Film 'Bending' perceptions

DURHAM -- The craziest thing happened in Durham a year ago. Hundreds and hundreds of people -- maybe a few thousand -- went downtown. And ventured into old warehouses. To see some kind of art that was hard to even describe.

Crazy.

The fact that it happened just as Raleigh turned up its nose at an unusual work of public art for its downtown made the Bull City's enthusiasm even more striking.

But French artist Georges Rousse's temporary installations in Durham and Spanish artist Jaume Plensa's proposal for Raleigh's city plaza were as different as the two cities. Just what made Rousse's experience in Durham a success is the subject of a documentary film that will premiere in the Carolina Theatre later this month.

"Bending Space: Georges Rousse and the Durham Project" follows the installations in four abandoned warehouses and the unexpected public support. The hourlong documentary will also be shown in Paris next spring, sent to film festivals and, if enough money can be raised, promoted for further distribution.

The filmmakers, Kenny Dalsheimer and Penelope Maunsell, are longtime Durham residents who had a lot of experience at far less complicated projects. With a little more than a week before the premiere, they are still editing the film. No one has yet seen what it will look like, and the filmmakers are intent on not leaking any spoilers.

But on a recent afternoon in Maunsell's artfully appointed home in the Morehead Hills neighborhood, the pair talked about what it has been like to work on the biggest project of their careers -- an unanticipated gift that has consumed them for the past year. As Dalsheimer put it: "We documented it, but we also lived it."

Art of art

It began with Frank Konhaus and Ellen Cassily, a Durham couple who knew of Rousse's work. The artist has long used abandoned buildings in Europe as canvasses. With a combination of painting and construction, he creates temporary installations for effects that are visible only from his camera's point of view.

Konhaus and Cassily arranged the project with Rousse and also contacted the filmmakers.

Maunsell, a London-born producer with a long career making mostly university and college films, comes from a family of artists. She was immediately fascinated with Rousse.

"The thing about Georges' art is you don't always get it when you first see it," she said. "In fact, most people don't get it. You have to have it pointed out to you, and then you go, 'No -- no way.' And then you think, 'Oh my God, I'm going to get to tell this story? I'm really a very lucky person. I hope I can do it justice.' "

Dalsheimer, a former middle-school teacher who has made low-budget documentaries about local subcultures, saw things differently.

"I was more interested in the community story," he said, "because I had a gut feeling that something cool was going to happen. I don't think I really knew before it happened how amazing it would be."

Here was their challenge: Rousse created 11 pieces in six very different spaces, each of which had a site manager supervising scores of volunteers.

"You want to get the stories from all these people," Maunsell said. "How to put together a film with all these different voices and somehow have it be cohesive?"

Often the pair were at odds over what to include, they said, but in the end were steered by the treatment that Maunsell had written beforehand.

"It's a linear story, and that's what saved our sanity," she said. "It basically starts at the beginning and ends at the end, thank goodness. I'm not sure that would have been the only way to tell the story, but it's the only why that I -- that we -- could figure it out."