale.

★★★½

“An Unlocked Window”, TAHH, Season 3: Ep. 17 - Joseph M. Newman (1965)

Perhaps the finest, and my personal favorite, of Alfred Hitchcock’s TV productions was “An Unlocked Window” (1965), which was Episode 17 of the final year of Hitchcock’s anthology TV series The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-65).  It is certainly one of the most spine-tingling horror features that I have seen, and this effect is attributable to the show’s diabolical narrative structure.  It operates in the fashion of an unknown and invisible spider slowly encircling its increasingly helpless prey and moving in for the kill.  We know that the “spider” is out there, but we don’t know where it is or even what it is.  In this sense it is a true horror film.

Of course this being a Hitchcock presentation, we can expect that there will be a case of misidentification of an important character and that there will be some sort of twist at the end of the tale.  Those elements in this context are intrinsic to the film’s horrifying outcome.

Veteran director Joseph M. Newman, in the last year of his career, directed the show.  James Bridges’s script was based on a story by English author Ethel Lina White, whose well-known novel The Wheel Spins (1936) had earlier been the basis for Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938).  And the music is furnished by Bernard Herrmann. The show’s star is Dana Wynter, whose most memorable film role was in  the harrowing tale, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

The plot does have a “red herring”, which is oftentimes an artificial plot element intended to mislead the viewer and is not usually an element in great stories.  In this case, though, the red herring is something of a metaphor for one of the story’s themes, and its use is justifiable on this occasion.

The story begins starkly.  A pretty nurse is shown walking home one evening and being strangled to death by a psychopathic murderer.  This, we learn from the news report, is only the latest crime of a still at-large serial killer who preys specifically on nurses with “pretty necks”.   Then the scene shifts to an old mansion in the countryside where two nurses are attending to a young wealthy gentleman who is bedridden with some kind of lung disease that requires the use of an oxygen tent.  Also living in the mansion is a married couple who attend to the grounds, the cooking, and the housekeeping.       

Since the serial nurse killings have all been committed in a general area of the city that includes  the mansion, the nurses are justifiably worried and take precautions by making sure that all the mansion’s doors and windows are securely locked tight.  So the younger of the two nurses, Stella (played by Dana Wynter), goes down to the basement to check that the windows there are all locked.  But she is frightened by seeing a mouse and runs back upstairs, thereby forgetting to attend to the last cellar window.  Throughout the rest of the story, there will be occasional cuts to a shot of the open, unlocked window, reminding the viewer that there is a neglected hole in their defense that may come to have dire consequences

But since there are five people in the house, they should be reasonably safe.  In addition to Stella, there is the older nurse Betty Ames (T. C. Jones), the caretaker Sam Isles, the housemaid Maude Isles (Louise Latham), and the bedridden young owner Glendon Baker (who seems to be on the verge or recovering his health). The focalization, though, is on the pretty Stella, and she is the one we are worried about.

As the story unfolds, however, it seems as though there is a noose slowly tightening around Stella’s neck.  In this respect note that whenever we are faced with a fearful situation, we take for granted that we are not completely alone – there are ordinary resources, infrastructure, and people that we can count on to operate in their customary ways.  Step by step, though, the support structure around Stella begins to unravel.  This leads to a growing sense of isolation and enclosure.

Stella is a caring and sympathetic young woman, and her beauty and manner has even attracted the amorous attentions of the handsome and wealthy Mr. Baker.  He vows to marry Stella as soon as he regains his health.  But we know from the unlocked window that Stella can sometimes overlook things, and another instance of that apparently appears when senior nurse Betty discovers that they have an urgent need for a new oxygen tank for Mr. Baker.  Betty scolds Stella for having forgotten to order a new tank, and then Sam is dispatched to go out that evening to town and bring back a backup oxygen tank.

Later a thunderstorm develops outside, and this leads to an electrical fault that apparently blows all the fuses in the house.  Now they are without electricity and pitched in darkness.  The maid/cook Maude, who up to this point had appeared to be loud and opinionated, has been drinking whisky to calm her nerves.   But the alcohol and her heightening fears get the better of her, and she starts to rave like a maniac.  Betty recommends that they give her a sedative injection to put her to sleep.

Now it is just the two nurses and Mr. Baker.  Stella runs upstairs to check on Baker, but he is unconscious (or worse).  Their telephone line is cut, too, and there is immediate evidence that a strange man, presumably the killer, is approaching the house. 

The lethal noose is tightening, and we are set for the chilling climax.  What makes all this work is the dramatic pacing and atmospheric mise-en-scene – achieved by expert acting, cinematography, and editing – that contribute to the ever-increasing sense of enclosure.  We gradually sense that all of Stella’s escape routes are being cut off, one by one.  The killer, still unseen, is all the more terrifying, because he is only left to our imagination.

All in all, it constitutes one of the most frightening horror dramas ever.
★★★★

“Change of Address”, TAHH, Season 3: Ep. 2 - David Friedkin (1964)

“Change of Address” (1964) was an episode (Season 3, Episode 2) of the popular TV anthology series The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-65).  This episode was directed by David Friedkin and scripted by Friedkin and Morton Fine based on an Andrew Benedict story. Interestingly, the musical score was provided by Bernard Herrmann.  As usual, it featured performances by major screen figures in the lead roles. And of course also as usual, it bore the famous Hitchcock earmarks of a suspenseful tale with a twist at the end.

The story concerns a middle-aged couple, Keith (played by Arthur Kennedy) and Elsa (Phyllis Thaxter) Hollands, who have just leased a beach house in fashionable Malibu, California.  The couple seem to have independent means, so this appears to be a lifestyle move, and their anticipations concerning those prospects are decidedly mixed.  Keith, seeking to recapture his fading youth, sees the home as providing an opportunity for adventure and new socializing with the trendy crowds that frequent the beach.  But Elsa, longing for the tranquility of their old homestead, hates the new setting.  When she looks out from their new apartment over the vast wavy ocean, she sees only wild turbulence and loneliness.  She also tells her husband that she thinks there is something eerily wrong with the new house and urges an immediate return to Philadelphia and stability. 

It soon becomes evident to the viewer that the Hollands’ marriage is teetering.  Keith has a roving eye, and his gestures of affection towards his wife are grandiose but phony.  In fact the more we see of Keith, the more evident it is that he is a complete egotist and has concern only for himself and his standing among pretty young women.  Elsa quietly senses this absence of affection from her husband, and she cannot conceal her growing unhappiness.

As an expression of his treasured sense of manliness, Keith fancies himself as a handyman, and he soon begins digging a deep hole in the cellar in an effort to improve drainage in the house in order to reduce the prevailing feeling of dampness.  Any viewer familiar with Hitchcock’s macabre tales can’t help wondering what other use this hole might soon be put to.

Meanwhile Elsa is embroiled in efforts to find a way to break their lease so that they can move out of the odious (to her) house.  She learns that the owners from whom they are leasing the house, the Wilsons, used to live in it, but Mrs. Wilson left her husband, and Mr. Wilson then moved away to Seattle.  Elsa wants to get in touch with the Wilsons, particularly with Mrs. Wilson, in order to learn more about the history of the house and perhaps about possible things wrong with it.

While she is doing this, Keith is busy cultivating a budding amorous relationship with a pretty girl (Tisha Sterling) he finds on the beach, who seems susceptible to Keith’s pseudo-manly boastfulness.

Things don’t look setup for a happy ending, and indeed what turns out doesn’t work out for anyone.  The twist at the end is interesting, but it is something I anticipated early on, and you will probably do the same.  Indeed the closing twist could have been better presented, and too much time is spent on Keith’s obnoxious, self-centered preening. Arthur Kennedy’s performance in this regard is energetic but lacks subtlety.  More nuanced and human is the performance of Phyllis Thaxter as Elsa.  Her worried and concernful visage is what sustains our sympathies throughout most of this tale.

★★★