Last Friday night I got to see Reid Farrington’s Passion Project at 3LD in the Financial District, an explosion of Carl Dreyer’s classic film Passion of Joan of Arc into a spatial performance.
There are three different prints and partial prints of the film. Farrington began this project by juxtaposing them: watching them simultaneously side by side. When we first entered the space, he had them playing on the wall. When the performance itself started, we moved into the second half of the room in which he’d constructed a ten-by-ten room of ropes and wood-and-canvas panels. He’d covered the walls around the space with coffee sacks. The performer, Laura K. Nicoll, entered the space dressed as Joan of Arc and manipulated the panels while the film played all around her. Her manipulation of the projection surfaces allowed Farrington to recreate the movie spatially in such a way that each of the characters appeared where the actor would have stood in the set, all in relationship to the two Joans: the projected Maria Falconetti and her breathing doppelganger Nicoll.
After the show, the friend who I went with asked Farrington about what using all three prints in the spatial part of the experience added to the performance? He answered that it allowed him to show all three in sequence without looping. I didn’t find that answer particularly satisfying. I’m not a film guy, but it seemed to me that he could have done the same thing with just one print. My impression of the Project was that it was really two different ways of exploring the same film, and both of them were interesting but not dependent on each other. The first was the juxtaposition of the three prints side-by-side, and the second was to play it as a spatial performance. I found the first interesting, and the second inspiring. I’m curious now to try to do the same thing with a different film. Preferably one that’s short and that I can get the rights to.
No comments:
Post a Comment