WHERE IS ROCKY II?

2016, 93”, produced by Gregoire Gensollen – The ink Connection, co-produced by Beatrice Bulgari – In Between Art Film, Marta Donzelli & Gregorio Paonessa Vivo Film & Vanderstatic Frakas Productions

PIERRE BISMUTH

Pierre Bismuth – born in 1963 in Neuilly sur Seine – is a contemporary artist. Through efficient and often humorous gestures, Bismuth interrupts pre- established codes of reading the images and objects that pervade daily life, from Hollywood films, headline stories in newspapers to magazine clippings from gentlemen’s magazines. In 2005 he won the best original screenplay at the 77th Academy Awards along with Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman for the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He lives and works in Brussels. The Artist is represented by Team Gallery, NY Jan Mot, Brussels, Bugada Cargnel, Paris Christine König, Vienna.

Layering documentary and fictional storylines and meta-narratives, artist and Academy Award-winner Pierre Bismuth’s Where is Rocky II? (2016) sets out to locate an undocumented sculpture by renowned US artist Ed Ruscha.

The work – titled Rocky II after the Sylvester Stallone film – is fabled to be a fake rock created to look exactly like the real ones among which it was placed in California’s Mojave desert in the late 1970s. Notably absent from his catalogue raisonné, Ruscha has never spoken publicly about the work. Taking two very different approaches to his search for this enigmatic artwork, Bismuth enlists the help of a private detective and Hollywood screenwriters D.V. DeVincentis (High Fidelity, Grosse Pointe Blank), Anthony Peckham (Sherlock Holmes, Invictus) and Mike White (School of Rock, Nacho Libre).

Moving between the detective’s meetings with museum directors, curators, artists and art collectors close to Ruscha and the plot given shape by the team of writers, the film presents a simultaneously amusing and nuanced clash of cinematic forms.