“Whitney 2014 Biennial: Five Hot Artists to Watch”
The Hollywood Reporter
Written by John DeFore
March 7, 2014
Full article here
Los Angeles-based Dashiell Manley, one of the youngest artists there, got his MFA a mere three years ago from UCLA. His ambitious The Great Train Robbery, expected to take ten years or so to finish, will be a scene-by-scene remake of Edwin S. Porter’s landmark silent film, albeit not your ordinary remake: Each scene is shot against an abstract backdrop covered with shorthand-like descriptions of the film’s action, sequences that may obliquely refer to the original. The installation at the Whitney, a recreation of the film’s third scene, was previously exhibited in a LA storage unit…[DDET read more]
Why focus on this film, one wonders? “I had been wanting to remake a film for a while,” Manley says, “and there were two specific criteria that I was looking for: I wanted the film to be a first in as many ways as possible: first action film, first jump cut, etc. Second, I wanted the film to have been remade already.” Michael Chrichton’s 1978 version starred Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland. “More than the idea of simply remaking a film,” he continues, “I am interested in telling the same story over and over again and the core reasons why we do this.” Other scenes in the project will be produced in different styles; the one he’s making now will be “traditional hand drawn animation, no physical sets or props,” he says.[/DDET]
