Take Time to Rewind at the Hirshhorn's 'Realisms'

Nothing Is Static About These Moving Pictures

To really suck the marrow from a painting or photograph, you need the discipline to give it a good half-hour look.

So let's see. Every second of film or video has at least 24 frames. That's 1,440 different pictures going by your eyes every minute. Which means that the 627 minutes of footage shown in "Realisms," the terrific second installment of the Hirshhorn Museum's "Cinema Effect" project, offer up more than 900,000 images -- or something like 51 years of serious looking.

But not to worry. A paltry seven-hour visit to the "Realisms" show, which opened Thursday, was enough to make a good start on the wonders of its 19 recent videos and films. A few more visits like that, and you could really begin to do justice to this art.

The strange thing about a whole-day "Realisms" visit, however, is that it doesn't leave you drained the way a similar stay with the Old Masters would. Tired, yes -- very. But not wrung out by the act of looking itself. Instead, even as the show gets ready to shut down for the day, there's still an urge to take one more look at this film's twisted plot, or to loop through that video one last time, and unpack its editing.

The thing about such cinematic works, when they're as good as most of those now at the Hirshhorn, is that they carry you along with them, at the same time as they let you pull back to figure out what's going on, how and why.

For instance, in the 16-minute projection called "Lonely Planet," by Berliner Julian Rosefeldt, it's perfectly possible just to wallow in its gorgeous shots and cryptic action. You can simply sit back and take in its hero, a classic backpacking tourist with a Che Guevara patch on his knapsack, as he emerges from a desert in India, passes into the crowds of an Indian city, detours through one of the country's new call centers, then ends up wandering onto a soundstage in Bollywood. In any given minute of footage, there's enough one-thing-after-another event to keep the mind and eyes ticking over. Which means that while they're contentedly watching, the undistracted brain finds time to think.

You can think about how we're sometimes left observing the backpacker from behind, as though trailing him as he moves through the exotic settings, whereas sometimes we're bumping along through the exotica itself, as though the camera's looking through his eyes. Your second time through the looping film, you might even start to think about how one of those shooting conventions, occasionally both, is used in almost any Hollywood movie, without our ever noticing the contrivance they involve.

Or you might think about and pull apart the strangeness of the movie's single Bollywood section. At first our hero's just an accidental onlooker in a messy behind-the-scenes setting, full of stage flats and lighting equipment and makeup tables. Then he wanders over to one of those tables and begins to be made up as a movie backpacker, with attendants tweaking his rouge and tourist clothes. And then (cue the music) he becomes a dancer in a classic Bollywood set piece, whose artifice-filled action happens to take place behind the scenes on a soundstage, with the scruffy grips, gaffers and makeup girls as its dancing and singing cast -- alongside the actor those same girls had been making up as the script's "Visiting Backpacker."

It's not just that the Rosefeldt tourist is revealed to have been an actor all along -- though it does come as a surprise to realize just how much this apparent travel film is not a documentary. It's that, at least in this Bollywood passage, the actor -- who, as it turns out, is also the real film's director -- has been cast not only as a backpacker, but as an actor who is playing a backpacker, who then stars in a dance number whose fictional cast includes an actor-who-is-playing-a-backpacker.

Rosefeldt's film ends with a lovely scene in which the tourist, back in his "civilian," non-actor role, wanders from that soundstage onto an empty Indian street and out into the desert at the edge of town. Just as he's leaving civilization, he casually strides past a giant boom that's hoisting a movie camera aloft. And that's the same camera, you eventually realize, that has to be shooting the last shot in the film (and the first as it begins again) which looks down on the backpacker as he walks "alone" into the sands of India, and then out of them again.

There. It took about 500 words to begin to deal, at the most superficial level, with the barest bit of what goes on in a single one of this show's pieces. Imagine what it takes to dig as deep as one could go into the works of all 19 artists? And yet, the great thing is that burrowing through all the layers in these films and videos is almost part and parcel of the act of watching them.

In this kind of "time-based" art -- they've yet to invent a less clunky term to cover all the different varieties of film, video and digital creation involved -- the unpacking of action, meaning and technique goes on almost naturally, in a way that takes concerted effort with a still image.