THE MIME AND THE APE

In the film Silent Movie (1976) a film director places a phone call to Marcel Marceau to ask him to star in a silent film. The world famous mime picks up the phone and shouts “No!”. Thirty-five years later the exact same stunt is repeated by Cesar, the chimpanzee protagonist in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011). Previously a speechless animal, he suddenly grabs the cattle prod out of the hands of his human prison guard and shouts “No!”.

In Erik Bünger’s two-channel video installation The Mime and the Ape, a narrator returns again and again to these two scenes treating them as two origin stories. If one scene takes us back to the origins of sound film, the other scene takes us all the way back to the origins of human language. With the help of the two scenes, the narrator weaves a winding tale about the inability of language to articulate its own origin.