"The Cinema Effect: Realisms" at the Hirshhorn

At the end of the classic 1952 film-about-a-film "Singin' in the Rain,"  the movie's last hidden reality is revealed: Debbie Reynolds had been serving as Jean Hagen's voice in Monumental Pictures' "The Dancing Cavalier."

The unmasking was pretty straightforward: Hagen had to sing the movie's title track, "Singin' in the Rain," in front of the audience at the film's premiere. [Above.] The problem was: Hagen couldn't sing, and that's why Reynolds had been serving as her voice. So in "Singin' in the Rain's" last big scene, Reynolds stood behind a curtain, singing as Hagen mouthed the words. The three male leads, led by Gene Kelly, pulled back the stage's curtain, revealing the film's -- "The Dueling Cavalier's" not "Singin' in the Rain's" -- last deception.

Well, sort of. Many of the rest of the deceptions in the film were hidden... but were plenty realized by contemporary audiences. In two of Debbie Reynolds' musical numbers, her voice was replaced with Betty Noyes'. (And in one of those two, Reynolds sang her own part later in the film.) In another scene, when Reynolds is allegedly dubbing over Hagen's voice in "The Dancing Cavalier," the voice of the dub isn't Reynolds', but Hagen's. The result is Jean Hagen doing Debbie Reynolds doing Jean Hagen.

The entire film is full of this kind of clever references to itself and to recent film history, all knowing nods to the false reality of movies. "Singin' in the Rain" is arguably the wittiest, slyest, most tongue-in-cheek exercise in playing with truth that Hollywood has ever produced. Among the children of the film are Mel Brooks' madcap comedies, mockumentaries such as "This is Spinal Tap," the Scary Movies, and The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image, on view at the Hirshhorn. The exhibition features contemporary video art and film installations that play with the idea of reality.

The show's curators, Anne Ellegood and Kristen Hileman, impressively and thoroughly demonstrate their thesis, that the question of what is real and what isn't is a particular interest among many film and video artists. But unfortunately most of the work here is tedious, academic and self-important. Installation after self-reflexive installation fails to tap into what makes reality plays so much fun: Mischievous wit. That's what makes painting's version of reality plays, trompe l'oeil, so much fun. And "Singin' in the Rain" isn't just witty, it's self-eviscerating. (To say nothing of centuries of gender-bending live theater!)

One of the reasons trompe l'oeil and "Singin' in the Rain" work is because the players -- painters, actors, directors, whomever -- delight in revealing the conceit behind the artifice. Who but a fool in a Hollywood movie would dance down a street in the rain (especially rain mixed with milk so it would show up on film)? The painted shadow of a trompe l'oeil nail or a 'tacked on' dollar bill is a smirking nod at the gag. With only a couple exceptions (most notably Francesco Vezzoli's self-obliterating Marlene Redux: A True Hollywood Story!), "Realisms" takes itself as seriously as a graduate student certain he's discovered something new when he hasn't.

At the heart of the show is Runa Islam's Tuin (1998), an artless multi-screen expose of how Rainer Werner Fassbinder created a shot in the 1974 film "Martha." We see the actors, the outdoor set, the cameras, and we see the track on which the cameras move. Islam limply presents mere deconstruction and re-creation as revelation. Compare Islam's installation to the way Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds play with the tools of their trade: In order for Kelly to tell Reynolds he's infatuated with her he cranks up all kinds of movie-making equipment --- a fan, bright lights, a cheesy romantic set -- to not just show Hollywood myth-making in action, but to poke fun at the silliness of both Hollywood and storybook romance. Islam just shows.

Reality plays work best when they acknowledge that the viewer is smart enough to understand the trick, not when they club him into understanding. (Witness: Gene Kelly spends much of "Singin' in the Rain" poking fun at recent Gene Kelly movies such as "The Three Musketeers" and "An American in Paris.") "Realisms'" curators apparently realized that little of the work stood on its own without acres of explanatory wall text. Sometimes -- such as in Mungo Thomson's New York, New York, New York, New York, a four-screen exploration of a movie set built to resemble New York City -- the wall-text precludes the viewer from having any chance to discover the work on his own. But more often the text works like a car salesman, trying to excuse a lame bit of narcissism, such as in Kerry Tribe's Double in which Tribe hired actors to play her. Or the Phil Collins piece in the show. (Would his career be possible without the invention of wall text?)

Next: What worked, and why.