This article studies two texts written by filmmaker Raul Ruiz in the early seventies, recently rediscovered by the Archivo Ruiz-Sarmiento. My focus is on the phrase "the rules of the game", which the director repeats to cipher a political dimension of his cinema. I argue that the phrase emerges as a shortcut to discuss three different issues: the system organizing the activity of filmmaking, that is, a cultural policy of cinema; the conceptual principles behind a "cinema of inquiry"; and, finally, the rules that would eventually overcome the aesthetic tradition known in documentary studies as "direct cinema".