City of Pirates
| City of Pirates | |
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Film poster
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| Directed by | Raúl Ruiz |
| Produced by | Paulo Branco |
| Written by | Raúl Ruiz |
| Starring |
Hugues Quester Anne Alvaro |
| Music by | Jorge Arriagada |
| Cinematography | Acácio de Almeida |
| Edited by | Valeria Sarmiento |
| Distributed by | Gerick Distribution |
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Release date
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Running time
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111 minutes |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
City of Pirates (French: La Ville des pirates) is a 1983 French fantasy film directed by Raúl Ruiz. Made during Ruiz's most active and fruitful era of filmmaking, the film is considerably one of Ruiz' best works and exemplifies several recurring themes, motifs and elements of the Chilean director's style including surrealism, neo-baroque cinematography, deep depth of field, the ocean and piracy, childhood, mythology, navigation, dreamscapes, and schizophrenia.
City of Pirates was shot in Portugal with a primarily French cast in a period of only three weeks. The script was produced alongside the shooting of the film. Ruiz would write the script through a process of automatic writing, where he continually tweaked the script to fit scenes already produced. Michael Goddard notes that "Ruiz would write the script each day immediately after the siesta; hence, in effect, dream the script rather than writing it." Due to this writing process, it becomes evident that the film is heavily influenced from conceptions of dreams and their relationship to storytelling and the visual.
City of Pirates isn't a film that can be understood in terms of plot or plot analysis, as it doesn't have a particular plot in a conventional or linear sense. Commonly described of as a surrealist exposition and film fantastique,City of Pirates primarily follows a main character named Isidore (Anne Alvaro) through multiple episodes of non sequitur events and narrative points that, in themselves, operate in an allegorical and dreamlike nature.
The film begins with the text-card stating "Overseas Territories, one week before the end of the war", something that isn't further described or referred to throughout the rest of the film. This initiates a common theme of City of Pirates in which narrative events are set up and never fully followed through to a traditional conclusion. Michael Goddard describes this effect as the suppression of narrative, where "every shot has a suppressed, subtracted before and after that continues to play a role in a film despite not being perceived by the spectator." We are then introduced to Isidore while she is in the company of a step-father and mother who give her commands and boss her around.
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