This work retraces John Wojtowicz's famous bank robbery of August 22, 1972, an event that inspired the 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Al Pacino. With a setup that seemed made for TV — Wojtowicz committed the robbery to pay for his lover's gender-reassignment surgery — the resulting news coverage, the first-ever live television broadcast of a crime, even interrupted network transmission of Richard Nixon's speech at the Republican National Convention.
Huyghe's split-screen video projection combines footage from the feature film with commentary by Wojtowicz himself, who reenacts the crime and comments on the movie's veracity. It is contextualized by postrobbery newspaper clippings and a segment from a January 1978 episode of The Jeanne Parr Show, in which the host interviews Wojtowicz (in prison) and his lover. Through this work, Huyghe attempts to deconstruct the ways in which the news media and Hollywood have reshaped even the original participants' recollections of actual events.
Source: http://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/109008#ixzz1EcVO5GydSan Francisco Museum of Modern Art
