Filming Vienna 1900: The Poetics of Cinema and the Politics of Ornament in Raúl Ruiz’s Klimt

Raúl Ruiz’s Klimt (2006) offers a sophisticated attempt to translate the visual art theory of Klimt’s Vienna into cinematic form. Reading this film alongside Ruiz’s reflections on film theory, this article explores how he employs key ideas from this period about ornament, spatiality and “surface effects”, reproducibility, and optic and haptic visuality in his search for a new cinematic language that might offer an alternative to mainstream cinema and the cinema of the “classical” avant-garde.