Richard Phillips Motion Portraiture
Painter and now video artist Richard Phillips is doing some interesting motion portraiture, mixing beautiful women into great architectural situations while drawing on iconic film references. His first motion portrait was of Lindsay Lohan:
Through Phillips’ frame, the invincible openness that makes Lohan endlessly watchable on film becomes the ignition point of each image—the pause before movement that allows for the identities of actor and director to meld, where the realities of expectation and projected image are contrasted with multilayered identity. In these full-frame motion portraits of Lohan, Phillips repudiates the cynicism and exploitation associated with the artistic and commercial convention of the screen test—interrogating its manipulative or coersive undertones—and instead uses this form to present the actor separate from media, narrative, and casual representation.
Fashion films and motion portraiture are tricky to pull off and for the most part, motion architecture is relegated to real estate agents shooting cell phone video. I think Richard Phillips has created something interesting here that represents both the person and the place without being trite or becoming a 90′s perfume ad. These videos move the viewer through some spectacular places like the John Lautner Chemosphere House which he used for the motion portrait of Sasha Grey.
Looking over the roadside from the vantage point of one the most legendary residences in modern and cinematic history, Sasha reflects on her relationship to the San Fernando Valley landscape- the location of some of her most noted adult performances. Back inside the circular vortex of the Chemosphere, Sasha’s inner dialogue projects an equally diaristic and imaginary self-portrait that pushes beyond the extremes of her past filmography and into her new future.
Motion needs a narrative and a through-line to keep the viewer interested. A motion portrait doesn’t necessarily need a 3 act structure but there should be a story behind the imagery so that it’s not just vapid and pretty. When I’m shooting a portrait, I often tell the subject to have a thought behind their eyes (even if it’s their grocery list) so that they don’t look like the lights are on but no ones home. Richard Phillips went to great lengths to use an established language that draws on the history of cinema to layer his projects with references that act as signposts for conveying the thought behind the portraits.
The film depicts Lohan engaged in a reformulation of classic performance tropes, with references including the iconic imageryof the Homeric identity split of Brigitte Bardot in Godard’s “Contempt” and the psychosexual amalgam of Bibi Anderson and Liv Ulman in Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona.” Employing a timeless Hollywood setting, Phillips repurposes an isolated Malibu mansion as a psychologically-charged backdrop, weighted with the desire and speculation of modern cinematic performance.
The selection of wardrobe and costume designer even played a roll in establishing the dialog:
Costume designer Ellen Mirojnick (“Basic Instinct,” “Fatal Attraction,” “Wall Street,” “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps”) dressed Sasha for the part in an array of lingerie and military inspired garments to highlight the dual nature of her masculine / feminine persona.
Cinema has it’s own sign language that can be tapped into to help communicate a story to an audience:
Unlike the written word, film’s basic unit, which Metz argues is the shot, is neither symbolic nor arbitrary but iconic; therefore, it is laden with specific meaning. Metz suggests that film is a language in which each shot used in a sequence works like a unit in a linguistic statement – Film Reference Semiotics
It’s clear that Richard Phillips puts a lot of thought and research into his motion work. He taps into the visual language of cinema to communicate the story behind the portraits and as a result his videos transcend the genres disjointed imagery which often resembles bad perfume commercials.
These videos are presented by VMagazine and will be included in “Commercial Break,” presented by the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Venice, Italy, June 1 – 5, 2011, concurrent with the 54th international exhibition of the Venice Biennale.
