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The Week in Germany: Culture July 11, 2008 Beautiful Life: Roving Through the Realms of Reality on Film
With the exhibition "Realisms," the second part of the Hirshhorn Museum's ambitious exploration of moving-image art, "The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image," the works of 19 international artists, including four Germans and many Berlin-based artists, examine the role that cinema and related media such as television, home video, and digital entertainment play in complicating the distinction between fiction and reality in our lives. The exhibition focuses first on global cinema, mainstream television, and Hollywood production, before turning to take a closer look at documentaries and historical recreations. The works reveal the structural make-up and special effects as well as the psychology behind some filmmaking techniques and make the viewer more aware about the media products he or she is consuming. Works such as American artist Candice Breitz's "Mother + Father" play with the idea that our real life situations are influenced by what we see in the media. In this work, she presents cultural parenting stereotypes with clips of emotional scenes from popular movies with well-known actors and actresses which she has pieced together. French artist Pierre Hughye’s work "The Third Memory" takes this idea further, as he shows that the true story film adaptation has affected the recollections of the man on whom the film was based.
In "Living a Beautiful Life," German artist Corinna Schnitt hired actors to portray the dreams of teenagers in Los Angeles, which she scripted from their responses to the question, "What constitutes a beautiful life?" Their answers clearly reflect their consumption of popular culture through movies and self-help TV shows. Using a similar technique in the work "This I played tomorrow," German artist Christian Jankowski constructed a script from interviews with actors on the subject of filmmaking at the famed Italian film studio Cinecittá. The production techniques of TV programs are the subject in Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli's work "Marlene Redux: A True Hollywood Story!", in which the artist creates a fictionalized story about a celebrity-obsessed eccentric. The work employs documentary-type motifs, pull-away shots, dramatic voiceovers, and interviews.
German artist Julian Rosefeldt stars in his work "Lonely Planet" as a tourist traveling through present-day India, acquainting himself with the country's clichés, which include a call center and a Bollywood stage set. The camera moves from the first-person perspective of the artist to that of the observer and then the crew, exposing traditional techniques of filmmaking. American Mungo Thompson also lays bare the little details which inform the viewer that the seemingly real scenes of New York City he filmed in his work are simply a movie set.
Taking the idea of deconstruction and exposure even further, Bangladeshi artist Runa Islam has recreated the 360° shot from Fassbinder's 1974 film "Martha" by German cameraman Michael Ballhaus, one of the most internationally recognized cameramen, who most recently shot Scorsese's Oscar-winning film "The Departed." In his installation, however, the artist shows viewers how this legendary shot was created from a variety of angles and on multiple screens. Israeli artist Omer Fast filmed historical reenactors from the "living history museum" and landmark Colonial Williamsburg as they discuss current affairs and while they are "in character" in his work "Godville." He then, however, edited the subject matter of the present-day discussions with the 18th-century reenactment scenes into one continuous dialogue, revealing the power of the editor to determine how and what is portrayed on the screen and confusing the viewer's understanding of time and history.
So-called reality TV is the subject of British artist Phil Collins' work "Return of the Real." He interviews the participants in a Turkish reality show about which aspects of their lives and interactions were left out or altered by the producers. German artist Kota Ezawa took on another aspect of reality TV, namely the courtroom frenzy around the O.J. Simpson trial. Using actual footage from the final minutes of the 1995 trial, the artist overlaid the scenes with paper cut-out animation but retained the original sound. The viewer, receiving simplified and reduced visual cues, is given a new way of looking at the reading of the verdict. This new exhibition at the Hirshhorn, which runs until Sept. 7, 2008, will give you a new perspective on the techniques behind filmmaking and on the "cinema effect" of the media surrounding us, which increasingly becomes a larger part of our daily lives. Links:
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