Imagine Peter Greenaway, on leave from the Central Office of Information, accepting a commission from the Arts Council to do a documentary on Anthony Blunt, and turning in a filmed interview with John Gielgud (playing a collector) who sets out to prove that Landseer's paintings are full of scatological references to mid-Victorian society scandals. Translated into French terms, this would yield one – but only one – layer of Raúl Ruiz's THE HYPOTHESIS OF THE STOLEN PAINTING (1978), the story of a collection of paintings by Tonnerre, a French academic painter of the mid-19th century, whose rather undistinguished works, with no consistency in style or subject matter, are said to have provoked a major but mysterious society scandal. However, to complete my hypothetical analogy, one would have to add that Ruiz has made the state of exile (in turn mimicking and mocking France, his host country, with equal conviction) the starting point for an erudite but nonetheless highly ironic study of the difference between filmic and pictorial rules of representation which leaves one wondering until well into the middle of the film whether Ruiz might not, after all, be serious with his conceit of these paintings bearing a dangerous secret.

What Ruiz has in common with Greenaway is a gift for mimicry as travesty (Ian Christie, talking about Ruiz's television work, once referred to “the strategies of parody and literalism”), which is to say, a sharp awareness of the tacit assumptions underlying the conventions of non-fiction film and television. Followed to the letter by a determined director, these television conventions of the filmed interview have the same disruptive effect on our sense of reality as a work-to-rule of post office workers has on our mail delivery. Ruiz once indicated that he might actually be an admirer of Greenaway (“Seeing THE FALLS, I found there my own hatred of British television, of the BBC with all its artificiality, the false efficiency that people are now trying to copy in France”), but he makes quite un-English use of the deliriously straight-faced British approach to wildly improbable narrative premises.