Raúl Ruiz’s Dog’s Dialogue (1977) is made up of still images, à la La Jetée (1962), while The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978) features several tableaux vivants. Both films are studies of motion, displaying Ruiz’s tendency to produce a synaptic type of cinema driven by proliferating narrative connections. Both films also emphasize immobility—stills are locked in time and a tableaux vivant’s models are always locked in place. Yet, Dog’s Dialogue and The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting both move at a tremendous speed; moreover, they are moving films about emotional crises. It’s difficult to imagine how someone could make two dynamic films about immobility, or something so theoretical that also feels so heartfelt, but these are the inevitable and delightful paradoxes that emerge when dealing with Raúl Ruiz.
Simon Field, the founder and editor of the film journal Afterimage, wrote that in Dog’s Dialogue, Ruiz “makes inspired low-budget use of the French tradition of the ‘photo-roman.”’ It must be added that Ruiz’s riff on the photo-roman, or photo-novel, is highly playful both in form and content. Inspired by the racy melodramas that dominated photo-romans, and were further popularized by telenovelas, Ruiz designs a circular narrative around Monique (Silke Humel), a young woman whose torrid life sets off a chain reaction of sexual and violent acts in rural France. The film's scenarios are undeniably provocative and absurd, and in some ways empty—which is not to say bad, but on the contrary, enriching. In an interview from a 1980 issue of Afterimage, Ruiz said that he recognized “emptiness as a function of the picture surface itself.” That same year, Roland Barthes published Camera Lucida, in which he wrote that with “the photograph, we enter into flat Death.” The hollow quality of Dog’s Dialogue reflects the emptiness inherent to photography—a powerful emptiness that invites meaning-making in the face of flat death.
The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting is an art mockumentary about seven paintings that, for reasons now lost, caused a scandal in 19th-century Paris. Throughout the film, an off-screen narrator and an on-screen collector argue about why the paintings provoked such a furor. Ultimately, nobody knows… The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting was originally commissioned by a French broadcaster as a documentary about the artist Pierre Klossowski, whose fictions are referenced throughout the film. (That same year, Ruiz adapted Klossowski’s The Suspended Vocation in more-or-less faithful fashion.) As a novelist, Klossowski had a tendency to create meta-narratives that matched Ruiz’s knack for piecing together several stories and transforming them into philosophical treatises. The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting’s labyrinthine tour through the seven paintings it focuses on inspires more questions than it provides answers. It is like a cinematic sphinx, beckoning answers to an unsolvable riddle.
Dog’s Dialogue and The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting screen tonight, March 13, at Anthology Film Archives as part of the series “Afterimage: Counter Cinema, Radical Cinema.”
