Monumental. What can one say about a work predicated entirely on the intangible relationship between dreams and nightmares? An adventure story turned into a surrealist evocation of internal, repressed psychic trauma reverberating across achingly beautiful, Argento-esque images and moody explorations of landscape, recalling both Maya Deren and Buñuel in its haunting, allegorical make-up. This is completely up my alley: elegiac formalism meshed with poetic digressions consisting of streams-of-consciousness reminiscent of late Godard, all wrapped within an unnerving and hypnotically assured atmospheric tapestry.

This was the first film I've seen from Raul Ruiz, but he displays a total mastery of space and off-screen sound; environments become increasingly abstract as we move deeper into a psychological reality manifested upon the walls, the…

Raúl Ruiz's style of surrealism consists of oddities so distant from any other surrealist or filmmaker, and perfecting this style to a point that Ruiz feels like he's pulling from your own dreams and memories. His structure is perhaps the closest to fully mindscaping through film, with shocking degrees of insecurity, fear, and humor feeling separated from any form of exterior interactions or realism. And yet these details of lighting, dialogue, shifts in mood and unbelievably bizarre choices in practically every regard is deeply and darkly personal. It's a fever dream of a film, but rarely do choices feel random or pointless. Emphasis on objects build a room, emphasis on color builds feeling, and emphasis on closeness and touch builds…

A film of blood and water. City of Pirates is extremely surreal, relying on its lack of sense and plot threads which never conclude. There is no city and no pirates. The dialogue is dense and abstract. Really City of Pirates is all about atmosphere, which is created through garish colours, unusual camera angles that draw attention to themselves, and ever constant music which seems to be always playing. Through this, the ocean is presented with the appearance of an alien world. The characters are lost amidst a nightmare of moral degredation and psychological repetition. The story, of police and lovers, is corrupt and perverse. A young boy and an adult woman embark on a relationship, because right and wrong…

Cinema reaching surreal grandeur. Celluloid history has now left one of its privileged high thrones for an alternate genius of breathtaking storytelling, armed with beautiful techniques: an editing and cinematography of Welles, the surreal brilliance of Buñuel and the artistic poetry of Cocteau. The result is an explosion of perfection in every sense, in every allegory, in every frame, in every orgy of images, in every shot of the sea as the central juggernaut of unavoidable attacks and psychological vibrations.

Five minutes after the last shot (the one with the shadow), I started to get red eyes and was on the verge of crying (literally). It also gave me difficulty breathing, because my heart was trying to get out of…

so much a film about loss, the machinations of grief paved along the line between dream and nightmare. the loss of a child, of course, but followed by a loss of self, too—alienation pushed so deeply inward as to foment bodily decay. 

no real need to dwell on Ruiz’s form here (though it became much clearer this time that everything is in service of something else), but i’m astounded that Alvaro’s performance isn’t discussed more often. beforehand, i’d viewed it as a valuable but not entirely essential complement to the aesthetics of the film at large, but now i see that it’s basically the foundation of the entire work. it’s a case of performance dictating image, and the way Alvaro…

still kind of reeling from a first viewing, but maaaan, that was something, so here's some extremely scatterbrained thoughts. it's a film that has a constant sense of amnesia at least within its visual/formal construction, dialogue, or both at the same time in the sense that any given moment is not at all dictated or caused by its preceding moment. in this sense the film is a joy to watch with Ruiz' imagination for surrealist visuals and absurdist situations unfolding one after the other.

it seems that there is somewhat of a consensus that the film is generally indecipherable or impossible to parse, and while I thought that Ruiz may have just been lining up one fever dream into another…

Raoul Ruiz’s notoriously indecipherable film more than lives up to its reputation. The film is out of the surrealist tradition stretching from Dali’s Perception of Memory through Gravity’s Rainbows, works so dense they by design resist interpretation. It’s difficult to ascertain the subtextual meaning when the textual story is this difficult to make ends of. Ruiz isn’t merely throwing bizarre imagery at the wall and seeing what sticks. Every bizarre image and scene in City of Pirates flows seamlessly into the next. It all feels organic and of a linear structure even when it can’t be understood in any traditional sense. The plot is difficult but we do get two lead characters and a child whose relationship convinces and adds…