From the French company Blaq Out:

THREE FILMS BY RAUL RUIZ on March 16

Three cult films by Raul Ruiz on an NTSC 2-DVD set:

THREE CROWNS OF A SAILOR (1983), the most "Wellesian" of Ruiz's films

THE HYPOTHESIS OF THE STOLEN PAINTING (1979), a must see.

SUSPENDED VOCATION is based on the novel by Pierre Klossowski, which relates the investigation of a young priest taken amidst the quarrels of different factions in the Catholic church.

Also included: two 30-minute interviews with Raul Ruiz.
Optional English and Spanish subtitles will be available on the films and special features.

are these available for pre-order?

Fantastic news! I'm not a huge fan of Suspended Vocation, but I'd welcome the chance to see it again. The other two are a couple of the greatest and most original films of their time.

My limited experience with BlaqOut has been entirely positive, so this could be the release of the year!

Very good news indeed! I've long wanted to see Suspended Vocation, and Hypothesis is one I've wanted on my shelf for years. I'm going to have to check into this label's other titles....

is there a web site or something with this info and/or other info on titles by this label?

Blaq out's website. They have also a real shop in paris which I was meant to check last time I was there, but forgot.

Too bad the French DVD of City of Pirates doesn't have English subs, and too bad Blaq Out isn't including this one as well.

With shipping, the 3 Ruiz films set comes to almost $70 (calculating the Euro to $ exchange rate) from the blaqout web site. Anywhere else this can be had for cheaper?

Amazon France has it for €40, I doubt shipping to the US will be €30

$55.95 at xploited. lol

What a fun set! r0 and NTSC, strangely. I've watched a little of each, and I can't wait to get further into them.

Quality looks really good, on the whole. I'm not sure how THREE CROWNS OF A SAILOR is supposed to look (here it looks a little saturated and not terribly sharp, as if it had been blown up from 8 or 16 mm), but it seems watchable. All 3 films are 1.33:1. If someone reveals those aren't correct aspect ratios I'll be considerably less joyful, though.

It's a delight seeing these films again.

Three Crowns of a Sailor is quite different from my memories of it (from a dim, distant single viewing nearly 20 years ago). In my recollections all I could remember was the luxurious extravagance of the visuals. I had forgotten just how cheap and seat-of-the-pants it all was. For a venerable cinematographer, Sacha Vierney sure was game, tackling such a visually ambitious film on 16mm, shooting through broken glasses and whatever was at hand.

Responding to feihong, Three Crowns does have that extraordinary look - foggy, flary, filtered - deliberately. Just seeing the weird shifting colours and distortive blurring brought that initial viewing experience sharply back into focus.

As with that first viewing, I'm finding the film developing in my head well after watching it a second time. As with the even more masterful City of Pirates, Ruiz creates an imaginary world bound by unstated rules, and much of the fun of the films lies in trying to infer those rules (e.g. the nature of the ship, the meaning of the money ritual) and join up the dots. His wacky 'adaptation' of Treasure Island is more like a game played according to rules derived from Stevenson's book, and L'Oeil qui ment seems to me to bear a similar relationship to Dracula. There's a vestige of this approach to his ultra-Proustian rendition of Time Regained.

Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting is just as breathtaking as when I first saw it. Ruiz and Vierney's collaboration here is another triumph, albeit in a completely different form. It's possible to see this visually as an answer film to Vierney's Last Year at Marienbad. One of the greatest pleasures I get from art is the satisfying click you experience when deciphering a great, complex work of art, like Mirror or Pale Fire, and this is a film that celebrates that sensation. It's about the process of decipherment while also providing the pleasures associated with it (oh, that wonderful moment when the hands of the models start to trace their circles!). This is the movie Peter Greenaway's been trying to make for quarter of a century.

Haven't got to The Suspended Vocation yet. It was my least favourite of the three, but I'm extremely curious to see how ti strikes me now.

The extras - two long interviews - are superb. Ruiz is personable and erudite, and the Three Crowns interview is full of essential tidbits. Who would have guessed that the extraordinary ultra-deep-focus effects he uses in the film (and his films thereafter) were inspired not by Orson Welles, but by Milton Caniff!? Now there's a satisfying click of aesthetic revelation!

is the AE "Time Regained" r2 dvd worth picking up? I was just looking for more mastroianni films to add to my catalog, and noticed this was directed by Ruiz.

By the sound of it, neither the AE R2 or the R1 are hot. If you're a gambler you might want to try the French R2 (available at Alapage) though I imagine you'd want this edition for the film, not for Marcello... :

. . . especially since he's not in it.

But it does have Marcello Mazzarella...

Yeah, what the hell, Vincent Price and Catherine Keener aren't in it either, but it's a masterpiece, so who cares?

Mazzarella is terrific, I thought, though have only seen him in this, and the impressive Placido Rizzotto.

Absolutely. His comparative obscurity (particularly in the company of that cast) certainly aids his uncanny merging with the character, who in turn is obliged to uncannily merge with the author. Yet another example of Ruiz finding a cinematic means of representing an essential, elusive element of the work he's adapting.

Hmm.... he died a few years before, so he can't be can he?'

As much as I wish my first ever post on this wonderful forum wasn't a boring grovel for info, I'm afraid that's what the fates have in store.

I've been looking for this edition of "Time Regained" since I first saw the film on Kino's DVD (not a terrible transfer, but non anamorphic). And I've never been able to find it. Even on eBay. I checked alapage, but unless I'm mistranslating, it's not available there either. (Or is it?)

If anyone knows where this Proust-obsessed fellar can get the one truly wonderful adaptation of his work to film, I'd be forever in your debt. Or if you happen to have a copy that you might be willing to trade for the right disc or the right price, please let me know...

Three new French issues/reissues, all with optional English subtitles:

CE JOUR-LÀ

GÉNÉALOGIES D'UN CRIME

TROIS VIES & UNE SEULE MORT

Unusual packaging on these editions, by the way. No box as such, just a wodge of white foam with a clear plastic sleeve.

Facets will be distributing a domestic release of Blaq Out's Three Crowns of a Sailor (which also includes the 30-minute interview) later this month. There's no mention of the other two films from the Blaq Out set...maybe someone else is holding onto the U.S. rights for those?

I've just recently gotten into Ruiz through the excellent BlaqOut double-disc set of three of his films (The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting, Three Crowns of a Sailor, and Suspended Vocation). I'm now looking for some more good (and English-subbed) Ruiz to check out next, though it appears that his DVDs are few and far between, and scattered hapharzardly as far as what regions and countries they appear in. I just placed an order for the French DVD of his 1996 Three Lives and Only One Death, which also features a late-70s short film. I notice the same company (Gemini) released the 1997 Genealogies of a Crime, but it appears to be OOP -- is the film worth tracking down? Or, alternatively, is the US release from Strand any good?

Anyway, I've also found the small list below. I'd appreciate any comments on the quality -- both of the DVDs and of the films themselves. They all seem to be more recent films and I'm a bit skeptical. Any additions that I've missed would also be very welcome. It's always a bit disheartening to come across a very exciting director who I'd never watched before, only to discover that most of his vast filmography is utterly unavailable.

That Day (Ce Jour-la) (2003) - Kino, US R1
Comedie de l'innocence (2000) - Artifical Eye, UK R2
Time Regained (1999) - Artificial Eye, UK R2
Shattered Image (1998) - Lions Gate, US R1
Genealogies of a Crime (1997) - Strand, US R1

Absolutely do not miss Time Regained, available in R2 from Artificial Eye. A masterpiece.

Time Regained is absolutely unmissable: a miracle of adaptation and one of the few films I know which is even better if you've already read the source novel (which is the entirety of Recherche, not just the final volume - this is one of the keys to the film's brilliance).

Comedie de l'Innocence is a fine, ludic film. The Carriere influence is very strong and Ruiz is quite restrained, with most of the flamboyance being conceptual: the film starts out with a completely absurd / impossible premise which it then follows through with meticulous logic. The Artificial Eye disc is fine.

L'Oeil qui ment (which I think was rendered in English as Dark at Noon) may also be available on VHS if you hunt around. It's a wildly wacky film in Ruiz's phantasmagoric City of Pirates / Three Crowns / Treasure Island mode (though I think it's less successful than those three). It involves travel into a strange region where miracles have become yawningly commonplace (not another apparition of the Madonna!) and seems (to me) to be playing on different historical conceptions of a controlling deity. Plus it riffs on Bram Stoker's Dracula the way that Treasure Island riffs on Stevenson. As befits its title, it's jam-packed with visual non sequiturs.