L'hypothèse du tableau volé

We begin with a narrator discussing a missing painting by the fictional painter Tonnere. We then join collector Jean Rougel, who has six other paintings by the artist. Using them, a series of people in various tableaux vivantes, minor details in each painting, and a fictional roman a clef novel, he concludes what the absent painting looked like, what the series means, and then to reject his own hypothesis, because he finds it distasteful.

Raúl Ruiz' black-and-white mockumentary can be viewed as a burlesque of the art documentary that infests high-minded television shows. It certainly goes around Robin Hood's barn to do so. It can also be viewed as the sort of detail-obsessed reasoning that infuses novels like The Da Vinci Code, the Q-Anon conspiracy, and the tendency of many modern neo-fascists to see a series of vast conspiracies motivating everything they disapprove of, with the lack of evidence engorging the reach of such conspiracies, and their failures to predict what happens next as evidence of false-flag operations, or some longer-range effort, with an exhortation to "stick to the plan."

Having been brought up in an atmosphere of evidence-based rationality, I find such hypotheses to be idiotic. I believe that you notice events, work up a hypothesis, use the hypothesis to make predictions, and use the success or failure of those predictions to verify or falsify the hypothesis. Those who believe in these elaborate theories, when confronted with falsifying events, merely make their hypotheses more elaborate, adding epicycles to the epicycles to the epicycles of their assumptions. Neither are my personal wishes and tastes matters to be considered -- although as a fallible man, I am subject to the same flaws as Rougel.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that this movie is a long exercise in seeing evidence in details that, like as not, are of no importance. The fictional Tonnere's details may be significant, but they may also be simply habits, or callbacks to other works, what are called "Easter Eggs" by the the detailed-obsessed, pseudo-rational loonies that infest our society. I have better ways to spend my time than to seek out meaning in nonsense, and find works like this, making obscure digs at the despicable, a bore.

With enchanting aestheticism and the theological investigation of art, of its creation and speculation, of its interrelationships with cinema, in particularly the recreation of a printing in a cinematic scope. Its a stylistic and fascinating, moderately surreal work by the master Raul Ruiz, but only to an extent, afterwards, the movie creates a incomprehensible concept by both the dialogue and the exploration of the idé itself.

A challenge for the viewer to enjoy the possible boundaries of cinema. An example of filmmaking where Ruiz stakes his claim to be in the same league as Tarkovsky, the later Kieslowski, and Welles. Ruiz creates a detective film on paintings by creating tableaux with live actors and two narrators, one seen and another unseen dueling with arguments on the paintings. The viewer is forced to read up more literature to appreciate the film sufficiently--e.g., Pierre Klossowski's writings and paintings, the death of St Sebastian, the history of rise and fall of the Knights Templar. If the viewer takes that trouble, there is a good case for Ruiz to be considered the most well read intellectual among filmmakers. The film is one of the best examples of a great mockumentary alongside my favorite and possibly banned Iranian film "Bitter Dreams" (2004).

L'Hypothèse du tableau volé/The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1979) begins in the courtyard of an old, three-story Parisian apartment building. Inside, we meet The Collector, an elderly man who has apparently devoted his life to the study of the six known existing paints of an obscure Impressionist-era painter, Tonnerre. A narrator recites various epigrams about art and painting, and then engages in a dialogue with The Collector, who describes the paintings to us, shows them to us, tells us a little bit about the painter and the scandal that brought him down, and then tells us he's going to show us something....

As he walks through a doorway, we enter another world, or worlds, or perhaps to stretch to the limits, other possible worlds. The Collector shows us through his apparently limitless house, including a large yard full of trees with a hill; within these confines are the 6 paintings come to life, or half-way to life as he walks us through various tableaux and describes to us the possible meanings of each painting, of the work as a whole, of a whole secret history behind the paintings, the scandal, the people in the paintings, the novel that may have inspired the paintings. And so on, and so on. Every room, every description, leads us deeper into a labyrinth, and all the while The Collector and The Narrator engage in their separate monologues, very occasionally verging into dialogue, but mostly staying separate and different.

I watched this a second time, so bizarre and powerful and indescribable it was, and so challenging to think or write about. If I have a guess as to what it all adds up to, it would be a sly satire of the whole nature of artistic interpretation. An indicator might be found in two of the most amusing and inexplicable scenes are those in which The Collector poses some sexless plastic figurines -- in the second of them, he also looks at photos taken of the figurines that mirror the poses in the paintings -- then he strides through his collection, which is now partially composed of life-size versions of the figures. If we think too much about it and don't just enjoy it, it all becomes just faceless plastic....

Whether I've come to any definite conclusions about "L'Hypothèse du tableau volé", or not, I can say definitely that outside of the early (and contemporaneous) works of Peter Greenaway like "A Walk Through H", I've rarely been so enthralled by something so deep, so serious, so dense....and at heart, so mischievous and fun.

Having read during many years about how great this film was, how it established Ruiz among the french critics (specially the snobbish Cahiers crowd), when I finally watched it about a year ago, I found it pretty disappointing (but then, I guess my expectations were sky-high). Shot in saturated black and white, this deliberately cerebral film (made for TV, and mercifully, only an hour long) is told in the form of a conversation between an art connoisseur and an off-screen narrator as they ponder through a series of paintings (which are shown in the style of tableaux vivants) and try to find if they hold some clues about a hidden political crime. (The awful Kate Beckinsale film Uncovered has a similar argument). Borgesian is a word I read a lot in reviews about this movie, but I would say almost any Borges story is more interesting than this film.