Ruiz's career began in the avant-garde theater where, from 1956 to 1962, he wrote over 100 plays. Although he never directed any of these productions, he did dabble in filmmaking in 1960 and 1964 with two short, unfinished films. In 1968, with the release of his first completed feature, "Tres tristes tigres," Ruiz, along with Miguel Littin and Aldo Francia, was placed in the forefront of Chilean film. A committed leftist who supported the Marxist government of Salvador Allende, Ruiz was forced to flee his country during the fascist coup of 1973. Living in exile in Paris since that time, he has found a forum for his ideas in European TV. His first great European success came with "The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting" (1978); a puzzling black-and-white film adapted from a novel by Pierre Klossowski, constructed in a "tableaux vivants" style that tells the enigmatic story of a missing 19th-century painting.
Influenced by the fabulist tradition that runs through much Latin American literature (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, and Alfonso Reyes have all been cited as influences), Ruiz is a poet of fantastic images whose films slip effortlessly from reality to imagination and back again. A manipulator of wild, intellectual games in which the rules are forever changing, Ruiz's techniques are as varied as film itself--a collection of odd Wellesian angles and close-ups, bewildering p.o.v. shots, dazzling colors, and labyrinthine narratives which weave and dodge the viewer's grasp with every shot. As original as Ruiz is, one can tell much about him by the diversity of his influences; in addition to adapting Klossowski, he has been inspired by Franz Kafka ("La Colonia Penal" 1971 is a Chilean reworking of "The Penal Colony"), Racine ("Berenice" 1984), Calderon ("Memory of Appearances: Life Is a Dream" 1986), Shakespeare ("Richard III" 1986), Robert Louis Stevenson ("Treasure Island" 1985), Orson Welles (whose "F For Fake" is a precursor of "The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting "1978), and Hollywood B movies (Roger Corman was executive producer on "The Territory" 1983). Like Godard (whom Ruiz names as an early influence and who also owes a debt to B films), Ruiz makes no differentiation between the "high art" of Racine or Calderon and the "low art" of Roger Corman.
Unfortunately, only a handful of Ruiz's films are available for viewing in the USA, and it is on these few films that his reputation here is built. The few works that are available, however, bear witness to the genius that informs his entire body of work.