Raoul Ruiz

n Raoul Ruiz, film director and writer. Born: 25 July, 1941, in Puerto Montt, Chile. Died: 19 August, 2011, in Paris, aged 70.

The Chilean-born film-maker Raoul Ruiz made around 100 films in a career spanning half a century, won a slew of international awards and worked with stars of the calibre of John Malkovich and Catherine Deneuve, so it was an enormous coup for Aberdeen University to secure his services as professor of film and modern thought four years ago.

Ruiz was inspired by his visits to Old Aberdeen to write a new version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which he had hoped to shoot there, possibly with John Malkovich (even though the American star had already played the role in the Hollywood movie Mary Reilly, which also filmed on location in Scotland).

Ruiz was a highly prolific filmmaker who made the most of the new, cheap digital technology. He was generally developing several projects at once, and Jekyll and Mr Hyde never made it in front of the cameras before his death in Paris, following complications from a pulmonary infection.

Born in 1941 in the port of Puerto Montt in the south of Chile, Raoul Ernesto Ruiz Pino came from a family who for generations had made their living as sailors and fishermen. His father was a steamship captain.

Ruiz came from the Chilean middle classes and went to university to study theology and law. He wrote plays and then started making short films, sharing a single camera with a group of other young would-be film-makers. Shorts led to features, including Tres Tristes Tigres (Three Sad Tigers), which portrayed the lives of ordinary Chileans and won the Golden Leopard award for best film at the Locarno Film Festival in 1969.

Ruiz was married to Valeria Sarmiento, with whom he worked on films in Chile in the early 1970s. She became his regular editor, but was also a noted filmmaker in her own right.

Palomita Blanca (Little White Dove) told a human story centred on the strains within Chilean society following the election of Marxist president Salvador Allende in 1970.

Allende was killed in a US-backed military coup in 1973, followed by widespread arrests, torture and killings. Ruiz, a prominent Allende supporter, was forced to flee and settled in Paris.

He enhanced his international reputation with L’Hypothese Du Tableau Vole (The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting) in which an art collector minutely examines a series of six paintings, hoping they might hold the clue to a seventh painting, which is missing. The paintings are living tableaux, populated by real people.

Ruiz drew on the fabulist traditions of Latin American literature and his films were often bizarre and challenging for viewers.

But he became the darling of European cinema’s avant garde. Regularly feted at Cannes, he worked with many of the Continent’s greatest stars, including Catherine Deneuve, who appeared in Genealogies d’un Crime and his 1999 period drama Le Temps Retrouve, an adaptation of Marcel Proust’s classic novel.

Le Temps Retrouve, which was released in the UK as Time Regained, was one of Ruiz’s most widely seen and most accessible films. It also starred Emmanuelle Beart and John Malkovich, with whom Ruiz also worked on Les Ames Fortes (Savage Souls) and on Klimt, a biopic of the famous Austrian artist Gustav Klimt and one of the few films Ruiz made in English. Ruiz and Malkovich had reportedly been due to start shooting a fourth feature film together this month.

In recent years Ruiz had also returned to Chile and used digital video technology to make films there.

Latterly he managed to straddle the divide between on the one hand arthouse and local films and on the other hand comparatively big international movies, with star names. In a single year he made Klimt on a budget of $15 million and a film in Chile for $100,000.

Ruiz has been the subject of several retrospectives at festivals and detailed academic and critical study, but it is only comparatively recently that his films have received a commercial release in the UK. Le Temps Retrouve, Shattered Image, an English-language thriller with William Baldwin, and Klimt all made it beyond the festival circuit.

His appointment at Aberdeen University came about through his friendship and association with Alberto Moreiras, who was the university’s professor in Hispanic studies and modern thought.

Ruiz said: “I like to teach my position in the cinema, which is a position of an outsider, not because I am out of the industry, because I work in the industry, but outsider in the sense that I don’t want to stay in the mainstream. I prefer to make the art/craft films, and then go back to the industry, this kind of pendular movement.”

He is survived by his wife Valeria Sarmiento.

BRIAN PENDREIGH