Compelling story behind a compelling art installation at the Herbert in Coventry

They use the recollections of his lead actress, Johanna ter Steege, as their take on the film. But they try through a set of inventive strategies and visual devices to avoid the usual narrative traps by creating a hall of mirrors effect, where the moving images stretch off to infinity in either direction.

The background of their film is almost as compelling as the film itself. The Wilsons were allowed access to Kubrick’s archive at the London College of Communication. There they became interested in his visual and written research for a film based on the Louis Begley novel, Wartime Lies, about a Jewish boy and his aunt who escaped from Poland during the Second World War. Much of the filming was finished but the production was abandoned by Kubrick when he apparently became depressed by the horrors of the archive material that he was having to research.

The Wilsons borrow some of this concentration camp footage as a way of challenging the glamour of the ‘wardrobe shoots’ that they recreate with ter Steege’s collaboration. In one scene she gives a voice-over account of the experience of acting for Kubrick. She talks about her first meeting with him when he tricked her into telling him her life story twice over so that on the second telling she was forced to act as its narrator.

These details and the combination of the Wilson’s shots of ter Steege and Kubrick’s original footage draw you inexorably towards the screen and away from its mirrored reflections. But then, personal accounts and histories can often be more compelling than spectacle itself. It’s video art’s central dilemma.

Peter McCarthy

l For further details about exhibitions at the Herbert, call 024 7683 2386.