Life Is a Dream (1986 film)

Life is a Dream (French: Mémoire des apparences) is a 1987 French surrealist art film written and directed by Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz. It is an oneiric, metafictional, "neo-Baroque" work about the Chilean dictatorship, exile, dream, cinema and mnemonics. It was inspired by Frances A. Yates' book The Art of Memory (1966) and features characters and scenes from Life Is a Dream (1635), a Spanish Golden Age play Ruiz had directed at the Avignon Festival in 1986, in addition to pastiches of B-movies and serials of the 1930s and 1940s.

Life is a Dream
Film poster
Directed by	Raúl Ruiz
Written by	Raúl Ruiz (based on Pedro Calderón de la Barca)
Produced by	Jean-Luc Larguier
Starring	Sylvain Thirolle
Cinematography	Jacques Bouquin
Edited by	Martine Bouquin Rudolfo Wedeles
Music by	Jorge Arriagada
Release date	1987 (1987)
Running time	103 minutes
Country	France
Language	French

Cast

• Sylvain Thirolle as Ignacio Vega
• Roch Leibovici
• Bénédicte Sire as Astrea
• Laurence Cortadellas
• Jean-Bernard Guillard as Prince Segismundo
• Jean-Pierre Agazar
• Alain Halle-Halle
• Jean-François Lapalus
• Alain Rimoux

Further reading

• Cisneros, James (2006); "The figure of memory in Chilean cinema: Patricio Guzmán and Raúl Ruiz" in Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 15, no. 1, pp. 59–75.
• Goddard, Michael (2013); The Cinema of Raúl Ruiz: Impossible Cartographies. Wallflower Press, pp. 89–93.
• Kaup, Monika (2012); "Antidictatorship Neobaroque Cinema: Raúl Ruiz's Mémoire des apparences and María Luisa Bemberg's Yo, la peor de todas" in Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film. University of Virginia Press, pp. 183–242.
• Marinescu, Andreea (2014); "The Dream of Memory in Raúl Ruiz’s Memories of Appearances: Life Is a Dream" in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Spring), pp. 7-31.

External links

• Mémoire des apparences at IMDb