Take Time to Rewind at the Hirshhorn's 'Realisms'
Nothing Is Static About These Moving Pictures

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 21, 2008

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.

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.