A Chilean Exilic Film between Iranian Surrealism and the European Alpha City: Raúl Ruiz’s Adaptation the Blind Owl (1987)

Upon having left Chile for France under the pressure of Pinochet’s military coup d'état, Raúl Ruiz adapted the The Blind Owl, an Iranian surrealist novel from 1937 into an eponymous film (1987). Half a century before Ruiz himself, Sadegh Hedayat—The Blind Owl’s author—had left his home country for Paris, though he did not complete his “Western” novel (celebrated by Breton) until he “re”-turned to India, east of Iran. If Hedayat’s work, with its commingling of separate stories and its curious blend of Western literary influences and Eastern Iconography, can already be seen as a commentary on cultural and aesthetic border-crossing, Ruiz’s film pushes this perspective to the n-th degree. In his film, the world would have come full circle in its diegetic Arabic filmtheater set in Paris, were it not for some very precise mismatches to prevent such closure. Although the editors of the Cahiers du cinéma were quick to embrace Ruiz as a master of avant-garde cinema, his adaptation of The Blind Owl remains mostly overlooked. With its exquisitely dense audiovisual layering, its plurilingualism and its intermingling strings of references, the film unfolds at a pace that is likely to elude comprehension.

I will analyze Ruiz’ film as an adaptation of Hedayat’s novel, trace how (id)entities in the film double, multiply, fold, and (ex)change, in order to raise the question whether his approach to adaptation across media and cultures could serve as a commentary on contemporary experiences of mobility and migration in European Alpha Cities like Paris.