9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Vicious Circle, December 7, 2006
This movie was (at least initially) inspired by Pierre Klossowski's novel The Baphomet, and was co-written by him. Klossowski, besides being the older brother of the painter Balthus, is also the author of a study of Nietzsche's thought entitled Nietzsche And The Vicious Circle; which is a study of perhaps his strangest idea, the eternal return. As The Baphomet is a novel based on principles of the eternal return, so is this movie. It is a mystery of sorts masquerading as a pseudo-documentary on an unknown (fictional) painter. All the surviving works by this painter are linked together into an enigmatic narrative made even more elusive by the absence of the one painting which is the key to the narrative circle (actually, any of the paintings, if missing, would've also been the missing key). The film is largely composed of live model reproductions of the paintings, and as the film progresses the actors within the paintings begin to move. The content of the missing painting is hypothesized by the convergence of the narratives extrapolated from the paintings on either side of it; but even the sequence of the paintings is hypothetical. It is a real head-piece, very tightly constructed - a baffling thought provoking gem.
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3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the most genial and invective artistic proposals ever made in the history of cinema!, March 10, 2008
During the decade of the seventies, two brilliant Chilean filmmakers made the world turns around the attention about them. Raoul Ruiz and Alexander Jodorowsky, this last one decided to risk by surrealistic universes while Ruiz remained as creator of hallucinating atmospheres.
I would not hesitate to state Raoul Ruiz meant for the cinema what Garcia Marquez in literature. His portentous imagination at the moment to present us his artistic proposals and convictions, with works that always challenge even the most exigent of the spectators, hovered by a nocturnal poetry and admirable visual metaphors.
This film is one the most representative, imaginative and dazzling ones of the seventies, who according Raoul Ruiz' words is. "a fiction about theory". All begins when a pompous art collector proposes a new history of western based on a mesmerizing gallery of "living images" created by a forgotten artist.
So, when our hard collector begins to drone away about aspects of his collection, the human figures smirk and fidget, introducing the spectator in another level of narrative proposal.
A brilliant exercise of imagination and supreme good taste that brings us close to another two related films. Basil Dearden' s "Dead of night", 1945 and Richard Rush's "The stunt man" , 1980.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
surrealism, art history, conspiracies and just plain weirdness, September 27, 2009
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.
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