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

When you're up against a static picture, there's not really such a thing as just looking at it, passively. You're either paying close, glorious attention to what you're seeing, and thinking, as your eyes move here and there across its surface, or you're barely there with it at all.

With artful videos and films, you can usually drift along on the narrative of what is going on -- there's even a kind of skeleton of "plot" just in the fact of waiting for one shot to follow another -- at the same time as you think about the experience you're undergoing. There's a kind of almost automatic layered-ness to the experience that you have to nearly force on static images.

In fact, that layered-ness -- the way you can take in the content of a film at the same time as you consider how it's crafted, and how the details of its crafting affect content -- comes close to being the subject of the entire Hirshhorn show.

Not that its works are only about the nature and structures of cinematic art. Most of them have real, compelling subjects. Ian Charlesworth's "John" gives us a close look at a poor teenager from Northern Ireland. Candice Breitz's "Mother + Father" is about the trials of parenting. Corinna Schnitt's "Living a Beautiful Life" is about young people's dreams for the future. Pierre Huyghe, the French artist, gives us "Third Memory," which is about the real 1972 bank robbery that was the basis for the movie "Dog Day Afternoon." And "Godville," by Omer Fast -- who was widely acclaimed as by far the best contributor to this year's Whitney Biennial -- looks at the lives and thoughts of reenactors in Colonial Williamsburg. (Presciently, the Hirshhorn bought the piece two years ago, before Fast hit it really big.)

This show is called "Realisms" because it's about the real world out there, beyond the cinema. But in almost every case, the works in it look at how "reality" -- or at least our vision of it -- interpenetrates with what's on TV and in movies. That is, they look into the "Cinema Effect" of the Hirshhorn project's title.

John, the Northern Irelander, is in fact a normal working-class lad who has already been paid to play himself -- to "just be himself" -- in various "realistic" films and ads. Charlesworth's 13-minute video documents the boy as he responds to a director's off-screen prompts, which ask him to play out dramas from his everyday life. The strange thing is that John seems most real when he's "playing" himself for the camera, and most wooden when he is just standing there waiting to be told what to do -- really being himself, right then and there. We're left wondering whether this enthusiastic watcher of TV feels most alive, even in his own life, when he's got a recognizable part to play -- a part he's seen before on-screen. Or whether, with or without TV's help, his life's most salient moments -- squabbles with a drunken dad, bullying or being bullied, asserting ownership of his girlfriend -- already come deeply scripted by the society around him. That makes it easier for him to reenact those iconic moments than to "improvise" a first-time conversation with a film director.

Breitz's "Mother + Father" follows through on the possibility that screenplays might shape behavior. It presents clips from famous movies whose actors play parents in crisis. In one room, six monitors show Meryl Streep, Susan Sarandon, Diane Keaton and three other women acting out the classic cinematic scripts for mothering. Next door, it's Donald Sutherland, Dustin Hoffman and another four actors who get to be the archetypal Hollywood fathers. The funny thing is that these 12 professionals, sources of our myths of parenting behavior, are less convincing in their roles than the Northern Irish boy who may have learned to be a kid from such performances.

Schnitt's "Beautiful Life" goes the other way: She imagines what it would be like to use real people's dreams as the basis for a film. Schnitt interviewed 14- and 15-year-old students in Los Angeles on what a gorgeous future life would be, then uses their replies as scripts for adult actors to play out. A good-looking husband sits beside his pool, saying, "I enjoy having a hot mistress every few months. . . . I'm a very successful person, and I know I'm contributing to the world." A perfectly groomed wife stands in her deluxe living room, explaining that "sometimes I get so busy I don't go to see [my friends] as often as I'd like." There's something rather poignant about pie-in-the-sky lives that are so pedestrian they can only be turned into films about banality.

The bank robber John Wojtowicz knows that his life was thriller-worthy. He saw it turned into a blockbuster by Sidney Lumet, with Wojtowicz's part played by Al Pacino. For "Third Memory," one of Huyghe's most successful works, the artist built a set on which Wojtowicz, long out of prison, could reenact the true facts behind "Dog Day Afternoon." But it's clear that Wojtowicz is more invested in crafting a rival cinematic take on things -- with him as the cliched gun-totin' hero -- than in coming to grips with any actuality. At one point he corrects the "Dog Day" version of events by insisting that what he calls his own "real movie" had more gunplay.

And then there's Fast's amazing "Godville." It starts out in reality, or very nearly there. Fast conducts standard interviews with Colonial Williamsburg's reenactors, in costume, on subjects ranging from the historic lives they play at work to the real lives they live at home. And then, exercising the godlike power of any film director, he splices and dices that footage so that its meaning barely holds together, or at least defies his speakers' original intentions. Time switches seamlessly between colonial and post-9/11 America. The interviewees' personas flicker back and forth between the characters they play and the real people they are. A woman's words are tweaked and twisted so that you can't tell if she's an 18th-century feminist or a 21st-century chauvinist. Fast's astounding editing creates a kind of cross-temporal schizophrenia. But it also implies that such madness lurks in every cut from one shot to the next, in every documentary you've seen.

Curators Anne Ellegood and Kristen Hileman have brought in at least another 10 works that are just about as captivating, by some of today's most original artists -- including Artur Zmijewski of Poland; the Italian Francesco Vezzoli; Brits Runa Islam, Jeremy Deller and Phil Collins; the German Christian Jankowski; and Americans Mungo Thomson, Kerry Tribe and Matthew Buckingham. But I'd need this whole section of the newspaper to even start to do them justice. And then I'd be asking readers to spend precious time reading me, when they ought to be saving their every spare minute, hour and day to take in this Hirshhorn show.

Realisms runs through Sept. 7 the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum, on the south side of the Mall at Seventh Street SW. Admission is free. Call 202-633-1000 or visit http://www.hirshhorn.si.edu.