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Fierce, committed and above all, tough — these are the words that collaborators use to describe producer Robin O’Hara, a longtime fixture of the New York independent film scene, who died suddenly last week after complications from cancer treatment.

When O’Hara’s business and life partner Scott Macaulay of Forensic Films posted the sad news on Facebook last Wednesday, hundreds of prominent filmmakers, former crewmembers, and friends from across the independent film world offered an outpouring of condolences, remembrances, and testimonies about O’Hara’s importance in nurturing their art and their careers.

As “Saving Face” director Alice Wu wrote, “She was brilliant and mercurial and hilarious and terrifying. She gave no fucks — unless she did give a fuck — and then she gave everything. Anyone who has been lucky enough to be in her orbit never lets go. She pushed us all … and we became better people.”

Echoing Wu,...

NEWSRaoul Coutard shooting BreathlessThe great cinematographer Raoul Coutard, legendary for his work shooting Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, and also a collaborator of Philippe Garrel, Nagisa Oshima, Costa-Gavras and François Truffaut, has died at the age of 92.Keep film alive! The New York non-profit film organization Mono No Aware has launched a Kickstarter to fund "the nation's first ever non-profit motion picture lab." An ambitious and worthy goal!Two film projects in the works we're very excited about: Claire Denis' High Life, starring Robert Pattinson and Patricia Arquette and co-written by Zadie Smith, and Leos Carax's Annette, a musical to star Adam Driver (everywhere these days!) and Rooney Mara.The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced the first part of its retrospective devoted to exiled Chilean fabulist Raúl Ruiz, which will include new digital restorations of Bérénice (1983) and The Golden Boat (1990), as well as 35mm prints of such...

The Ifp’s Independent Film Week’s Filmmaker Conference kicked off today, beginning with a case study of Beasts of the Southern Wild and ending with a conversation, moderated by Ifp Executive Director Joana Vicente, between producer and Killer Films head Christine Vachon and producer, screenwriter and Focus Features CEO James Schamus. Below are 12 tips from the latter event — advice aimed at producers and, in some cases, anybody else, from two veterans with deep, decades-long roots in the independent community.

1. Consider producing. Christine Vachon and James Schamus are producers, but they both remembered a time when they were not. Christine talked about working various crew positions in the ’80s New York indie scene, and James recalled starting out and realizing that people needed “someone to go out and ask for money.” Schamus remembered that time as a period when everyone wanted to be “artistic.” “Christine and I just decided we wanted to make stuff,...

Above: A TV Dante (1991).

Below you will find the original language enteries for Notebook's series of commentaries and remembrances on Raúl Ruiz, entitled Raúl Ruiz: Blind Man's Bluff. Links are provided for the English-language translations by David Phelps.

Plus: Bonus, untranslated article by Cristián Sánchez Garfias, Klimt y La Muerte Recobrada, at the bottom of this post!

Recuerdos Chilenos

Había recién llegado a Nueva York a fines de los 90s, estaba completamente perdido, superado por la experiencia de tener que mutar, de dejar de ser solamente chileno para entender esta multicultural y devoradora ciudad, cuando me encontré con una raída copia en VHS de ‘On Top of the Whale’, un ovni cinematográfico que, además de dejarme aún más descolocado, me tuvo 5 minutos llorando de la risa. En medio de todo aquello que le daba vida esta enigmática cinta, aparece una de las vociferadas - o chuchadas, como dicen en Chile- más notables,...

Above: Le film à venir (1997).

Notebook is unfurling a series of tributes to Raúl Ruiz entitled Blind Man's Bluff: along with some previously published articles, here in English for the first time, the bulk a compilation of new, shorter pieces from a few generous critics and Ruizians on favorite moments from a vast, subterranean filmography. For more from Raúl Ruiz: Blind Man's Bluff see the Table of Contents.

The Golden Boat (1990)

A man follows a trail of beat-up shoes left discarded along a New York sidewalk. They lead him to an older man, who sits crouched on the street, crying. “This, my son, is not my place,” the older man proclaims—and then stabs himself. So begins The Golden Boat—“a game between soap opera and reality,” as Ruiz called it—his first film in America, made in exile over a few long weekends during a teaching stint at Harvard.

Above: La chouette aveugle (The Blind Owl, 1987)

Over the next couple weeks, Notebook will be unfurling a series of tributes to Raúl Ruiz: along with some previously published articles, here in English for the first time, the bulk a compilation of new, shorter pieces from a few generous critics and Ruizians on favorite moments from a vast, subterranean filmography. This small, mock-filmography shouldn’t be taken as anything like a comprehensive grip on Ruiz’s films or even incomprehensive grip: the Rouge annotated filmography remains the essential, critical card catalogue. Instead, something like this collection of close-readings can probably only show the ways Ruiz eludes chronology and anything but a kaleidoscopic perspective onto his work. Hopefully it can hint at the many phantom Ruizes unconsidered here while pin-pointing some pivotal moments in a pivoting career.

As we publish the pieces in batches by decade, the links below will be...

Nadie Dijo Nada" />

Above: Nadie Dijo Nada (1971).

Over the next couple weeks, Notebook will be unfurling a series of tributes to Raúl Ruiz entitled Blind Man's Bluff: along with some previously published articles, here in English for the first time, the bulk a compilation of new, shorter pieces from a few generous critics and Ruizians on favorite moments from a vast, subterranean filmography. For more from Raúl Ruiz: Blind Man's Bluff see the Table of Contents.

Chilean Memories

Above: On Top of the Whale (1982).

I had recently arrived in New York in the late 90s and was completely lost, overwhelmed by the need to adapt, to no longer be just chileno, and to understand this multicultural, all-consuming city, when I found myself with a worn-out VHS tape of On Top of the Whale, an alien film that only left me feeling more displaced but crying with laughter for five minutes straight.

James Schamus has written a lovely and extended appreciation of Raoul Ruiz for Filmmaker magazine. And it definitely deserves a read. Schamus was a PhD candidate when first wrote Ruiz in 1987 with the charming but bizarre idea that Ruiz might direct a script by Carl Theodor Dreyer about the life of Mary, Queen of Scots. That didn't happen, but the next year, "The Golden Boat" did. And that movie ...

Chilean-born film-maker who became the darling of the French avant garde

Raúl Ruiz, the Chilean-born film director who has died aged 70 after suffering a lung infection, held audiences with his glittering eye for more than 40 years. Baroque imagery, bizarre humour and labyrinthine plots made his elusive and allusive oeuvre unlike anything else in contemporary cinema.

Although most of his films were made while he was an exile in France, his work was part of the fabulist tradition that runs through much Latin American literature, such as the writings of Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges and Alfonso Reyes. Ruiz liked to quote the Cuban surrealist writer José Lezama Lima, who stated that the task of the poet is "to go into a dark room and build a waterfall there".

Born in Puerto Montt, in southern Chile, Ruiz studied law, theology and theatre before becoming a prolific avant-garde playwright. His first feature,...

Revered Chilean filmmaker Raul Ruiz has died in Paris at the age of 70.

The director and film aficionado made over 100 movies including Mysteries of Lisbon, Klimt, Time Regained, Shattered Image and The Golden Boat.

He made his feature film debut in 1968 with the movie Tres tristes tigres, and he quickly became a leading figure in Chilean cinema.

Ruiz was forced to flee his homeland for political reasons in the mid-1970s and he spent the rest of his life living in exile in France.

Often described as a cinematic genius, Ruiz was also a theatre director and playwright, and he taught at Harvard University.

Among his many accolades, the director was awarded the title of Docteur Honoris Causa by the Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon in 2005 and he also holds a Professorship at the University of Aberdeen and a Doctor Honoris Causa honour from the Universidad de Valparaiso, which he received earlier this year.

Ruiz was also presented with Chile's National Prize of Arts.

He is survived by his wife, Valeria Sarmiento, a Chilean writer-director.

The great Chilean filmmaker Raul Ruiz passed away today in Paris. Through his feature The Golden Boat, which was James Schamus’s first as a producer, Raul gave a group of us in New York’s nascent ’80s independent scene a wonderful and nearly indescribable introduction to filmmaking. So, I’m grateful here to James for this piece remembering Ruiz and those thrilling and formative days. — S.M.

Raul Ruiz: First Thoughts

Raul Ruiz passed away today, age 70, in Paris. He’ll be remembered as one of the truly great, idiosyncratic and visionary voices of world cinema. He was tirelessly inventive, gentle, profoundly uninterested in the business and hype of the film world, willing to show up anywhere a good crew and cast were ready to explore with him. He didn’t so much make movies as he lived one long continuously productive moviemaking life. Exiled from his native...

Catherine Grant has tweeted a link to the shocking news as reported by El Mostrador: Raúl Ruiz, widely considered the most important filmmaker to have come from Chile, has died in Paris at the age of 70. The funeral will be held on Tuesday morning.

Just a few weeks ago, the New York Times' Ao Scott profiled Ruiz, director of more than "100 films in several languages and also, in his spare time, a theater director and film theorist of some renown in Europe and beyond. He has taught at Harvard, adapted the last volume of Proust into a feature film, transformed several of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales into a dark, surrealist comedy starring Marcello Mastroianni and made the life of the Viennese painter Gustav Klimt into a fractured biopic starring John Malkovich. His forays into North America have included the twisty psychological thriller Shattered Image, starring William Baldwin and Anne Parillaud,...