The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978)

 

Director: Raúl Ruiz

Screenplay: Raúl Ruiz

Cast: Jean Rougeul as the Collector

An Abstract Candidate

 

Established in the beginning, with the unseen narrator and an art collector (Jean Rougeul) onscreen establishing the set-up and the later correcting the later onwards, The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting was originally meant to be an actual documentary on author, theorist, and artist Pierre Klossowski. Instead becoming a pastiche of a documentary, and paying tribute to Klossowski still with explicit references to his provocative last novel The Baphomet (1965), The Hypothesis... as with many other Ruiz films becomes of work of layers upon layers even in a work just over sixty minutes.

The set-up in itself is something you could expect in a more conventionally told mystery tale. A fictitious artist is created here, Fredéric Tonnerre, whose exhibition of a series of seven paintings caused a major yet mysterious scandal in the Parisian court in nineteenth century France. The art collector we follow believes the seven paintings were coded for a true meaning, the documentary we now see intending to demonstrate this to the viewer as, recreating the paintings onscreen with actors, the codes are found in replication and decoded. That one painting is lost causes an elusiveness to this, and as with other Ruiz tales, the point is never the conclusion but the hidden fragments and the journey we experience.

As with anything the Chilean director touches, more is to be revealed onscreen and early into his exile from his homeland in France, an added factor here is cinematographer Sacha Vierny. A true legend behind countless films, the film to touch on, and would be referred to in Vierny's work with Welsh director Peter Greenaway, is Last Year at Marienbad (1961), itself a curiosity as whilst a legendary title of its director Alain Resnais, more and more I myself look to its story writer, legendary author and later filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet, as much the author with Sacha Vierny. Whilst eventually unfolding with an unnerving beauty in the end, The Hypothesis... gets the initial parody successful, as this journey with the unnamed art collector raises a scandal of secret codes, connected directly to a novel written at the time, related to a secret cult. One which evokes The Baphomet novel, the piece of the puzzle for an actual viewer, like me, which would answer a lot of questions but many may not be even aware of or have read. By itself, it is a fascinating enough take on the notion of interpretation, especially as the mock up enactments of the paintings, heavy handed works of kitsch in some cases, force one to rethink the difference between how a film to a painting stages scenes, Ruiz not hiding when the actors, whilst standing still, sway a little and have to keep themselves steady.

The original figure of the project, before he transformed this documentary to one of his most well known films, is Pierre Klossowski, a polymath especially in where and how he crossed multiple mediums in his homeland of France. Translating Franz Kafka and Ludwig Wittgenstein at one point, acting in Robert Bresson's Au hasard, Balthazar (1966) at another, an author in his own right as much as writing on the likes of the Marquis de Sade, with his last novel The Baphomet, when a synopsis is glanced at, being of the Knights Templar, after their dissolution of heretical rights, reassemble as ghosts and leads to Klossowski himself, a Templar grand master and Frederick Nietzsche being introduced debating notions of morality between themselves. To some that would sound impossible for some to ever be able to engage with, whilst just that synopsis by itself, even with the director is not known for lengthy philosophical discussions in his works, sounds like something Ruiz dreamt up for his later films.

There is an irony knowing this is probably one of his most accessible films, as in one hour it encapsulates a very easy to grasp premise, but is one with enough in itself innately to fully serve his style. It is more restrained as, before his full blown eighties period of delirium, this is kept in a sedate elegance with its monochrome appearance, absolutely stunning to witness thanks to Sacha Vierny. Even Klossowski himself is much part of a greater mystery this hints at, more so as beforehand Ruiz had adapted one of his novels The Suspended Vocation, a 1950 publication, into a 1978 film from the same year. Alongside the narrative being about a seminarian in a Catholic Church organisation caught between jostling sides, one which might not even exist, Ruiz himself added a layer in how the film is structured as if one half was made at a significantly different time, alongside presentation, to evoke a production with its own mysteries in its incomplete form. (Apt as the novel is structured as a critique of a fictitious book of the same name). The Hypothesis... does not play these games, instead its own simple game. Even a painting of the hunter goddess Diana can be linked to a nineteenth century scandal, especially when the mirror is pointed out and the clues start to appear for the art collector.

Its elegance as a film makes sure as much that its mystery does not come off potentially ridiculous and overcooked, something it is in danger of when the art collector reads the entire narrative summary of a nineteenth century novel, a drama of deceit and hidden homosexuality, which may have easily turned the mystery in a cliché by trying to link everything together. It is helped considerably that the film is one of the best to start a novice to Ruiz's world with, but with fans seeing other films, it grows even beyond the obviousness of its material. It is, without trouble, a beautiful and eerie production, stunning especially when it begins with the staged recreations bleed into each other. With knowledge to Ruiz's career, the more mysteries at hand, the more questions are raised. Beyond the obvious, that the mystery's answer suggested here could merely be a theory, there is fixed a missing piece of the puzzle too, and also the fact that even in theory, one can find oneself caught in debate on interpretation, the art collector correcting the narrator, undercutting their place in a documentary as the authoritative voice that knows everything, and even questioning himself in the end.

Strange details alone raise questions, like the collector taking male plastic dolls, like Barbie ken dolls, out of a drawer as if to use them for a demonstration, only to put them away in another drawer in the same scene, and that he has used them in stages photos we see, add strange jokes and questions the more you see the film. Raúl Ruiz is a director perversely apt for the modern age, where you can return to films over and over, even if his work is ingrained into the past and history with great intelligence. (He is annoyingly never however one director among many others who have been betrayed by the lack of availability of his work by ignorance.) Ruiz here is as much compelling for the pleasure of his work, the imagination, as that in it is intellectual dissection. One of his fascinations was the concepts of doubles, drawing from theories of a 19th century Algerian activist and scholar Abd al-Qādir whose notion of the "veiled vision of divinities" was transposed to cinema by Ruiz. Ruiz, taking Qādir's concept of the divine being concealed within images of this world, which in turn reflect invisible realities with divine sparks, theorised that films themselves contained a hidden film, and every frame thus a secret frame¹. As an amateur fan, this stems more in his other work, especially the eighties work which, embracing almost pulp and cult-like film tropes as much as being serious works, the tales behind them as much as the images and how they connect together on-screen in one film having worlds-within-worlds for the filmmaker. Yet The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting radiates such virtue in itself, its simplicity growing to a beauty in its questions. Even with the morbidness of its final reveal, demon worship by holy orders, sacrificial child-boy priests and the material of gothic novels, the film eventually grows into something dreamlike when the art collector wanders a manor, once a stage for elaborate recreations, bled into by figures from paintings in living compositions more beautiful than the ones they originated from.

Reality, as mist enters rooms in the end, and Sacha Vierny guides such beautiful images with his director, dissipates as happens in a Raúl Ruiz film but it in itself feels more real and tangible, apt for a director where the dead do not disappear and immediately get back up in many cases, and the unnatural is as real and imposing in a film like City of Pirates (1984) after the initial set-up. It itself, with The Suspended Vocation, this film marked the early stages of a director who fled his home, due to a Chilean dictatorship, and yet found himself lost at sea in Europe managing a run, into 1990, that is as spectacular as cinema can be.

Abstract Spectrum: Eerie/Playful

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

 

=============

1) I myself will openly admit to taking this from The Brooklyn Rail website, from their Critics Page on the film by Dalia Neis from their May 2019 issue. It refers to material from the Poetics of Cinema, a book of Ruiz's transcribed lectures from 1992, which is both befitting a review of a work with many layers upon layers, and felt necessary to reference. It encapsulates a huge part of Raúl Ruiz the filmmaker in ideology for me now as a huge fan of his work.