Two famous Ruiz films are available on DVD through Blaq Out Cinema. They both consider the hidden meanings of images and their significance.

A narrative written out of art critical theory and history, presented as an art collector takes a floating narrator/POV through recreated tableaux of a painter’s oeuvre, including an argument that a painting is missing in the middle of it. Particularly, the collector asks you not see the images as merely symbolic or the serialization of them as merely development, but to look at how the compositions themselves lead the viewer through a sort of chronology.

A group of Catholic monks make a movie in 1948 and 1968. This pastiche cut of the two movies back and forth shows their struggles with representation in painting, statues, cinema, texts, and other methods of art and communication on their beliefs; lying under the surface is a crisis of faith and a conflict between two sects, but it’s hard to follow as Ruiz dispenses with continuity and narrative structure altogether, preferring to lay out the discussion as a series of individual struggles of consciousness and faith.

–DB