Abstract

Raul Ruiz famously referred to his 1985 adaptation of Robert Louis-Stevenson’s Treasure Island as a “trailer or user’s manual” for his entire cinema. Given that the film involved two years of pre-production, a three-month shoot, and then a tortuous six year post-production process in which both major financiers—Paulo Branco’s Les films du passage and 80s B-movie powerhouse Cannon Films—experienced bankruptcy, it would seem somewhat strange to the outsider, though not entirely uncharacteristic to the initiated that he would do so. This thesis addresses Ruiz’s self-assessment by doing two things: firstly, it attends to the relationship between theory and practice in the director’s cinema, using his writings as the foundation for a production history of the film (focusing, in particular, on Cannon’s attempts to legitimize and “civilize” its cinematic output, and the manner in which Ruiz’s emphasis upon the aleatory is reflected in the aesthetic scars of the film). Secondly, it uses this history—as well as the literary reading theory of Québec scholar Gilles Thérien—as a foundation for its central argument: Treasure Island is an allegory of the Ruizian reading process itself. Understanding the film in such a way opens the door for further academic work on the director’s adaptation process, an under-theorized area within the field of Ruiz study.