Moving Pictures

The very best art in this show isn't about dreams, per se. It's not even about the mechanics of movies. It's about the world beyond the silver screen and how the movies touch it. The show's organizers -- Hirshhorn curators Kerry Brougher and Kelly Gordon -- use the term "cinema effect" to point to how movies have managed to encroach on our reality. Even in the most normal lives, they say, there has come to be a blurring of the boundaries between fact and cinematic fiction. Movies may even help to build our notion of what the world is like. New main streets in America are built to look like Main Street in "The Music Man."

Every culture's norms and codes have to be stored somewhere. Medieval knights found out about themselves by reading chivalric romances. The huge castle of Tintagel, in Cornwall, may have been built mainly as an Arthurian fantasy; it barely had a military function, and its name came out of fiction that preceded it. Today, we've got movies to keep us posted on who we are and what we are supposed to do. Which means that when the works in "Dreams" probe what cinema is all about, they're also poking at the realities it builds.

The 12 monitors in a work by the Czech-born Berliner Harun Farocki show decade-by-decade footage of 20th-century workers leaving their factories -- and dare us to figure out which screen's clip was lifted from a documentary and which from a feature film.

Another highlight of the Hirshhorn show is a nine-minute black-and-white "wrestling movie" called "Bear," by Steve McQueen. (No, not that Steve McQueen. This one's a British artist born in 1969. See how movies can affect our reading even of a name?) In "Bear," two naked black men square off for a fight, but the imagery is full of doubts and ambiguities that normal moviemaking would rule out. In McQueen's fight club, we're not sure what's affection and what's aggression, what's standard machismo and what's the homophilia such machismo hates.

The scene is shot from all the normal, polite camera angles, but there are also shots that show the fighters from below, with their genitals flopping as in a two-beast tussle from a nature film. Which, of course, zooms in on the racial issues also treated in the piece. For decades, Hollywood presented blacks as more nearly animal than whites. (Some would say that tradition continues, with more blacks still playing violent, "primeval" hoods than steady, "civilized" heroes.) This piece by McQueen -- who happens to be black -- unsettles some of those established images.

Other pieces also look at how the world gets built in moving pictures. A very recent piece called "Up and Away," by Michael Bell-Smith, clips the landscape backgrounds out of the very earliest video games, and presents them in an endless scroll of hypersaturated scenery and cityscapes. It's the sublime panorama from J.M.W. Turner, updated and brought home to every child's game console. Nineteenth-century romantics traveled far in search of landscapes that could match the ones their art fed them. Where can we go to find ours?

We can't simply run to our TV screens and cinemas, this show seems to say. The final projection in the exhibition, "Niagara" by German-born New Yorker Wolfgang Staehle, is the only one that seems straightforwardly realistic. It's simply a wall-filling projection of the great cascade, falling in what seems to be real time. But after being roughed up by this show's other moving images, our sense of what is real or not is shaky. For all of its reality effect, is Staehle's image truly any less a manufactured thing than Fay Wray's scream? Its live-looking footage has, after all, been carefully framed and shot and packaged for projection in a Hirshhorn gallery.

Can we trust it to be real? Or is it like one of those moments in a dream that seem as unremarkable as normal life -- until your boss begins to sprout a tusk?

Dreams, Part 1 of "The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image," runs through May 11 at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum, on the south side of the Mall at Seventh Street SW. Call 202-633-1000 or visit http://www.hirshhorn.si.edu. Part 2, titled "Realisms," runs from June 20 to Sept. 7.