The Wanderer (Betty Drunk)
Art Exchange presents Laure Prouvost’s The Wanderer (Betty Drunk), a newly commissioned film and installation. Based on a script by artist Rory Macbeth, who without knowledge of German translated Kafka’s The Metamorphosis into English, Betty Drunk follows characters as they undergo a series of increasingly bizarre experiences, navigating a path through situations in which reality becomes increasingly uncertain.
Prouvost uses the state of drunkness as a way in which to destabilise the divide between the interior spaces of the mind and spaces of public projection, deliberately flaunting the social codes that moderate our speech and action in public. Betty’s acknowledgement of the audience, her manipulation of the camera’s movement and the deliberate de-syncing of image and sound throughout the sequence are employed as structuralist devices that draw attention to elements of its own construction.
Working for the first time with a full crew and a cast of actors, Prouvost used Rory Macbeth’s text as a loose framework rather than a definitive script, opening up the narrative to the various shifts and slippages of language and direction introduced by filmmaking process.
Laure Prouvost is winner of the Max Mara Prize 2011 andwil have an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2013.