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.