Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting begins with a static shot of a street which appears at first to be a still image or photograph. The remaining scenes center around an art collector participating in a
mockumentary style of interviews from a disembodied interviewer who the audience never sees. Through a large 19th-century
baroque-style house and its grounds, the camera follows the collector as he guides the interviewer. The collector has six of seven canvasses by a fictional 19th-century painter called Fredéric Tonnerre (a reference to Klossowski's short story about a painter of the same name). No one knows what was in the fourth painting of the sequence because it was stolen. His quest is to recreate the missing painting through a series of connections between the other six in order to discover the meaning of the series in its entirety. To achieve this, he hires
models, acquires
props and rigs
lighting in order to bring each of the six surviving
scenes to life as
tableaux vivants. The collector takes advantage of the tableaux vivants as a
medium to experience aspects of the paintings that could only be materialized in three dimensions. He can then walk around each tableau, adjust lighting, move actors to different positions, and construct
narratives intertextually between the tableaux. Some of the narratives asserted by the collector include the mythological characters of
Diana and
Actaeon,
Knights of the Templar playing chess, a scandal among Parisian nobility, and an
occult ceremony involving a sacrifice similar to that of
St Sebastian. He also recites the complicated
plot of the novel in which the paintings were primarily conceived. He thinks traces of an esoteric cult of the
Baphomet are hidden in secret codes within the pictures. As the collector explains the multitude of threads connecting each painting, the narrator questions the collector's pedantic conclusions. The collector presses on with his investigation despite the narrator's critique. Yet, without the missing painting, any overall answer eludes him, and the collector is left asking more questions than when he'd begun. He travels back through the gallery toward the exit, slowly walking past the tableaux vivants which are now entangled and sprawled throughout the gallery. The
actors playing the characters in the tableaux are having trouble keeping still; some blink and some begin to lose their balance. The collector exits through the back door of the gallery and the film ends while the camera resides in the gallery. ==Interpretation==