Menick's strategy is seemingly straightforward, yet upon closer viewings a subtle complexity is revealed. The video narrates the act of location scouting- a hired activity that precedes a movie before it is produced which is given the task of finding the buildings, hallways, parks, bridges, etc. that would most adequately compliment a movie's narrative. The video can also can be read as indicating scouting as simultaneous cult-hobby, with its practitioners finding and 'remembering' those places identified after a film's release, places that in 'real life' gave meaning to the imagined worlds that had been previously projected before them. With this video Mr. Menick expands possibilities of cinema and art video, with an imagined 'producer' sending memos to his movie industry pals- What are you doing? What's up with LA? And what's up with Nuremberg? Have you guys checked out the possibilities there? Or maybe Detroit?
The issues that are raised with regard to place, memory and mediation in The Disappearance thus link through a conversation previous projects like Artemio's APoohcalypse Now and Kurt Forman's and Salvatore Reda's CNN Goes to War. What socioeconomical agencies create images and to what extent are we aware of that process administration? What is an adequate representation and what is not? Does it matter? What is the relation between Hollywood art directors that bring us their versions of a war-torn landscapes, and Albert Speers' theory of ruin value?
Ultimately The Disappearance is a fiction that behaves as a documentary, one that addresses the complicated relations between the film industry and the way film-consumers relate to place, between real locations and their mediated counterparts.
