KLIMT

March 30-31, April 1-2, 5
Fri 7:00, Sat 9:00, Sun 7:00, Mon 9:00, Thu 7:00

Director: Raoul Ruiz // Cast: John Malkovich, Saffron Burrows, Stephen Dillane // Austria/France/Germany UK 2006 // 97 minutes // 35mm // In English, German and French with English subtitles

VANCOUVER PREMIERE // VANCITY THEATRE EXCLUSIVE

Far from a classical historical biopic, Raoul Ruiz's unique take on the life of famed art nouveaux symbolist Gustav Klimt-here played by one John Malkovich-treats fin-de-siècle Vienna as a vibrant, lively painting waiting to be immortalized.

During the 1900 World Exposition in Paris, the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt met Lea de Castro. To him she seemed like a fantastic muse, the personification of his heroic ideals and his carnal desires. The film focuses on the artist's passion for the woman, his fight for creative freedom, his tireless battle for new forms of expression, and Vienna's reaction to the social and artistic spirit that swept the city between the late 1800s and the early 1900s.

"This film is not a linear biopic of the life and times of Gustav Klimt. It is more a fantasy, or, if you like, a phantasmagory. Rather more like one of his paintings, in which material and imaginary figures blend and spiral around a central point: the painter Klimt. I intend to draw on the unique stylistic characteristic of Klimt's artwork, the prevailing beauty, excess of colour, spatial distortion and complex angles in order to bring to life and illuminate one of the riches, most contradictory and eerie epochs in modern history." -Raoul Ruiz

Ruiz sees Klimt's life as something deeply personal that can only be understood through the painter's own eyes, and forges a feverishly stylish portrait of erotic deception and delusion, coming and going from Klimt's death bed, through his studio, and into smoky Viennese cafes and high society.

"The time portrayed in the film was one of the highlights of Viennese culture, which had burst onto the scene very quickly and in which the first seeds of decay were evident almost straight away, since such brilliance rarely lasts. We have Klimt, his private life, the world around him in all its splendour, but in the background we feel something malignant that quietly gains prominence, something contagious."-Raoul Ruiz

Raúl Ruiz (born July 25, 1941) is a Chilean filmmaker and one of the most prolific filmakers of the last 50 years. He was trained as a painter. He spent some years at the University of Santa Fe, Argentina's cinema school. Back in Chile he directed his first feature films in the the late sixties and early seventies. He was somewhat of an outsider among the politically oriented cinematographers of his generation such as Miguel Littin and Helvio Soto, his work beeing far more ironic, surrealistic and deeply experimental. In 1973 he left Chile and settled in France. After several years producing and directing low-budget telefilms, his career took off in 1996 with Three Lives and one Death, starring Marcello Mastroiani followed by Genealogies of a Crime (1997) starring Catherine Deneuve and Time Regained (1999)