Video Installations Show More Promise Than Focus

French film buffs, they say, are so reverent some virtually memorize favorite flicks. That habit may go some way to explain both the puzzlement and pleasure of Pierre Huyghe’s video installations at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

Huyghe, a Parisian in his mid-30s, makes his American West Coast debut with this show, which is part of “Co^te Ouest,” a series on French contemporary art being held this season at various venues.

Viewed head-on, Huyghe’s pieces frequently seem either too opaque to penetrate or too transparent to grasp. Maybe that’s why one is titled “L’Ellipse.” Projected on a wall roughly 30 feet long, it’s in three sections. First we see two young men in telephone conversation from high-rise apartments facing across a river. Sound is essentially inaudible. Next we see a man about 20 years older crossing a bridge. The scene cuts back to the young guys--now in one apartment--again earnestly talking. The scene piddles off without any particularly dramatic event.

What is to be made of this? Well, as it turns out--even though we’re in a museum about the language of vision--Huyghe’s art can’t be grasped by just looking. It requires either the cinematic savvy of a major cultist or some other form of clarification. A gallery information sheet omits certain salient facts. The first and last scenes of “L’Ellipse” are from Wim Wenders’ 1977 film “The American Friend.” The central bit was shot recently by Huyghe using one of the original actors, Bruno Ganz. He’s aged enough to escape immediate identification with his younger self in the original clips. Evidently Huyghe doesn’t think all that is germane. According to the info sheet, the artist’s intent was to make a philosophical point by inserting the bridge walk where Wenders chose a jump-cut. That point was to demonstrate “the impossibility of separating lived experience from its representation.”

Huyghe’s other pieces are less confusing and thus more successful. “Dubbing” shows a group of young actors projected close to life-size. Dressed in anonymous street clothes and sitting in folding chairs, they look like kids in a class, except they’re talking in turn to a microphone. A crawl of French text runs across the bottom of the screen. The actors are dubbing Steven Spielberg’s 1982 classic “Poltergeist.”

It’s fun, first, to be shown how this is done, then how animated the actors become when they’re on, how like unstrung puppets when they’re not. This time our gallery info-script says the viewer is supposed to become “the metaphorical screen for their own projection of what the dubbers are seeing.”

Huyghe may get closest to his own intentions in “Blanche Neige Lucie.” A conventional-format video, it presents an interview with Lucie Dolene, a matronly blond who provided Snow White’s voice for the French version of the great Disney animated film. She explains that although honored by being chosen for the role, she came to feel that, contractually, Disney had in effect stolen her voice. She successfully litigated to get it back.

Dolene had a point. As she sings bits of “Someday My Prince Will Come” there’s an eerie impression she’s lip-syncing the little princess. Huyghe’s script, however, suggests that viewers, in reading the subtitles, are stealing Dolene’s voice a second time. Sounds like the artist is swimming in Deconstructionist philosophy.

Huyghe’s work embodies the spirit of a refined and complex mind still in search of a clear way to express itself. There’s an inclination to ascribe what seems to us as excessive obliqueness to mere cultural differences between the French and Americans. Historically, French art has been inclined to analyze, philosophize and be artistic all at once. Cubism provides a good example from the visual arts; the films of Jean-Luc Godard make the case for cinema.

Since Americans have managed to appreciate both of them, there seems to be a good chance Huyghe can also find his way. The best thing he has going for him is the gentle, good-humored concern he brings to working with his subjects. In the end his mega-theme seems to be about personal identity.

* “Pierre Huyghe: Cinema Installations” Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, Building G-1, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, through Nov. 28, (310) 586-6488, closed Sundays and Mondays.