Mysteries of Lisbon and Intermedial History-Telling

Abstract

Raúl Ruiz’s copious cinematic production has been treated as a single never-ending film due to his notorious disregard for narrative closure. Mysteries of Lisbon is his lengthiest film, consisting of a monumental adaptation (4h26min as a film, 6h as a TV series) of Camilo Castelo Branco’s eponymous novel in which interconnected narrative strands multiply across generations. However, all of these strands in the TV series, and most of them in the film, come to a logical resolution, indicating that the film’s protracted length derives from the chosen genre, the literary feuilleton combined with the soap opera, rather than being the consequence of an open-ended work. My hypothesis here is that the film’s self-reflexive procedures, questioning the medium and its hierarchic position among other media, bring storytelling close to reality and history-telling by creating holes in the narrative mesh through which the spectator can catch a glimpse of the incompleteness and incoherence of real life. In this context, the film’s constant intermedial morphings become “passages” to the real, through which decorated tiles, toy theatres, drawings and paintings change into live action and vice versa, silently subverting the idea that the story could have one single end, or an end at all.