Généalogies d'un Crime posted by Darren at 2:41 PM

My interest is officially piqued. From the IMDb plot summary:

At her son's funeral, Solange, a lawyer famous for losing hopeless cases, agrees to defend René, her son's age, accused of murdering his wealthy aunt, Jeanne, who's part of the Franco-Belgian Psychoanalytic Society, known for odd views and methods. She reads Jeanne's journal, documenting René's criminal tendencies. Solange believes him innocent, manipulated into the murder or framed. Odd psychiatrists turn up, including Georges Didier, who runs FBPS, and his rival, Christian, who believes crime originates in a story's taking hold of a person.

When I asked the friend who recommended Généalogies if he had any advice for our screening, he said, "Just sit back and enjoy. Don't get too wrapped up in keeping all the details straight (and there will be a lot!); it all comes together anyway." From a quick scan of Internet resources, the general consensus seems to be that Ruiz fits somewhere along the line of surrealists that includes Luis Bunuel and Jacques Rivette.

Rivette, in particular, is often compared to Ruiz, and they appear to share a co-writer, Pascal Bonitzer. Bonitzer is also a film theorist whose readings of Hitchcock I’ve found of some use in the past. (His essay, "Hitchcockian Suspense" in Slavoj Zizek’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) is good stuff.) So anyway, the film should prove interesting visually, and it will likely direct our discussion into the realm of psychoanalytic criticism. Or not.

Ruiz is ridiculously prodigous, knocking out 91 films since 1960 (when he was 19) and 26 since 1990. His latest project is a biography of Gustav Klimt starring John Malkovich, which is scheduled for release next year. Ruiz is also a writer and critic. Here's a blurb from Adrian Martin's "Ruiz in the '90s":

Narrative gaps constitute true Ruiz territory. He is the cinema's greatest poet of discontinuity, of black holes, empty spaces and alarming fissures riddling every story. Ruiz likes to muse a lot, in interviews and in his marvellous 1995 book Poetics of Cinema, about how there's always something hidden and mysterious, a hidden piece, an interval, between every shot and the next in a movie. Even within a single shot, funny things happen in his films: images are split down a fuzzy, almost imperceptible line in the middle of the screen so that, for instance, we might see Mastroianni sitting down and drumming his fingers at the dinner table in the left of the shot, and in the right, a view of him in a mirror showing him doing something similar, but just slightly, nigglingly different.

In the immortal words of Arte Johnson, "verrrry interesting.