„Imagine a totalitarian society. For some reason only one painting is allowed, and the only permissible artistic activity is copying this painting. Any variation, reinterpretation, or visual commentary on the painting is severely punished. Nevertheless, by mistake or perhaps for some political reasons, copying details is authorized. This freedom has led one painter to take one percent of the painting and blow it up one hundred times. At this scale, he has felt able to risk a slight alternation in point of view. In successive reproductions, the point of view varies slightly each time. The original fragment, a detail of the nose of the President (the only subject of the original painting), gradually slips from frontal view to profile. For years the painter works on hundreds of details each blown up a hundredfold, until he has exhausted his material. The painter dies and his disciples set out to reconstitute his material. Naively, they believe that by recomposing the totality of the fragments they will obtain a reproduction of the original painting from the original angle. In fact, the reconstitution proves impossible: there is not one realistic picture seen frontally, but hundreds of angles, giving the ensemble a cubist feel – and cubism, in this country, is highly illegal. But if every detail is put in a specific order and projected at a speed of twenty-four details a second, the result is a film giving the impression of a tour around the authorized face.”

Aus dem Kapitel „Images of Images” (S.44-45), in Raúl Ruiz‘ „Poetics of Cinema”. Übersetzt von Brian Holmes. ÉDITIONS DIS VOIR, Paris, 1995.

Raúl Ruiz ist tot. Geboren in Chile, seit Anfang der 70er in Paris, hinterlässt er hunderte Filme und Fernseharbeiten, Bücher und Projekte, die – wie in seinem Gleichnis oben – ein Portrait in Bewegung ergeben. (David Hudson hat auf Mubi erste Stimmen zu Ruiz‘ Tod zusammengetragen. Daniel Kasman weist dort auch auf Ruiz Meisterwerk THREE CROWNS OF A SAILOR von 1983 hin, der auf Youtube frei zugänglich ist.)

(Eingestellt von Christoph)