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A multitude of works—deconstruction, spoof, reverie, showman's trick—drawn at once by Raoul Ruiz like a breeze through the museum. The format is that of a French TV special on art and representation, the old Collector (Jean Rougeul) wanders around a murky gallery to contemplate the enigmas of mise en scène. Six 19th-century paintings, dull and academic and yet the trigger of a scandal in Paris, the supposed key is a supposed seventh canvas supposedly purloined. "At the risk of upsetting a somewhat facile train of thought, I would like to inject a certain doubt." Binoculars by the drawing-room window segue into costumed players in the misty garden, the first of several tableaux vivant arranged to try to exhume connection and meaning from the works: Diana the Huntress with a mirror casts a reflecting beam, the camera follows it to the basement and dissolves to a medieval knight before a chessboard, on goes the inquiry. (Jean Reno, Bernard Daillencourt, Alfred Baillou, and Jean Narboni are among the enervated human mannequins.) Lighting and composition, gestures and masks, tools for the storyteller and feints for the interpreter. "The pitfalls of dusty scholarship" mark the terrain for the bone-dry drollery of Ruiz and Pierre Klossowski, the Resnais effect of prowling camera and static figures has Sacha Vierny revisiting Marienbad chambers. It's a thankless job, the auteurist critic's, he searches for buried links and nods off mid-pontification, the unseen narrator continues with a whisper that could be the director's chuckle. Yet it's that inquisitive search for images that can imagine a whole occult melodrama lurking within a stiff family portrait. "Alas! Et pourtant..." Between F for Fake and Histoire(s) du Cinéma, a bridge atoned to Borges' words, "this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon." In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |