Soapbox: DIY Gondry

I'm still not sure what a "Fellini campfire scene" is, but I acted in one. As I communed blissfully with a fake tree, nobody questioned my motivation. Some pranced. An angelic hipster had liberated us from the world of sound with a radio device pried from her dead boyfriend's palm after a train inexplicably hit them. She was (obviously) the title character in our movie, The Silencer of Music.

Conceived and shot in three hours as part of Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind Film Club installation at the Deitch Projects in Manhattan's SoHo, the five-minute film joined over a hundred others on the shelves of the show's fake video shop. Not surprisingly, the mingling of visitors and filmmaking groups on Gondry's contraption-filled back lot was a bit like being in one of the French director's films—albeit one way cooler than the Jack Black/Mos Def comedy on which the exhibit was based.

In the film, the screwballery was too much to handle, merely a convenient vehicle for what Gondry excels at: wonder. At the Deitch Projects, any expectations of a viewer/screen relationship completely disintegrated—with Gondry himself even wandering around some days—and wonder was all that remained. Wallpaper patterns rotated on cranks, conveyor-belt landscapes turned past model trains, and a Volkswagen carcass was fitted with an accelerator to control the speed of the video playing behind the rear window.

Two 45-minute workshops created a path through Gondry's world, reconnecting visitors with almost primal notions of film and play. In the first, we picked our genre. Wall instructions ("to be read OUTLOUD") encouraged us to hybridize. "Horror! Silent film! Bollywood musical!" we shouted. "Let's make a silent musical!" So arrived our title. During a second workshop, we plotted 10 scenes, concluding that The Silencer of Music would be neither silent nor musical. And then it was to the sets, where we had a camera (no retakes, no edits), a microphone, and an hour to shoot. "Imperfection is your ally," a handout noted.

Our film, which made far more calculable sense than I anticipated (at least, to me) joined a library containing works by twentysomethings and school groups, ranging from Something's Coming (a mockumentary about a production of West Side Story) to Elliot's Midlife Crisis or How To Kill the Guy You Love (co-starring Gondry and visitors Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon).

Archived carefully by Deitch assistants and made available to participants, Gondry has no plans to put the films online, though he's writing a book about the experience. Perhaps he can explain why we all knew exactly what to do when somebody shouted out for a Fellini campfire scene.

Watch The Silencer of Music:

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