Continuing his research into the canons of European art, their concepts, their history and their grey areas ( Daphne and Thomas , FID 2019), Assaf Gruber leads the tour. Rude Witness – (d')après Transient Witness – takes us from a van loaded with works, which we learn were stolen from the famous Grünes Gewölbe (" the Green Vault ") museum belonging to the Dresden State Collections (SKD), to this same museum, considered here as a domestic space: the line is clear. In this film cultivating a deadpan sense of humor, borrowing from the codes of detective cinema, we follow a very strange thief flanked by his imposing dog, transformed from museum visitor into master of his territory. Playing on the mocking gaze of the oriental-inspired caryatids as a welcome to the building, Assaf Gruber multiplies the slippages to redistribute gestures that Art History sometimes struggles to distinguish: collecting and stealing. The shifts question the concepts of inheritance, attribution, law, and loss that shape the dominant narratives of Art History, with looting off-screen. The repressed returns in this story of boxing (in a display case). The museum's objects and spaces, stripped of the conventional museum distinction between seeing and doing, are playfully reactivated. Moving from one thief to another, from the dead to the living, right up to the dog aptly named Präsens (the present in German), the film unfolds a story of nested devourings, like this Chad Gadya , a cumulative counting rhyme sung in Italian where everyone, from the mouse to the cat, from the cat to the dog... ends up being beaten in the next verse.