Inner Sage / Outer King gathers and assembles research material from the ongoing search for Ruiz’s unfinished film The Comedy of Shadows. Made for the Taiwan Biennale with collaborators in Paris and Taipei, the film features the painter Kar Siu Lee, poet Waldo Rojas, musician Jorge Arriagada and filmmaker Laha Mebow and is structured around readings of the original script and diary fragments by Ruiz together with photographs and video documentation of the original shoot in Taiwan in 1995.

“In one moment I fall into the expression in English inner sage / outer king. In this dichotomy the maximum aspiration would be contained, philosophy doesn’t search to know, it searches for happiness.” — Raúl Ruiz, Diary (Wednesday, March 8th, 1995)

“In Wind Water Ruiz stages a three-way dialogue between three great cultures: the West, China and Arabia. He imagines what might occur if Shih-T’ao’s six poetic procedures for attaining the primal respiration or cosmic breath in painting were applied to one of the flagships of Western art, Velazquez’s Las Meninas. Ruiz wants the three cultures to interact and test each other like the paper, stone and scissors of the children’s game. The result is an insoluble dispute, a différend. No reconciliation or compromise is possible between these cultural outlooks. If Shih-T’ao has the first word, inevitably the man from the West has the last. In between, the West Wind, speaking in Arabic, proclaims the other’s words to be nonsense, and declares that what we see in great art is the work of angels. But, in the end, these disparate discourses barely hold out against the filmmaker Ruiz, the man from the Americas, whose images portray a world in tatters. The figures in Las Meninas fly out of the frame, fragmenting any attempt to create the perfect harmony sought by other aesthetic approaches.” (Fergus Daly)

“I see obsessives everywhere, and I suppose I am one. I see only books about cinema. I open the Bible, it’s about cinema. I go to China, everything’s about cinema. Cooking book — about cinema. Wind Water is part of a series of films for TV in which filmmakers like Paul Schrader and Atom Egoyan explained a painting in four minutes. I chose Velazquez’s Las Meninas. It’s a sort of primitive animation narrated in French with voice overs in Old Arabic, Spanish for the dog in the painting, and Mandarin for the 18th century Chinese painter Shih-T’ao, who explains the painting and who wrote a treatise that I use constantly, ‘Reflections on Painting by the Monk Bitter Pumpkin’.” — Raúl Ruiz, Film Comment, Jan / Feb 1997.

In late 1982, Raúl Ruiz returns to his hometown in Chile for the first time since his departure following Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état. “Ruiz, rediscovering the things of his past in Chile ten years after the Coup, regards them now with the eyes of another world. This other world is cinema, the mechanical gaze of a Super 8 camera. This eye sees very deeply, even beyond reality and brute memory. Letter from a Filmmaker is the documentary version of a Ruizian fiction: a survivor returns to the land of the dead and discovers his doubles and phantom friends.” (Charles Tesson)

Raúl Ruiz shot this film on March 28th, 1971, during the big peasant march in Temuco, Chile, when the government of Salvador Allende passed its first law, granting full civil and political rights to the indigenous Mapuche Indians. Raúl Ruiz, then acting as a film adviser to the Socialist party in Allende’s coalition, listens to their stories which stand in contrast to the ideals of official government policies.

Double Ghosts takes as its starting point an unfinished film made by Raúl Ruiz in Taiwan in 1995. Based in Paris since the late 1970s, Ruiz came to Taiwan to film The Comedy of Shadows with a script inspired by the Taoist tales and parables of Chuang Tzu and Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. The project was filmed at Chin Pao San cemetery with a Taiwanese cast and crew but never finished. Double Ghosts considers the echoes of this unrealized project to explore cinematic and political phantoms, following traces across the Pacific from Ruiz’s birthplace in Puerto Montt to the mountain cemetery in Taiwan. Drawing on contributions from filmmakers Valeria Sarmiento and Niles Atallah as well as Chilote fishermen, the film is staged as a series of actions seeking to reactivate this lost film.