L'Ellipse (1998)

Overview

Pierre Huyghe’s video installation consists of an extended panoramic screen bearing three projections shown in sequence from left to right. The left and right ends of the screen are clips from Wim Wenders’s 1977 film, The American Friend. The center screen displays an episode using the film’s original actor, Bruno Ganz, but created by Huyghe years later. This insertion is an ellipsis, a "fill" in a cinematic time gap, that connects the two original scenes to form one continuous real-time sequence. Huyghe’s intervention forms a juncture where art and life, fiction and reality, and past and present intersect.

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