Erased James Franco
An actor, a leather chair, a fern, and a prosthetic leg
Posted by: Robert Runyon on Sep 07, 2009 at 02:00PM
4 Comments
There’s a phrase that popular TV chef Gordon Ramsay always uses on the British version of his show Kitchen Nightmares. He walks into some inn with a stone facade with a name like the Pusslewick Arms (you see, the title always has to have the suffix “-wick” and end in Arms) and sees a single chef working in a grease-stained kitchen, dropping individual serving bags of lamb in a boiling pot and plating it by scooping the skin off the top of some four-day-old gravy. Ramsay asks how much this restaurateur is charging for this dish of plastic lamb and days-old gravy. The response usually is a ridiculous amount, around £15 ($30 or so), to which Ramsay wipes his nose with his forearm, furrows his brow and incredulously asks this question: “Are you taking the piss?”
That was my response to Erased James Franco.
Honestly, I think Franco and director Carter’s (no other name; just Carter) main endeavor was to take the piss during this movie, much in the same way Rauschenberg did with his “Erased de Kooning.” Of course, a major difference between the works is Rauschenberg did his erasing on a work from arguably the greatest living artist at the time, while Carter works with James Franco, whose most critically acclaimed individual work was in an action pot comedy. It’s not that Franco is a bad actor (he’s actually quite good), it’s just that erasing him doesn’t quite have the same effect. If this work were done with, say, Daniel Day-Lewis, then you’d see something as off-putting and magnetic as Carter wanted this to be.
The movie itself has no narrative structure. It simply is Franco with a series of props: a red leather upholstered chair, a desk, a brass statue of a head (always turned away from the camera), balloons, a fern, a Franco-created painting, glasses of water, several telephones, and a prosthetic leg. Much of it consists of Franco answering the phones, listening to some barely audible lines, giving a grunt or sigh as a response, and then hanging up. As a seminar in acting through grunts, sighs, and facial expressions, it succeeded.
Then he would take this seminar to other daily activities such as drinking water. He would pick up a glass with a whole hand, then with only a few fingers, and then saddle-horn style spilling the water all over his face in the process. He would then show us the many ways one can eat crackers. I wondered to myself if he would also act out going to the bathroom. The next scene, he was sitting in the chair, looking at the camera, squirming, grunting, and breathing hard for a bit, and then let out a sigh of relief. My question was answered.
This work was an endurance test for the audience. More than 20 people walked out of the screening I attended, and you could see why. The four-minute sequence where Franco rotates a chair 360 degrees was like the Paul Rudd clean-up scene from Wet Hot American Summer but not played for laughs. The sequence where the camera follows Franco as he walks down a hall and through a doorway, then abruptly stops at a wall is repeated nine times. They were daring us to leave, it seemed. They acknowledged that they were making us watch a guy just walk into a wall over and over again. I stayed due to simple morbid curiosity and the hope that they would give us shirts on our way out of the theater with “I sat through Erased James Franco and all I got was this stupid shirt” written across the front.
Staying would pay off by the end, though. As Franco acted out parts as Rock Hudson and Julianne Moore from other movies, moving through the monologues and wrenching emotion from every word, it was a disconcerting effect—someone who has been so flat and inactive for the past hour suddenly feels and there’s no context as to why. The end is a culmination, as Franco finally stops giving the camera furtive glances with grunts, and he looks directly through the camera out at the audience and repeats the words, “I love you.”
At its most successful, Erased James Franco mined emotion from little to no context at all. At its worst, it was a guy sitting around showing us how to eat crackers.
Which brings me back to Chef Ramsay’s question. Were Franco and Carter taking the piss? I certainly hope they were. If the film was meant to mess with the audience and their expectations, forcing them to squirm in their seats as Franco holds a flashlight in his mouth as he writes on notebook paper for five minutes, and ask them how much nothing they are willing to sit through, it wildly succeeded. If they were actually serious about that, then Erased James Franco was one of the most self-indulgent works I’ve ever seen.
I also didn’t enjoy myself much at this screening, and certainly Carter & Franco are asking a lot of their audience to sit through Erased James Franco. But I disagree with your reading here, Robert. The piece—about the construction & dismantling of narrative & identity, left us without either narrative or identity to hold onto throughout its 65 minutes. Fragments of character and story materialized briefly (a son and his copy father, a woman at a support group, etc) and then dissolved into a series of classic acting exercises: entering a room, drinking a class of water, answering the telephone. These are all part of a process of character (or identity) study.
A study is useful, though more to those in the audience who are engaged on a technical level. Carter was referencing a Rauschenberg drawing, and I did think that this hour long video piece might benefit from a different show space. A narrative-less drawing leaves its audience free to engage (and then disengage) for as long as they want. This film screening would have benefitted from a similar gallery-showing leaving the audience free to engage, ponder, and wander away. Sitting in a traditional darkened theater made me feel to much an unhappily captive audience. It also sets up expectations for story, character, and connection that Carter is simply not interested in answering.
Showing this in a gallery would definitely change the viewer’s relationship with it. I’m just surprised that option wasn’t available, with all the other things going on at the Works. Couldn’t it have fit in nicely along side Kalup Linzy’s work or robbinschilds? Still, we got the darkened theater. I would love to know if that was a decision on PICA’s part or on the part of Carter himself, because that definitely would change my idea of it.
I too would be interested in the curatorial backstory. I’m not saying it was successful—just that I disagree with an interpretation that is essentially, “this artist hates me/or is an idiot.”
And you’re right, we DID get the darkened theater, and MAN is that a lot to sit through- there was a line in the film that focused the whole thing, “I wanted to paint a picture but all I had was a face and lines.”
True all the way ’round on this one.
The film was originally shown in a gallery, In Paris, with other works like a sculpture of Franco’s leg (cool!).
http://www.yvon-lambert.com/_carter-A13.html
I liked seeing it in a theater though. As “annoying” as it was, it still allowed me to watch a wonderful and attractive actor, wander about. Kind of like watching a stranger on a bus that is really hot, you look at them as long as you can without them catching you’re eye. This film allowed me to watch an attractive face without worrying about getting busted by the person I was watching. Bravo Carter and Franco!!!!