The New York Times wrote a nice mini-review for my favorite art duo Hubbard / Birchler’s latest piece, Méliès, in which the artists investigate a remote Texas prominence with the unexpected name “Movie Mountain”:
How this unprepossessing peak got its name is the subject of Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler’s beautifully made two-screen, high-definition video “Méliès.” To the sound of melancholy piano music, the 24-minute film interweaves panoramic landscapes and interviews with local people who vaguely recall that someone shot a silent movie, a western, on or near Movie Mountain early in the 20th century. No one is quite sure who made that early film, but two of the interviewees say they had relatives who were employed as extras. The artists conclude that Gaston Méliès, brother of the cinema pioneer Georges Méliès, made that lost movie around 1910 or 1911 during a stopover in Sierra Blanca while relocating to California from San Antonio. […] The meandering, understated emergence of cinematic fact and fiction is captivating to watch.