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, Tres Tristes Tigres (Three Sad Tigers, 1968), follows a group of louche, lower-middle-class characters who are neither proletarian nor part of Chile's Europeanised bourgeoisie. The ironic, experimental film, whose title was based on a local tongue-twister, was influenced by the Nouvelle Vague and won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno film festival.

Ruiz and his fellow directors Miguel Littin, Aldo Francia and Helvio Soto made up Chile's brief "new wave" during that creative period just before and during the presidency of Salvador Allende. Ruiz's La Colonia Penal (The Penal Colony, 1970), a bitterly ironic version of Kafka's story, concerned torture and military dictatorship, foreshadowing what was soon to happen in Chile. In 1971-72 Ruiz was a film adviser to the Socialist party in Allende's coalition, but was forced to flee the country during the coup d'etat of 1973. The last film he made before leaving was Palomita Blanca (Little White Dove, 1973), based on a rightwing novel. "Obviously, what intrigued me was to offer a sort of critical reading of the novel, to deconstruct it in some sense," he said. "After Pinochet came to power, the film was held up for a long time."

Diálogos de Exiliados (Dialogues of Exiles, 1975), Ruiz's first film shot in France (over three weeks), was a low-budget semi-documentary on Chilean exiles in Paris, inspired by Bertolt Brecht's Refugee Conversations. It took a further three years before he became the darling of the French avant garde with L'Hypothèse du Tableau Volé (The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting, 1978). In this film, an art collector guides an unseen interviewer around six paintings by Frédéric Tonnerre in an attempt to solve the mystery of a missing seventh painting. Ruiz's intriguing meditation on the possibilities and limitations of the pictorial in the cinema is also a detective story with clues and a solution.

Ruiz continued to explore a range of narrative possibilities with Les Trois Couronnes du Matelot (Three Crowns of the Sailor, 1982) and La Ville des Pirates (City of Pirates, 1983). The latter is a delirious surrealist fantasy involving a murderous child, a dreamy girl who might be his mother, a pirate who keeps her prisoner on a rocky island, incestuous relationships, a castration and a rape. In the former film – his first to get a theatrical release outside France – a student, after committing a murder, is persuaded to spend the night listening to a drunken sailor's tales of brothels, Latin American ports and a ship with a ghost crew. This mixture of The Ancient Mariner, Orson Welles and Ruiz's own distinctive voice makes for a film that takes one, like the haunted sailor, off the beaten track.

These films led naturally to Ruiz's Treasure Island (1985), a singular interpretation of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel in which Jim Hawkins is played by Melvil Poupaud, who made a dozen films with Ruiz. The director moved on to classic Spanish drama with Mémoire des Apparences (Life Is a Dream, 1986), in which a Chilean revolutionary returns secretly to his home country, recalling that 10 years earlier he had memorised the names of 1,500 members of an anti-junta movement. The film incorporates some scenes from a drama by Pedro Calderón de la Barca which Ruiz had staged at Avignon.

The Golden Boat (1990) was his first film made in the US. With the help of actors from the Wooster Group, and cameos by the directors Jim Jarmusch and Barbet Schroeder, Ruiz turns a bemused eye on the interactions of a group of characters in New York, where violence seems the sole manner in which people communicate.

It was around this time that Ruiz, who always made the most of the slender resources at his disposal, was given bigger budgets and bigger stars. For L'Oeil Qui Ment (Dark at Noon, 1992), one of his many films shot in Portugal, he used an Arriflex 535, which he called "the Rolls-Royce of cameras". As he explained: "I'm used to working in 16mm and then processing the images almost as ideograms with two or three pieces of information per frame." In the film, which Ruiz considered not far from Monty Python, John Hurt plays both a wicked marquis and a manufacturer of prosthetic limbs.

In the metaphysical comedy Généalogies d'un Crime (Genealogies of a Crime, 1997), Catherine Deneuve, as a lawyer, imagines herself to be the murder victim of the young man she is defending. Deneuve then appeared as Odette in Le Temps Retrouvé, Ruiz's fairly faithful 1999 interpretation of Proust's Time Regained. In Comédie de l'Innocence (The Comedy of Innocence, 2000), Isabelle Huppert starred as a woman whose 10-year-old son tells her that he has another name and another mother – a further exploration of parallel realities.

Ruiz was now making an average of three films a year, varying from video to 35mm, cheap to expensive. Cofralandes, Rapsodia Chilena (Chilean Rhapsody, 2002) was a personal exploration of his homeland using a digital camera in a rigorous yet playful manner. This dream-Chile is shown through the eyes of three travellers, while the Chilean narrator (Ruiz) rediscovers the strange country that is his birthplace. There was always the sense that Ruiz remained an exiled film-maker in search of a home, whether in France, Portugal or even Chile.

One of his most ambitious projects was Mistérios de Lisboa (Mysteries of Lisbon, 2010), based on the episodic novel by the 19th-century Portuguese writer Camilo Castelo Branco. The turning and twisting narrative of this four-and-a-half-hour film stretches through three generations and as many countries, all controlled by Ruiz's flowing digital camerawork. At the time, it was thought that Ruiz, who had been a heavy drinker and smoker for many years, would never complete his magnum opus, but he was aided by an operation for liver cancer. This also allowed him enough time to shoot La Noche de Enfrente (The Night in Front), adapted from a work by Hernán del Solar, in the country in which he was born and never really left spiritually.

He is survived by his wife, Valeria Sarmiento, who edited many of his films.

• Raúl Ernesto Ruiz Pino, film director, born 25 July 1941; died 19 August 2011

Ronald BERGAN
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