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Grand Paris Texas
Date2009
MediumHigh-definition video with sound
DimensionsDuration: 54 minutes
Credit LineCollection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Museum purchase
Object number2007.8
Status
Not on viewCopyright© Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler
Category
Label TextTeresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler have worked as a collaborative artistic duo since 1990. Their projects in sculpture, film, and photography investigate how narratives are constructed, remembered, and collectively understood. The artists are best known for their meticulously crafted films that slip between reportage and invention, slowly unfolding with nonlinear plotlines and multiple levels of meaning. From one film project to the next, a defining feature of their cinematic work is its self-reflexivity: Hubbard / Birchler make films that reflect upon and foreground the art of filmmaking itself.
Grand Paris Texas, 2009, commissioned by the Modern, is the first in the artists’ trilogy of Texas-based films that explores the impact of moviemaking on a location. The location in this work is the small town of Paris, a place that became internationally famous following the release of Wim Wenders’s 1984 movie Paris, Texas—despite the fact that not a single frame was actually filmed there. Hubbard / Birchler’s Grand Paris Texas, shot entirely on location in East Texas, revolves around the town’s Grand Theater, a once-popular movie palace that had fallen into disrepair. Hubbard / Birchler’s film intercuts views of the dilapidated theater with interviews in which Paris residents reflect on the decline of the Grand, their personal relationships to cinema, and their recollections of Wenders’s movie, which many of them saw at the Grand in 1984 or rented at a local video store. Grand Paris Texas explores the lasting effects that movies impart on ordinary people.
Grand Paris Texas, 2009, commissioned by the Modern, is the first in the artists’ trilogy of Texas-based films that explores the impact of moviemaking on a location. The location in this work is the small town of Paris, a place that became internationally famous following the release of Wim Wenders’s 1984 movie Paris, Texas—despite the fact that not a single frame was actually filmed there. Hubbard / Birchler’s Grand Paris Texas, shot entirely on location in East Texas, revolves around the town’s Grand Theater, a once-popular movie palace that had fallen into disrepair. Hubbard / Birchler’s film intercuts views of the dilapidated theater with interviews in which Paris residents reflect on the decline of the Grand, their personal relationships to cinema, and their recollections of Wenders’s movie, which many of them saw at the Grand in 1984 or rented at a local video store. Grand Paris Texas explores the lasting effects that movies impart on ordinary people.
