Open Wide: Mouths On Screen

Maurice Pialat’s The Mouth Agape screens alongside two works of performance art concerning the mouth and language.

Mouth to Mouth (1975)
Dir. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
8min, Digital

English and Korean words appear on the screen, a mouth forms the shape of an “O,” then opens and closes. Is this the beginning of language? In this early videotape, the Korean-American conceptual artist and writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha isolates and repeats a simple, physical act—a mouth forming the eight Korean vowel graphemes—to convey the difficulty and loss of language caused by the distance and alienation of diasporic migration, colonization, and translation.

Open Book (1970)
Dir. Vito Acconci
10min, Digital

Performance and video artist Vito Acconci struggles to hold his mouth open and attempts to talk to the viewer, intoning in an almost unintelligible voice. As though under the authority of an implicit contract with the viewer, Acconci fights to keep his “promise” of remaining open. The controlled action is typical of the works in which Acconci sets up an implicit agreement to perform a specific act for the viewer.

The Mouth Agape (1974)
Dir. Maurice Pialat
82min, DCP

Monique (Monique Melinand) is dying of cancer, lying in bed in the apartment above the store her family owns while her philandering husband, Roger (Hubert Deschamps), carries on with life, groping the female customers. Her son, Philippe (Philippe Léotard), remains aloof and impatient. Her daughter-in-law, Nathalie (Nathalie Baye), wonders if she is witnessing her own future decline. The four individuals struggle to express—or even feel—their love for one another, as they await the inevitable.