April 1–30, 2025
e-flux Film is pleased to present The Third Memory (1999) by Pierre Huyghe as the April 2025 edition of our online series Staff Picks.
Huyghe’s two-channel moving-image work returns to a moment that was already, in its time, a media event: a 1972 Brooklyn bank robbery that attracted substantial media coverage, which was later adapted into a New Hollywood movie that has itself garnered cult status. Instead of producing a documentary account of what had not been shown in the pre-existing movie, Huyghe invites the original bank robber, John Wojtowicz, to reenact his memories of the robbery and situates the new footage next to images from the movie. What emerges is a story of the past event distorted by its own cinematic adaptation, slipping between recollection and performance. In 2025, The Third Memory remains poignant as a performative articulation of how media subjugates memory, folding the past into a logic of repetition.
The Third Memory (1999, 10 minutes)
On August 22, 1972, John Wojtowicz robbed a bank in Brooklyn and held its employees hostage. This news item was broadcast live on television and covered by the press. A Life Magazine article inspired Sidney Lumet to make Dog Day Afternoon in 1975, with Al Pacino in the leading role. A series of narratives, press articles, broadcasts, and screenplays through which the event was interpreted serves as a prologue to a filmed reenactment. John Wojtowicz directs his own view of the facts, in which he incorporates fiction and the various parts he may have played in this chain of events. He reveals the confused relations that emerge between a character and the person on which that character is based.
The film will stream on e-flux Film from April 1–30, 2025. Watch here.
Pierre Huyghe (born in 1962, Paris) lives and works in Santiago, Chile. His work is internationally known and presented in various exhibitions around the world. Recent exhibitions include Liminal, Punta della Dogana, Venice (2024); Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul (2025); Chimera, EMMA, Espoo (2023); Variants, Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker (2022); After UUmwelt, Luma Foundation, Arles (2021); UUmwelt, Serpentine Gallery, London (2018); After ALife Ahead in Skulptur Projekte Münster (2017); The Roof Garden, Metropolitan Museum, New York (2015). In 2012, his work Untilled was one of the most critically acclaimed contributions to dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel. In 2012–2014, a major retrospective of Pierre Huyghe’s work traveled from the Centre Pompidou, France, to the Ludwig Museum, Germany, and to Los Angeles County Museum of Art, USA. In 2019, he was named Artistic Director of the Okayama Art Summit: If the Snake. The artist’s work is represented in the collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Kunstmuseum Basel; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Tate Modern, London, among others.
Staff Picks is a streaming series on e-flux Film of recommended videos designed to disrupt the monotony of an algorithm. Before the end times of big data, we used to discover suggested content along dusty shelves in video rental stores, where Post-it notes scribbled by shift workers implored us to experience the same movies that made them guffaw, scream, or weep. Sometimes the content bored us, sometimes it overwhelmed us, and sometimes, as if by magic, it was just right. e-flux invites you to relive this rental store mode of perusal, with personalized picks curated through judgment that does not take into consideration your viewing history.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.