Pictures of an Exhibition(ist): Films by Brian Frye
The work of Brian Frye, a 23-year-old from northern California recently transplanted to New York, is different. And the six films in his first one-person show–at Chicago Filmmakers tonight, when Frye will be present–represent some of the most original work I’ve seen recently from a new filmmaker. Redefining the relationship between spectator and film, his somewhat hermetic works–mostly silent, all in black and white, and varying in length from two minutes to about half an hour–don’t offer any of the usual moviegoing pleasures: not only are there no plots, but Frye’s images are neither entertaining nor seductive, nor is his editing particularly rhythmic or immediately satisfying. Instead his unassuming, almost offhanded work points toward an intellectual cinema that questions the ways we see and know the world.
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The two-minute Brian Frye Fails to Masturbate shows the filmmaker fully clothed, sitting in a chair fidgeting, seemingly unsure what to do with his hands. Inspired by the joke that student performance artists just get up in front of the audience and masturbate, this film in one sense merely illustrates the stereotype: Frye makes his body the subject. But because he appears not to know how to sit and where to look, and because the film is not obviously artful (it’s a single take not particularly well framed), his body becomes the locus of instability rather than a fetishized object. The title adds an element of pathos, making his discomfort ours as Frye announces his failure at the one thing virtually every young man can succeed at.
Frye’s point in 6.95: Striptease, as in all his work, is that we cannot directly know the world by seeing it. Among various short texts he’s written are meditations, influenced by Wittgenstein, on the limitations of language, including film language. In one essay he argues that since the moving image exists not on the screen or the retina but in the viewer’s mind, which is what creates the movement, cinema is not a “reflection of the Real” but rather “a self-aware language.” While Frye’s self-abnegating presentation of his body surely has a psychological dimension, offering an alternative to narcissistic art, that presentation also has a deeper, almost epistemological level. Frye qualifies his own physical presence because he believes that film never really allows us to know anyone, and he underlines film’s materiality to foreground that unbreachable gulf. Offering us the inverse of cinematic “attractions” to entertain and delight, Frye makes of himself almost an antipresence–a human image who never provides the sensuous physical illusion of “being there” with us.
This footage comes from a time before Frye was born, of course, but he says it wasn’t chosen by chance. Citing Hannah Arendt’s book The Human Condition, he calls the Kennedy era “the swan song of political life in America. Arendt talks about words and deeds, how the action of the citizen can be significant. The president is the stand-in for the political life that’s been relinquished by the populace. But I don’t think people think about the president in the same terms anymore–he’s no longer someone you expect to respect.” And indeed the larger-than-life cultural status of Kennedy and Khrushchev–emblems of a struggle for world power–heightens the impact of these fragments. Frye’s form once again denies any heroism, but the denial here and elsewhere isn’t just political or epistemological: the self-abnegating severity of his images, their weird standoffishness, has an almost irrational emotional component.
