Another Pynchon-like film

[Adam Lou Stephanides]

Chris Stolz's post on _La Jetee_ and its parallels to
_V_ and _CoL49_ reminded me of another film: Raul Ruiz's
_The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting_.  While quite unlike
_La Jetee_, Ruiz's film strikes me as being similar
to these novels in the way it presents sinister and
conspiratiorial-like undercurrents beneath an apparently
banal surface, but leaves a "gap" which makes it impossible
to conclusively affirm that these undercurrents exist.

_Hypothesis_ is a black-and-white pseudo-documentary about
an art collector's attempt to solve the mystery of why a
collection of seven "realistic" paintings caused a scandal
when they were exhibited together in the nineteenth century.
The collector has assembled six of the seven paintings, and
has reconstructed them as living tableaus, with the help of
which he argues that in each painting there is a detail which
points to a corresponding detail in the following painting,
forming a thread connecting all seven.  The individual
paintings prove to have disturbing features when examined
closely, and by following the "thread" the collector finds
an explanation of why the original exhibit was so scandalous;
but at the end of the movie he admits that his explanation is
only a hypothesis.  The movie's title refers to the fact that
one of the paintings was stolen, and the collector could not
recover it, so the series of linked clues he claimed to have
discovered is irretrievably broken.  This seems to me very
much like what Stolz referred to as the "deconstruction-like"
nature of _La Jetee_ and Pynchon's first two novels, with their
"object[s] whose capture would ground the narrative in some sort
of certainty."

I would recommend this film if you get a chance to see
it (or any film of Ruiz's, for that matter; he's one of the most 
interesting filmmakers I know of).

--Adam