Raul Ruiz, a Chilean director who presented a labyrinthine, cryptic picture of individual psychology and social relations in “Mysteries of Lisbon” and more than 100 other films, died Friday in Paris. He was 70.

His death was announced by Chile’s minister of arts and culture, Luciano Cruz-Coke. The cause was complications of a lung infection, Francois Margolin, who produced several of Ruiz’s films, told The Associated Press.

Although most of Ruiz’s films played in art houses and film festivals, he began reaching a broader audience when “Three Lives and Only One Death,” starring Marcello Mastroianni, was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1996, after which he began making films with international stars.

These included “Genealogies of a Crime” (1997) with Catherine Deneuve, “Comedy of Innocence” (2000) with Isabelle Huppert, and several films with John Malkovich, including the Austrian biographical film “Klimt” (2006).

American movies

He also made American films, including the Hitchcockian “Shattered Image” (1998), which starred William Baldwin and Anne Parillaud.

“Time Regained” (1999), his retelling of the Proust novel, was a grand period piece that reflected his lifelong attraction to complex, interwoven social dramas, with a lineup of stars that included Deneuve as Odette de Crecy, Malkovich as the Baron de Charlus and Emmanuelle Beart as Gilberte.

Ruiz later indulged his passion for storytelling on a large social canvas in the 2010 film “Mysteries of Lisbon,” a twisting, incident-packed chronicle of the Portuguese aristocracy during the civil wars of the 19th century, which many critics regarded as the capstone to his career.

Based on a sprawling 19th-century novel by Camilo Castelo Branco that was originally published in serial form, the film was shown in Europe as a television series stretching over six hours before being edited to a film of just over four. It made its debut in the United States at the New York Film Festival in 2010 and captivated critics with its scope and narrative complexity, full of deft twists and turns.

‘Booby-trapped’ films

“The world of his movies — as experienced by the characters and the audience alike — is at once soothingly, elegantly familiar and booby-trapped with surprises,” A.O. Scott wrote in a profile of Ruiz for The New York Times Magazine in July. “There are sudden disappearances, long-buried secrets coming to light, supernatural happenings and bizarre coincidences. In his universe, improbability is the rule.”

Raul Ernesto Ruiz Pino was born on July 25, 1941, in Puerto Montt, in the south of Chile, and grew up in and around Valparaiso. His father was a merchant marine captain with whom he sailed all over the world on his summer vacations.

As a boy, he steered clear of the local movie house that showed serious Mexican, French and Italian films, favoring the theater that showed Flash Gordon serials and cowboy movies.

He began writing plays at a furious rate while still a teenager, and although he studied law and theology at the University of Chile, he gravitated toward the film club and the department of experimental film.

After spending a year at the film school run by Fernando Birri in Santa Fe, Argentina, he worked as an editor on television news programs in Chile and as a scriptwriter for soap operas produced by Televisa in Mexico, an experience reflected in his career-long fascination with popular culture and the conventions of serial narrative.

Ruiz came of age as a filmmaker soon after the socialist politician Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile in 1970.

He had already built a small reputation for his first feature, the experimental sociopolitical comedy “Three Sad Tigers,” which won the top prize at the Locarno International Film Festival in 1969.

In an interview with Bomb in 1991, he called it “a film without a story,” describing it in terms that indicated his natural bent toward artistic subversion. “All the elements of a story are there but they are used like a landscape, and the landscape is used like story,” he said.

Employed by the state film agency, Chile Films, Ruiz took an oblique, surreal approach to political issues in several idiosyncratic films dealing with pressing social questions, notably “The Penal Colony,” a fanciful reinterpretation of the Kafka story, and “The Expropriation,” about an agronomist who is sent to take over a landowner’s estate and encounters a web of social contradictions.

Asylum in France

After Allende was overthrown in 1973, Ruiz sought asylum in France with his wife and sometime collaborator, the filmmaker Valeria Sarmiento, who survives him. There he embarked on an astonishingly varied and productive career as a director for film, television, video and the theater in a half-dozen languages, earning a critical reputation as one of the most compelling, idiosyncratic and elusive talents in the cinema.