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CANTOS 9-14
by Raul Ruiz
Ruiz’s treatment of Cantos 9-14 of the Inferno is typical of his work. His background setting is Santiago de Chile, and his characteristic juxtaposition of the quotidien reality of the city and its people with carefully-staged cinematic passages, sliced through with his grotesque and extreme images of surrealism, achieves a heightened reality in which the everday becomes as bizarre and disturbing as the wilder manifestations of his imagination. As a depiction of Hell, the films main strength lies in the dreamlike atmosphere of normality and the familiar transformed, like a thin skin which is stretched to tearing and through which intimations of the inexorable horrors of the Abyss are visible.
Called by one critic “the best known unknown film-maker in the world”, and by another “the phantom of the cinema”, Chilean-born Raul Ruiz has created a body of work of quiet fame. Living in self-imposed exile, Ruiz works, of necessity, in foreign countries, the madcap metaphysical lands he cinematically imagines are essentially foreign – strange, eerie and uncanny; he is the supreme visual stylist. At the same time playful and rigorous, his films tend to confound expectations by combining genres and disparate influences, playing with fiction and non-fiction and ending as Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, “somewhere left of the stratosphere, indulging in a kind of freefall of the imagination that puts his initial premises through kaleidoscopic transformations.”
Raised in a family of sailors, Ruiz studied law and theology and became a noted avant-garde playwright in his twenties, before entering the film world as a scriptwriter and editor. He went on to produce, write and direct films throughout South America, rising to Head of Allende’s film office before his local career was cut short by Pinochet’s coup in 1973. His first feature film, Three Sad Tigers, won the Grand Prize at the Locarno Film festival in 1969. In 1974, Ruiz settled, more or less, in Paris and made over 40 features and shorts in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. While Ruiz has participated in international filmmaking, it is in France where his films, like Colloque des Chiens (1978), which won the French Cesar Award for best short, Les Couronnes de Matelot (1982) and La Ville des Pirates (1983) have gained the most attention.
It is also in France where his talents have found expression in theatre and television. Since the late 1970s, he has collaborated with the Institute Nationale de la Communication Audiovisuelle (INA) to produce a series of innovative television works, including his Petit Manuel d'Histoire de France (1979). In 1983 he was commissioned by the Avignon Festival to direct and film various theatre works, and in 1986, he was appointed director of La Maison de la Culture in Le Havre, where he has produced films himself and encouraged the work of other artists. In 1989/90 he was the Visiting Professor of Film at Harvard University, and whilst in the States, made his first American feature, The Golden Boat, in collaboration with writer Kathy Acker, Jim Jarmusch, Vito Acconci and musician John Zorn. Inspired by American police TV shows and soap operas, the film follows an aged street assassin and a young rock critic on their adventures through the surreal labyrinths of New York City's streets.


CANTO IX: After some hindrances, and having seen the hellish Furies and other monsters, the poets, with the help of an angel, enter the city of Dis, wherein Dante discovers that the heretics are punished in tombs burning with intense fire; and he, together with Virgil, passes onwards between the sepulchres and the walls of the city.

CANTO X: Dante, having obtained permission from his guide, holds discourse with Farinata degli Uberti and Cavalcante Cavalcanti, who lie in their fiery tombs that are yet open and not to be closed up until after the Last Judgement. Farinata predicts Dante's exile from Florence, and shows him that the condemned have knowledge of future things but are ignorant of what is at present passing unless it be revealed by some newcomer from earth.

CANTO XI: Dante arrives at the verge of a rocky precipice which encloses the seventh circle, where he sees the sepuluchre of Anatasius the heretic, behind the lid of which, pausing a little to make himself capable by degrees of enduring the fetid smell that steamed upward from the abyss, he is instructed by Virgil concerning the manner in which the three following circles are disposed, and what category of sinners is punished in each. He then inquires the reason why the carnal, the gluttonous, the avaricious and the prodigal, the wrathful and gloomy, are not punished within the city of Dis. He next asks how the crime of usury is an offence against God; and at length the two poets go towards the place from whence a passage leads down to the seventh circle.

CANTO XII: Descending by a very rugged way into the seventh circle, where the violent are punished, Dante and his guide find it guarded by the Minotaur, whose fury Virgil pacifies and they step downwards from crag to crag; till drawing near the bottom, they see a river of blood wherein are tormented those who have committed violence against their neighbour. When these strive to emerge from the blood, a troop of centaurs, running along the side of the river, aim their arrows. Three of the centaurs challenge the two poets at the foot of the steep, and Virgil persuades one to carry them both across the stream. During their passage, Virgil tells Dante about the course of the river, and those that are punished therein.

CANTO XIII: Still in the seventh circle, Dante enters its second compartment, which contains both those who have done violence on their own persons and those who have violently consumed their goods. The first have changed into rough and knotted trees in which the harpies build their nests, the latter are chased and torn by black mastiff bitches. Among the former, Pierro delle Vigne is one who tells Dante the cause of his having committed suicide and how the souls are transformed into those trunks. Of the latter crew, Dante recognises Lano, a Siennese, and Giacomo, a Paduan; and lastly a Florentine, who had hung himself from his own roof, speaks to him of the calamities of his countrymen.

CANTO XIV: They arrive at the beginning of the third compartment of the seventh circle. It is a plain of dry, hot sand, where three kinds of violence are punished; namely, against God, against Nature and against Art; and those that have thus sinned are tormented by flakes of fire, eternally showering down upon them. Among the violent against God is found Capaneus, whose blasphemies they hear. Next, turning to the left along the forest of self-slayers, and having journeyed a little onward, they meet with a streamlet of blood that issues from the forest and traverses the sandy plain. Here Virgil speaks to Dante of a huge ancient statue which stands within Mount Ida in Crete, from a fissure in which statue there is a dripping of tears, from which the streamlet, together with the other three rivers are formed.

Cast: Fernando Bordeu, Francisco Reyes
Producer(s): Kees Kasander
Director(s): Raul Ruiz
Format: Colour
Region: All
Classification: 18
Running Time: 80 mins
Studio: RM Associates
Download Size: 724.56 MB