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The Third Memory

Name: The Third Memory
Director: Pierre Huyghe
Released: 1999
Duration: 10 min

Representation Score

5.7/10

Fair

1999

Director

Pierre Huyghe

Runtime

10 minutes

Average Rating

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New Showbiz Analysis

The Third Memory is a postmodern interrogation of truth that uses the 1972 Brooklyn bank heist to dismantle historical stability. It succeeds by elevating subjective memories over polished cinematic myths. While the film lacks demographic breadth, its intellectual framework provides significant progressive value. It effectively challenges the dominance of official history through a lens of ontological relativism. However, the work's experimental nature limits its engagement with certain demographics. The focus remains heavily on the specific socio-geographic setting and the central figure's personal narrative.

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Category Breakdown

Does The Third Memory have LGBTQ+ representation?

Good

The film centers on the lived experience of John Wojtowicz, a queer individual. This perspective challenges the assumption that everyone is straight or cisgender by prioritizing his subjective reality.

How does The Third Memory portray gender?

Fair

Huyghe disrupts masculine crime clichés by focusing on memory rather than action. However, women's ability to drive the story remains secondary to the film's broader philosophical inquiry into subjectivity.

How racially and ethnically diverse is The Third Memory?

Fair

The work focuses on a specific, localized urban experience in Brooklyn. There is little evidence of a diverse or non-Anglo-Saxon majority cast within this historical context.

How does The Third Memory represent religion and culture?

Excellent

The film excels by questioning the sanctity of the historical record. It replaces objective Western narratives with a complex, postmodern understanding of identity and fragmented personal perceptions.

Does The Third Memory include disability representation?

Minimal

The film provides no evidence regarding the portrayal of physical or neurodivergent disabilities.

Present on Screen

Challenges the monolithic, straight-centered lens typically applied to historical crime stories.
Deconstructs the idea of an objective Western historical narrative through subjective truth.
Disrupts conventional masculine clichés by shifting focus from action to memory.

Limited or Absent

Lacks evidence of diverse or non-Anglo-Saxon representation within the localized setting.
Provides minimal presence of women's ability to drive the story or subversion of gender hierarchies.
Offers no discernible representation of physical or neurodivergent disabilities.

Official Synopsis

Using time, memory, and the texture of everyday experience as his mediums, Pierre Huyghe conflates the traditional dichotomy between art and life. Working in an array of cultural formats—from billboards and television broadcasts to community celebrations and museum exhibitions—he reformulates their codes and deploys them as catalysts for creating new experiential possibilities. A mode of perception that lies in the interstices between reality and its representation is the subject of his two-channel video, The Third Memory (2000), which reenacts the 1972 hold-up of a Brooklyn bank immortalized in Sidney Lumet's acclaimed film Dog Day Afternoon (1975). Almost 30 years later, Huyghe provides a platform for the heist's charismatic mastermind, John Wojtowicz, to relate his version of that infamous day in a reconstructed set of the bank.

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