Raúl Ruiz's Serial Utopia: The Proliferating Forms of Television

Cyril Béghin's essay examines Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz's lifelong engagement with television series as a model for cinematic utopia. Though Ruiz never directed a series, his work was deeply informed by serial structures—from telenovelas to shows like *Bones* and *The Tudors*. Béghin argues that for Ruiz, the series represented an ideal of infinite narrative expansion, a 'cinematic utopia' opposed to the 'central conflict' theory of screenwriting. Ruiz's films, such as *The Blind One* (1980), *Mysteries of Lisbon* (2010), and *La Recta Provincia* (2007), embody serial logics: proliferating digressions, nested narratives, and a vertiginous interplay of convergence and divergence. The essay traces how Ruiz's projects—including unrealized series like *The Blind One*—exploit the 'mass' of serial fiction to create 'dysnarration,' where coherence dissolves into a magma of disconnected stories. Key examples include *Mysteries of Lisbon*, which exists as both a six-episode series and a feature film, and *La Recta Provincia*, a Chilean TV miniseries about a mother and son collecting bones, which layers up to five narrative levels. Béghin concludes that Ruiz's serial utopia culminates in the idea of a series that would consist solely of summaries of previous episodes—a monument of nostalgia.