Re-enacting cinema at the crossroads: Nicky Coutts’ passing place

Nicky Coutts’s film Passing Place (2009) consists of six re-enactments of the moments
in which crossroads appear in the following films: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex
(1967), Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law (1986), Robert Zemeckis’s Castaway (2000),
Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1985), Stuart Rosenberg’s
Cool Hand Luke (1967) and Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
(1972). The crossroads in Passing Place is located in rural Northumberland and the
‘re-enactors’ are local people who live or work nearby. Th e original films were chosen
by both Coutts and the participants, Passing Place being made during Coutts’s residency
at VARC (Visual Arts in Rural Communities) at Highgreen Tarset. While artists
have been ‘remaking cinema’ for over a decade, Coutts’s film should be seen against
the backdrop of the more recent phenomenon of re-enactment in artists’ practices,
which focuses on the event of performance rather than on the medium of film per
se. In this focus, the interrelationships between temporality and memory, acting and
authenticity, become paramount. Rather than writing solely about Coutts’s film, I shall
use it to think through these interrelationships, ultimately focusing on those aspects
that allow me to unravel my encounter with Passing Place. The work was shown at
Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art in 2010 along with two other films by Coutts,
Eastern (2010) and Reminsizenzen der Erinnerung (2010), both of which also engage
with cinematic re-enactment, but which are beyond the scope of this article.