The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting/The Suspended Vacation
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Guy Bonnafoux, Jean Raynaud (II), Jean Rougeul, Nadege Finkelstein, Philippe ChasselBrand: Facets Multimedia
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); French (Original Language), Unknown
Format: Black & White, Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 66 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-09-26
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Facets Video
Movie Reviews of The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting/The Suspended Vacation
Movie Review: surrealism, art history, conspiracies and just plain weirdness
Summary: 5 Stars
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 HYPOTHESIS 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.
I found "La Vocation suspendue"/SUSPENDED VOCATION (1978), the earliest feature from Ruiz that I've seen thus far, which is included on this Blaq Out/Facets disc, very difficult and at times completely incomprehensible -- I really think one has to have some background in or knowledge of Catholicism to fully appreciate it, and clearly though the visual aspects of the film are important, the religious themes are at the heart of it; it is unquestionably a film about something, a film that is dealing intellectually with a subject, but in an oblique enough way that if you start out more or less at ground zero (as I did) it will be hard to take anything away. The black and white photography elements (courtesy of one of the world's greatest cinematographers, Sacha Vierny, in his first collaboration with Ruiz) were quite striking though, and at times it gave off a very Bressonian feel.
Both features were based on novels by Pierre Klossowski, who seems worth looking into for sure. The two are also available with THREE CROWNS OF THE SAILOR on a 2-disc edition.
Summary of The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting/The Suspended Vacation
Chilean born director Raul Ruiz offers an enigmatic musing on the nature of art interpretation in this unusual mystery centered on a stolen painting. A bumbling art collector attempts to reconstruct the content of a painting missing from a series of seven painted 100 years earlier by an eccentric artist. To help him in his task, a group of actors pose as the figures in the paintings to create a series of human tableaux. The collector makes far-fetched thematic connections between the tableaux as a way to figure out what the missing artwork might look like while alluding to the scandals, mysteries, and conspiracies surrounding the paintings. Beautifully photographed by legendary cinematographer Sacha Vierny (NIGHT AND FOG, BELLE DE JOUR, STARVISKY) and based on the provocative novel by Pierre Klossowski, HYPOTHESIS OF A STOLEN PAINTING gives new meaning to the phrase "intellectual thriller." As an added bonus, Ruiz?s film THE SUSPENDED VOCATION?also based on a novel by the idiosyncratic Klossowski?is included on this DVD.Similar DVD Movies
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