Description
Directed by Arakawa
Written by Madeline Gins
Cast: Jonathan Leeds
Narrator: Maurice Blanc
For Example, the second of [the] two feature-length films, was photographed and directed by Arakawa and written by Madeline Gins. The film is a strikingly detached account of its protagonist, a seven-year-old, seemingly drunk homeless boy as he wanders the Bowery and other streets in downtown NewYork City. As Arakawa describes it in a contemporaneous letter, “the young boy searches for ways to be in the world. He is abandoned and so must find out by himself. What he demonstrates after all is poetry of action. The child happens to live on the Bowery. His experiments take place there and in the neighborhood playground.” This also happens to be the neighborhood of the artists’ studio and home.
Shot in a documentary style, the camera observes the child’s daily life in the streets and every step of his investigation into the constantly shifting relationship between his body and its surroundings. Arakawa and Gins playfully examine the combination of real-time documentary and fiction; “[t]his is a true story” the narrator tells the audience at the beginning of the film, and at some point he even states, “the driver noticed [his] camera, although so far the child hadn’t.” In a somewhat discomfiting, voyeuristic pursuit, the audience continues to follow this boy through his search for some kind of change in his environment until he experiences atraumatic seizure in a telephone booth. As the audience discovers that the documentary is in fact not a documentary, in film critic and historian Amos Vogel’s words, “here reality itself—the truth of the image—is insidiously called into question... does it matter if he is ‘real’ or ‘only’ an actor? There exists, says the filmmaker, a child such as this somewhere and his life can be documented before he is found.” As Vogel suggests, the film is “as much a new reality as a new ‘story’”.
At the time of production, Arakawa and Madeline Gins were deeply engaged in research on the workings of the mind and the body in the process of perceiving the world. They describe For Example as a “melodrama” that unfolded alongside their open-ended research project into the nature of meaning. The film appears to be in dialogue with Lionel Rogosin’s On the Bowery (1957) in terms of its iconic setting and socio-critical stance, as well as its exploration of docufiction in cinema. Elements of the film also bring to mind the cinematic influence of Charlie Chaplin’s body movements and his strange interactions with objects, people, and surroundings. These experiments inform much of the Japanese and American duo’s later creative practice, philosophical concepts, and artworks, from their poetry to their visionary architectural constructions. While presenting rare and new insight into Arakawa and Madeline Gins’ early works and creative collaboration, For Example reveals the unique intersection of the New York conceptual art movement and the radical experimentation of film as an artistic medium of the 1960s and 1970s.
Following For Example’s premiere in 1972 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the films of Arakawa have been widely discussed, exhibited and praised by their audiences. Film critic Roger Greenspun of the New York Times particularly commends the young actor Jonathan Leed’s “remarkable” performance. Both films by Arakawa were included in Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art. Vogel describes For Example as “unquestionably a major work of the American Avant-Garde of the seventies” and continues to praise Arakawa’s second film as “original and even more subversive than Why Not.” The film was screened at the Venice Biennale 1978, Venice, Italy; NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo, Japan; Aichi Arts Center, Nagoya, Japan; Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, Yamaguchi, Japan; Park Tower Hall Image Forum, Tokyo, Japan; Kyoto Cinema, Kyoto, Japan; Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, Japan; Forum Lenteng, Jakarta, Indonesia; Toyo University, Tokyo, Japan; Kansai University, Osaka, Japan; and dozens of other venues.
Description provided by the Reversible Destiny Foundation
Creation Date
1971
Format
16mm
Run Time
01:34:00
Components (0)