Building bonds of friendship and a filmmaker's career





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Although most scenes focus on the two protagonists, director Kurys doesn't neglect the secondary figures. She etches the husbands and children with swift, resonant strokes until they seem fully alive despite their limited time on the screen.

Moreover, through artful handling of background details and settings, Kurys evokes and comments on the '50s period itself, pulling its attitudes and assumptions into the heart of the film's development. A hair-raising scene of a husband's rage, for instance, can be seen as an outburst of sexual fear and hostility that suits not only the character's personality but the time and place in which he lives. Another fine example is the very last scene, which isn't so much directed as choreographed - with each shot, gesture, and camera angle contributing to a rich tapestry of meaning.

''Entre Nous'' has weaknesses. The plot is episodic; some points of the story are vague; not all the imagery is as strong as it might be. And some viewers may feel the sexual episodes push the PG label rather far, though the film's seriousness and sincerity are never in doubt. Kurys still has some growing to do as a filmmaker. But her career has taken a giant leap with ''Entre Nous,'' and the future looks bright for her and her admirers.

New trend in video

Instead of screening their works in the usual fashion, some film and video artists prefer ''installations'' - gallery-type exhibits in which a sequence of images can be studied at length.

This is convenient for the viewer, who can come and go at will. More important, though, is the way this format changes the time dimension of motion pictures. How long the images will be viewed depends on the spectator, not on the preexisting length of the movie or cassette. Thus the viewing experience is less manipulative, one might even say less autocratic, than normal.

The installation setting is ideal for Dara Birnbaum's 1982 work PM Magazine, seen recently at the Whitney Museum of American Art here. Its purpose, to paraphrase a statement by the artist, is to manipulate television before it manipulates us.

To this end, the work wrenches TV pictures out of their usual contexts, offering not an alternative TV show but a carefully framed meditation on contemporary images, gestures, and stereotypes. Arranged in repeating cycles - unlike standard TV scenes that race from one jolt to the next - they take on new meanings and implications as they hover before the eye. ''Twentieth-century speed is suspended for the viewer's examination and interpretation,'' in Birnbaum's words.

The exhibition space is dominated by three large panels, each carrying a grainy photograph and one or more TV screens. The moving and still pictures echo each other, and are echoed in turn by a rock-music recording. Borrowed from a network entertainment show and an electronics commercial, the images (a child with an ice cream cone, an office worker at a computer, and others) seem ironic, absurd, and oddly seductive all at once. Their meanings - overt and hidden, intentional and not - become increasingly apparent through repetition.

''PM Magazine'' is stimulating not only for its own sake, but as an illustration of an important trend in video aesthetics. Early in its development , video art was adopted largely by painters and sculptors seeking a new medium, and by filmmakers who liked its flexibility and economy. Few of these artists gave a passing thought to video as television, or to the crude but ubiquitous popular culture that most people associate with TV.

That's been changing for a few years, and Birnbaum is in the forefront of the new effort to confront simultaneously the nature of popular TV and the possibilities of art video. The dynamics of both are pillars of her ambitious ''PM Magazine.''

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