It occurred to me in the course of writing the prior post on Mathias Poledna’s Imitation of Life that Disney’s Snow White has turned up in the work of another significant artist in recent years. That being in a pair of pieces by artist Pierre Huyghe; starting with his Snow White Lucie of 1997. The piece focuses on Lucie Dolène, the chantuese who had provided the voice for the character of Snow White in the dubbed French version of the film, and who decades later sued Disney studios for unpaid royalties. In Huyghe's piece, Dolène is seen sitting in an empty soundstage studio singing “Someday My Prince Will Come” while the story of her lawsuit appears at the bottom of the screen in subtitles.
Like Poledna’s piece, Snow White Lucie deals with the realities that reside behind the curtain of the entertainment industry’s machinations of artifice and make-believe. At the same time, it deals with another theme that occurs repeatedly throughout Huyghe’s work – that of ownership, copyright, and how it pertains to the common culture. This theme echoes throughout Huyghe’s sprawling 2006 installation Celebration Park, in which Snow White (along with other cultural entities) would again be invoked, although this time in name-only form, as one of a number of neon disclaimers...
One of Huyghe’s best-known works is the 2000 split-screen video installation The Third Memory. The work is based on the famous 1972 incident in which John Wojtowicz attempted to rob a Chase Manhattan branch in Brooklyn, which resulted in a hostage situation and a 14-hour standoff with police. The incident, of course, inspired the 1975 Sidney Lumet movie Dog Day Afternoon, which started Al Pacino in the role of Wojtowicz.
For The Third Memory, Huyghe has Wojtowicz himself revisit the sequence of events of that August day in 1972, offering a matter-of-fact walkthrough of the drama as he remembers them. The staging of this reenactment is done with the aid of a mock-up set of the bank, extras standing in as hostages and the like, and various props. Scenes from Lumet’s dramatization sometimes appear on one of the flanking screens, paralleling Wojtowicz’s own narrative by way of comparison and contrast.
With The Third Memory, Huyghe conflates Wojtowicz’s own lived experiences with that of a theatrical, adapted narrative; in the process allowing Wojtowicz the opportunity to “reclaim” his story from the realm of the mediated spectacle. It’s likely that Huyghe had originally developed the idea for the work from the fact that Wojtowicz had complained to the New York Times about how his story had been represented by Hollywood, and had requested that the paper offer him the chance to set the record straight. An arts editor from the Times responded:
"I'm very sorry to say no to this after all of our correspondence, but this article just won't work for us. The problem is that I just don't believe you have profoundly come to grips with the motives for your crime, and the complex relationship between art and reality in this instance."There is also the matter of how Huyghe’s presents and stages the reenactment, particularly in how it follows the format set by late-‘90s TV shows like America’s Most Wanted. The chief difference being that Huyghe allows the perpetrator to present an alternate narrative to the “based on a true story”/”ripped from the headlines” premise.
Also worth underscoring the way that The Third Memory riffs off of its cinematic precursor, by way of a double-edged pun on the idea of a "captive audience." In Dog Day Afternoon, director Lumet buttressed the pathos of the story by portraying Wojtowicz as a conflicted yet sympathetic character. His rapport with his hostages (as Lumet chose to tell the story) leads to a "Stockholm Syndrome" scenario; which is extended to the TV viewers and members of the surrounding Brooklyn community, many of whom come to regard Wojtowicz as something of a folk-heroic figure as the drama unfolds. As critic David Joselit has pointed out, the story had already – via print and broadcast sources – gone through numerous layers of mediated reframing before Lumet adapted it to film.
