“An important French film of the seventies, The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting began as a documentary on Pierre Klossowski (author of The Suspended Vocation) but soon became, in Ruiz's words, ‘a fiction about theory.' A pompous art collector offers a new history of western art through a guided tour of a fantastic gallery of ‘living images,' all created by the ‘forgotten' artist, Tonnerr. As our guide drones away about aspects of his collection, the human figures within the art works begin to smirk and fidget, emphasizing their play-acting and introducing a new level of spectating into the narrative. Structured as a kind of never-ending detective thriller, in which the pleasure is not so much solving the crime as it is discovering yet another level of complications, the film is a daring, fascinating meditation on the relationship between words and images, between works of art and their description or interpretation.” Richard Peña