![across the street across the street](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VNFhtxeAdtY/T5V_BqsJJHI/AAAAAAAAAQI/jqX45D8XSX8/s1600/JWH+Flag+Pole+004.jpg)
As anyone who’s ever dozed off unexpectedly will attest, conscious thoughts have a habit of dissipating, like smashed atoms, whirligig fashion, as they collide with the beachheads of the unconscious mind.
ACROSS THE STREET FREE
The short definition of surrealism, as practiced in the cinema from Buñuel onward, is the artistic free transit, back and forth across such borders, namely the one dividing our dreams and waking lives. Brightness and color latitudes are strained to their breaking points, but Ruiz’s sense of empowerment, earned many times over since his earliest experiments, characterizes these fissures with a sense of happy-go-lucky defiance that’s not only thrilling, but is also thematically significant. Shooting in high-definition digital video, as he did with Mysteries of Lisbon and Nucingen House, Ruiz, like Michael Mann, is fearless in foregrounding the un-filmic qualities of video if it means achieving effects (and there are many different kinds of effects in his arsenal) that are uniquely breathtaking or tactile in the digital realm. This being Ruiz, that’s only the tip of the thematic and narrative iceberg. Around him orbit characters from his real life, his memories, his fantasies, and the zones between the zones. He also carries an alarm clock in his pocket, to remind him to take his meds. Robinson in Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street, minus the emasculated home life that leads him to double as a painter and pine for a younger woman. Celso is a compact gentleman in a coat two sizes too large, and his gently put-upon status at the office (a Melville-esque office that gets no customers, but seems to have something vaguely to do with shipping or shipbuilding) recalls Edward G. Whereas Cocteau played himself in Testament of Orpheus, Ruiz casts veteran Chilean actor Sergio Hernández as Don Celso Barra, his on-screen surrogate, a slightly demented old man on the eve of his retirement. In this case, Ruiz has made a variation on Jean Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus: the auteur bidding himself goodbye, and guessing correctly that we’ll celebrate his imagination and passion from our theater seats. In almost all cases, the director either lives on for some time after his last work (like John Ford and Howard Hawks), while others leave us rather abruptly (Yasujirô Ozu and Pier Paolo Pasolini), casting their swan songs in a rather circumstantial light. Not all departed auteurs are able to make use of those conditions.
![across the street across the street](https://images.thenile.io/r1000/9780718189259.jpg)
It’s also a final film in the specific sense of Ruiz designing the larger part of it around a metaphorical contemplation of his own, imminent demise. Not surprisingly, unlike Lines of Wellington, which was prepared by Ruiz but directed by his widow, Ruiz-ness dominates every aspect of Night Across the Street: conceptually, structurally, aesthetically, you name it. Night Across the Street is the second of two 2012 films yielded from his posthumous estate, and the only one for which he actually sat at the helm. It’s a bit crass to suggest that new films by the late master Raúl Ruiz are appearing like posthumous Tupac B-sides, but conclusive data on what’s still to come remains sparse.