Friday December 5, 2025 | 3:45PM-4:45PM

Greenleaf Conference Room (1st Floor, Jones Hall)

Book Presentation Abstract

This presentation is part of a book project devoted to the archives of exile filmmaker Raúl Ruiz, who made over one hundred films in Chile, France, Portugal, Germany, and the United States, among other places. Ruiz’s status as a key figure of world cinema has kept on growing after his death in 2011, with an endless proliferation of “rediscovered” films, writings, and media installations—a direct result of an archival constellation conditioned by exile. The book examines the nature of archival collections shaped by exile as well as on the possibilities of a film historiography that foregrounds scatteredness as its fundamental precondition.

In this talk Palacios focuses on Ruiz’s tenure as co-director of la Maison de la Culture du Havre (MCH) between 1985 and 1989. To tell this story he rely on MCH catalogues and on a series of archival documents that detail the fraught process of Ruiz’s election as artistic director in partnership with executive director Jean-Luc Larguier, together with their plan for the institution and its execution over four years.

His main purpose here is to dissect the mode of production of MCH as a studio lab that mixed film, video, dance, and theater, and as a meeting hub for likeminded artists like filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira and choreographer Jean-Claude Galotta. In doing so, he expands on questions of labor and collaboration scattered across Ruiz’s archival documents, centering on Ruiz’s role as a “cultural worker” favoring a unique understanding of the creative industries based on marginality and experimentation.

Presenters

• José Miguel Palacios (California State University Long Beach)

• Masha Salazkina (Concordia University, chair and discussant)