Educational Media Reviews Online

According to liner notes on the Hors Pistes vol. 3 DVD, the Hors Pistes short film festival, held annually since 2006 at the Pompidou Center in Paris, is “a (momentary) gathering together of heterogeneous fragments of material within a single time and place.” This somewhat inaccurate definition applies to most film festivals if it is understood not to be taken exceedingly literally. Larger film festivals project several films at the same time at different venues, but films certainly could be projected all at the same time in different places or all in the same place but at different times. Small film festivals tend to have films shown in succession at the same venue. This is the case of Hors Pistes, which roughly translates as “Off Track.” The festival’s 14 films were screened during the last weekend in March 2008. Although there is brief information on all the films appearing at the festival, only 3 have been included on the DVD. There is, however, no mention of the selection process for the inclusion of the three chosen films on the third volume of the Hors Pistes DVD series.

The first film included on the DVD is The Music of Regret (2006), a 40-minute 35mm American film from 2006. The filmmaker, Laurie Simmons, is an established artist living in New York whose concerns have been largely related to the photographic representation of women using dolls, and cut-outs. The Music of Regret transposes her ideas into a kind of Broadway musical experimentation in 3 acts. The acts are not related by anything but the fact that they employ conventions found in theatrical, film and television musicals and each act uses different techniques in surprisingly witty and entertaining ways. Her cast and crew are stellar: The music is by Michael Rohatyn whose work prior to this film included Forty Shades of Blue and the Ballad of Jack and Rose. The cinematographer is Edward Lachman, whose 25 year previous experience included Desperately Seeking Susan, Less than Zero and Prairie Home Companion (director Robert Altman’s last film), which starred Meryl Streep. This film also stars Meryl Streep in the second act. It’s entirely possible that Mr. Lachman’s working acquaintance with Ms. Streep facilitated her decision to appear in this film. Her performance in Act Two is, not surprisingly, effortlessly fitting for the piece. She performs a variety of singing duets with several Charlie McCarthy-looking ventriloquist dummies that are differentiated in their personalities by their costumes. The songs and stagings are old-Hollywood clichés made fresh and poignant through the performances and the masterful cinematography. It is the exceptional quality and professionalism of the cast and crew that elevate this production from what could have been another attempt at derivative camp into a work of art. Act One features a very sad descent into suicide using dolls in beautifully arranged settings. It is absolutely riveting as both a send-up of contemporary Broadway musicals and a valuable contribution to the genre. In less professional hands this exercise could have resulted in a sophomoric attempt at imitating Todd Haynes’ Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story in which he used Barbie and Ken dolls to stand in for the Carpenters. Act Three employs professional dancers to “audition” as guns, birthday cakes, and clocks reminiscent of early musicals and television commercials from the 1950s in which human legs danced while attached to giant inanimate objects affixed to their torsos and heads, similar to the dancing cigarette package in the Old Gold Cigarette commercials.

The second film on the DVD is French playwright Eléonore Weber’s 38-minute, 35mm film Les Hommes sans gravité (Men Without Gravity) from 2007. Set in a ramshackle old house, two gay men uncover their sexual personalities while looking over piles of accumulated junk in the house. Their discoveries lead to conversations and musings that affirm who they are as individuals. A third character, a woman appears from time to time to question them or to act as the voice of reason. The story is not so much a linear narrative that resolves itself at the end; it is more a theatrical back-story for the characters. The film reflects the ideas of the playwright and leads the audience to think about the differences between action-driven conventional narratives, and more character-driven theatrical pieces. In this way the film interacts with the audience to construct additional narratives around the information presented as a type of cinema/theatre convergence.

In the Wake of a Deadad (U.K., 2006), the last film on the DVD, is Andrew Kotting’s 64-minute video reflection on the life and death of his father. Kotting constructed blow-up effigies of his dead dad and deployed them in numerous locales that had either meant something to his father or later to himself. He videotaped the deployment in each of the 65 locations including Hollywood, Mexico and the Pyrenees thus producing 65 short little films on the same topic but in different locations. In its original installation at the CGP Gallery in London, the show consisted of 65 monitors each showing a different clip, all positioned in an exhibition space allowing the exploration of the events at the pace and intensity of each attendee. In fact, this type of exhibit is precisely what Elisabeth Wetterwald, the author of the DVD’s liner notes, stated as being the definition of the Hors Pistes film festival: “a (momentary) gathering together of heterogeneous fragments of material within a single time and place.” Kotting’s original exhibit is exactly where one found these numerous films being shown in a single time and place. As an exhibit, the bombardment of images from 65 monitors creates a moving experience for the viewer touring the gallery and allows non-linear interaction; as a film with each fragment sequentially edited together, the feature-length 64 minutes are repetitiously numbing and rob the work of the spontaneous emotion sought in the viewer. This unfortunately leads to the viewer’s mind wandering and wondering about other films employing the technique of photographing an inanimate object in a variety of places. The French film Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulin (2001) certainly comes to mind as does the most recent Up in the Air (2009). Surely, the idea of this type of personal tourist photography has been around long before a commercial film like Amélie incorporated the practice into its narrative, and so a serious feature-length auto/biographical film that only contains the placing and photographing of the effigy does not reproduce the installation experience, it unfortunately reduces it to its bare devices. In this case, the exhibition had a sense of reflection and a way of paying homage to the memory of the artist’s father by allowing for each little video to stand on its own or to be contemplated in its multiplicity. The arrangement of the videos into one film regrettably lessens the impact of the artist’s original work. The question thus remains about whether the original installation could be preserved on a different medium with the same effect and, if so, a further question would be about the most appropriate way of documenting the installation to reproduce the impact of the original.

This DVD is recommended as a stimulating sample of contemporary visual arts.