Galerie Joyce Yahouda is currently screening film maker Perry Bard’s project
Man with a Movie Camera.

As you sit on the comfy white sofa in gallery 2 you’ll become totally absorbed by two movies running side by side. On the left, Vertov’s 1929 masterpiece Man with a Movie Camera, a silent black-and-white one-hour documentary of urban life in 1920s Russia. On the right runs a re-make of the same movie, a scene by scene re-interpretation created by members of the general public. Bard’s contribution to this project is coming up with the concept, but volunteers actually shoot the footage, which they then submit via the internet. Anyone can participate, and no movie clip is excluded except for blatantly pornographic or violent submissions. Each scene is indexed and a software synchronises the two films, selecting clips at random if there’s more than one submission for the same scene.
The effect of this double-projection is hypnotic, as your eye continually wanders back and forth between the two versions, looking for visual and semantic echoes. And, I must admit, Bard is quite brilliant to come up with an art project which involves absolutely no physical input from the artist, except to come up with the initial idea. Though, admittedly, coming up with the idea is the hard part… If you’d like to participate in this “experiment in database cinema for the 21st century”, check out http://dziga.perrybard.net.

Galerie Joyce Yahouda
space 516
Perry Bard
Man with a Movie Camera
exhibition dates: March 27 – April 26
www.joyceyahoudagallery.com