Pierre Huyghe Third Memory split screen film
Huyghe’s work — entitled The Third Memory — really entertained me. I usually can’t care less about photos and texts arranged in grids, or videos, but there was a lot of weird human interest here. The work is about John Wojtowicz, who held up a bank in Brooklyn in 1972 and whose story was the basis for the script of Sidney Lumet’s 1975 movie Dog Day Afternoon. It’s just a collection of documents and films. But they all happen to be riveting, and one of them Huyghe actually made himself: a reenactment of certain scenes from the real robbery. For example, at one point you might be seeing, on one side of a split screen, a very stout, very white-haired Brooklyn-accented oldster performing: that’s actually Wojtowicz, who’s been out of prison for several years now. In a sleazy modern French TV studio, he’s ordering low-rate actors playing bank staff to put their hands up. At the same time, on the other half of the screen, a young Al Pacino orders highly experienced Hollywood actors playing bank staff to do the same thing.
The title The Third Memory refers to the supposed creation made from two different types of memory — those that are real on the one hand (the robber’s own subjective sense of what happened to him) and fictional on the other (the movie’s construction of events). The result is a third type of memory: cultural-mythic (all of us, kind of — all our heads now accommodating this rich myth of lowlife goings-on in early-’70s New York). Along with the film, there were framed news photos of Wojtowicz telling off the cops outside the bank and being arrested. He looked thin and handsome — in fact, uncannily like the young Al Pacino.
)
)
)
Daniele Villa works on very small collages (average size 5cm x 5cm). he is member and founder of citrullo international, an independent film production company focused on documentaries, animation and books on cinema.he exhibits in several galleries in Rome and works as an illustrator.
http://www.mosaic-blog.com/