Last summer, sometime during the five weeks he spent stringing Swedish moss on a 950-square-foot expanse of chicken wire for Olafur Eliasson’s Moss Wall at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chris Hefner heard an NPR piece about the legendary last meal of French president Francois Mitterand: a tiny songbird called the ortolan that’s force-fed, drowned alive in Armagnac, plucked, seasoned, cooked, and then devoured—bones, innards, and all—by gourmets with napkins draped over their faces.
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Shot on black-and-white Super 8, with old-timey stylistic flourishes, The Pink Hotel—which premieres Friday, April 9, at the Music Box—is a sort of surreal fun-house reflection of early MGM talkies like Grand Hotel, the 1932 movie set at a posh Berlin pension. It’s wartime. Invited to a New Year’s Eve party that never materializes, the jet-setting denizens of the pink hotel munch ortolan and engage in other acts of gross consumption, chase ominous noises down winding corridors, and plot acts of sabotage as the hotel mysteriously disintegrates around them. A superimposed zeppelin model periodically rumbles across the skyline in a brazenly ragged effect.
Hefner takes every opportunity to highlight artifice in his work. Mainstream directors “spend so much energy making the medium invisible,” he says. “They don’t want to see things coming apart. It reminds them that they’re on a path that won’t last forever. . . . I work on the opposite end of the spectrum. Everything looks fake. You see the medium readily. The image jumps, it’s high-grain, the exposure is harsh. There’s this understanding that this is an object, like you and me. It’s got a life span. It won’t be around forever.”
He assembled his volunteer cast and crew from MCA coworkers and the loose-knit community of musicians, artists, and aerialists that revolves around the Reversible Eye Gallery in Humboldt Park. “We’d build the Eliasson stuff, then go over to the Reversible Eye and build the sets,” he says.
After graduation in 2006, Hefner started working freelance for the MCA, setting up and breaking down exhibits. (He calls himself an “art carnie.”) Meanwhile he continued to produce a steady stream of shorts and installations, which he’s exhibited at Heaven Gallery, the Finch Gallery, and Swimming Pool Project Space. This summer he’ll work in Winnipeg as a camera operator and film diarist, shooting behind-the-scenes footage, for Maddin’s movie Key Hole. After that, Hefner plans to take The Pink Hotel on a European microcinema tour, with a different musician performing a 20-minute overture in each city. The tentative plan calls for Knox to play in London and the film’s composer, Tommy Jansen, in his hometown of Oslo.
