The Thinking Machine 10

Resonances - City of Pirates & Time Regained

Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López reflect on the art of filmmaking in monthly video essays.

“Vicinity and resonance come together to intensify a cinematic emotion that we find hard to name”. In Volume 2 of his Poetics of Cinema, Raúl Ruiz speculates on how every film often resembles other films: in obvious ways (such as genre), but also on the basis of more mysterious resonances or echoes. It is as if each work actualises some piece of what is possible or virtual in another work … This was certainly true of Ruiz’s own cinema: between City of Pirates in 1983 and Time Regained in 1999, there is a surrealistic ‘communicating vessel’ that explores sensations of memory, time and fluidity; and a mise en scène of bodies, voices and movements.