City of Pirates · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A bottle stands inches from the lens, swollen, out of scale, in perfect focus. Behind it, at the far end of a shuttered room, a woman is also in perfect focus, small, and no more important than the bottle. Nothing recedes politely into background here. That is the first thing City of Pirates teaches you, before anyone has murdered anyone: the frame is not a window you look through. It's a stack you read.

Deleuze called the frame a closed set. Everything inside it counts as information, and a filmmaker can treat that information as a system instead of a view. Most films manage the set on your behalf: focus tells you where to look, depth ranks what matters. Ruiz and his cinematographer Acácio de Almeida jam a candelabra, a banister, a plant, somebody's forearm into the near field and keep the far wall sharp anyway. You get every corner of the room and no instructions about it.

The story, such as it is. Isidore is a maidservant tormented by a voice that may be coming from outside her or from inside. A small boy turns up and tells her, without emphasis, that he has murdered his family. She takes him in. Later there is an island of pirates, and on it a man inhabited by several people at once. Approach this as a mystery and it gives you nothing; the questions of who did what, and which parts are real, are the wrong tools. Deleuze's two Cinema books help here not because they decode Ruiz but because they were written about the same problem he is working inside: what a film becomes once action can no longer settle anything, and time has to carry the picture by itself.

Start with the boy. He is what Deleuze calls a crystal-seed: a small foreign body dropped into a household, around which the whole thing begins to crystallize, the way a speck in a saturated solution suddenly makes the liquid grow structure. He doesn't cause a plot. He starts a reaction.

Then watch the doors. A character crosses a threshold and arrives in a room that cannot possibly be adjacent to the one just left. Scenes begin after their beginning and stop before their end. Deleuze's term for this is the irrational cut, or the interstice: the join between two shots is a gap rather than a link, and the gap does the work. Continuity editing makes a promise (this space touches that space, this moment follows that one) and spends a century keeping it. Ruiz and his editor Valeria Sarmiento hold a composition until it completes some private movement, then cut to an elsewhere and let the seam show. What accumulates isn't a place. It's a set of disconnected fragments, each with its own weather: shuttered villas, corridors, the hard silver light off the Portuguese Atlantic. Deleuze's name for such a space is the any-space-whatever, and its disconnected variant is exactly this — space that has stopped serving as a setting for action and become pure affective quality. Note that Ruiz was in Portugal because Paulo Branco could make films there cheaply. He took a country emptied of its own history and converted a budget constraint into a geography that doesn't exist.

The film moves by displacement, the way dreams move: repeat a gesture, relight a room, put the same sentence in a different mouth. Deleuze calls this circuit the dream-image, and its mark is that it can't be pinned to anyone's remembered past. A flashback is dated and owned. This isn't. And in such images the character often goes still while the world does the travelling — the movement of world. Isidore doesn't journey to the island. She is carried there, by the boy or by her own wish, and the film declines to say which.

The man on the island is the engine. Several people inhabit him at once, and the film never resolves them into one person with a history. These are not memories. They are contradictory presents, all current, sharing a body: what Deleuze calls peaks of present. The man is a forger in Deleuze's sense, a figure whose identity keeps shifting serially and who therefore produces truth rather than reporting it. Around him the whole film adopts falsifying narration, in which mutually exclusive versions are held as co-true instead of being ranked. Ruiz took the family romance — parent, sibling, murderer, lover, the murdered and the desired — and ran it as a combinatorial machine until every figure had occupied every position. Mirrors fold two spaces into one frame; a present and a reverie become genuinely impossible to tell apart. That indiscernibility is the crystal-image, and here it never cracks open onto an outside.

Sound does its own version of this. Because the dialogue was post-synchronized, voices could be given a different acoustic space from the bodies, detached, whispered from off-screen, assigned to the wrong speaker. A budgetary norm of European art cinema becomes the subject of a film about a man containing several people. Deleuze calls the general condition audiovisual disjunction, and he named the strongest case after Duras: voices-off cut loose from the bodies, image and sound telling two different stories that only meet across the gap. Jorge Arriagada's score seals it, lush and waltzing and archaic over material it has no business consoling. It works as a solvent, dissolving horror into reverie. Once an image can no longer be taken in at a glance and has to be deciphered instead, Deleuze calls it a lectosign — a readable image. Ruiz makes almost nothing but these.

Here's where it sits in film theory, and it's a sharp irony. Almeida's lens logic is Gregg Toland's on Citizen Kane: very short focal lengths, a looming object in the near foreground, floor-level angles that press the ceilings down. Bazin loved that deep focus because it kept the world whole and handed the viewer the responsibility of choosing within a real, continuous space. Ruiz keeps every bit of the ambiguity and removes the world. The other half of the inheritance is older and more mischievous: Méliès's substitution splice inside a frontally staged tableau, magic done in the camera with the seam left visible as part of the pleasure. Cocteau supplies both the disembodied poet's narration laid over images it doesn't quite describe (The Blood of a Poet) and the enchanted bourgeois house of Beauty and the Beast, which is the direct model for this seaside villa. Buñuel supplies the tone: in L'Âge d'Or, shot scale and eyelines behave impeccably while the content refuses to, which is why the boy can confess a massacre in the register of asking about supper. Dreyer's Vampyr supplies the rest — somnambulist performances, diffused light, a geography that will not assemble, voices wholly detached from bodies. Ruiz's invention is to run all of it at once, as a method rather than an effect, on a schedule of several features a year.

What did that do? It proved a feature could be organized by association, repetition and permutation instead of causality and still hold an audience upright for its full length. It also proved that the marvelous is not a purchase order. At exactly the moment the fantastic was becoming something an effects department sold you, Ruiz got his out of gels, mirrors, prisms held in front of the lens and available architecture. The descendants are hard to name as a school, and it would be dishonest to invent one; this film seeded viewers rather than a movement, surviving through cinémathèques, retrospectives, restorations and eventually streaming, with Sarmiento keeping custody of the work. Worth saying what it is not: the puzzle films that later trained audiences to hunt for the reveal are doing something else entirely. Ruiz has no reveal. The indiscernibility is the architecture.

So the voice that torments Isidore. Inside her or outside her? The film will not say, and Deleuze's whole argument is that this is not a withheld answer but the form itself. Watch it again and stop asking what room the door leads to. Watch what the door does to the woman standing in it, and notice that the bottle in the foreground has been watching her the whole time.