The Pathos of Richard Dreyfus, 1998, video, color, sound, total running time 8 minutes and 50 seconds
The Pathos of Richard Dreyfus collects and strings together in chronological order every scene from Steven Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind in which the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming appears. Regardless of the duration of the scene, if the Devil’s Tower appeared on screen in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it was included in The Pathos of Richard Dreyfus. From glimpses of the Devil’s Tower in pencil sketches, to zooms into maps, to tracking shots around mashed potato sculptures of the tower, to the actual tower itself – the obsessive collecting of imagery in The Pathos of Richard Dreyfus mirrors the fanatical qualities that mark the movie’s misunderstood protagonists.
The soundtrack for the piece is a repeated five second sample of a rising string buildup with an agitated Richard Dreyfus gutturally barking “not right, not right – not right,” while failing to give sculptural form to his mysterious vision of the yet unseen Devil’s Tower. The audio loops for the duration of the piece and briefly synchronizes when it reaches the video source from which it was extracted. This project is a collaboration with Tom Kehn.
