Transcendent, my ass!   

James Franco is both creator and subject of Francophrenia (or: Don't Kill Me, I Know Where the Baby Is). Ben Walters reports.

What’s going on with James Franco? Hollywood actor, Oscar host, writer of fiction, graduate student, soap opera guest star, experimental fine artist… It’s little wonder many commentators don’t quite know what to do with him. And his latest escapade, which gets its world premiere at Rotterdam, is unlikely to make things any clearer.

Running at 70-odd minutes (the final cut is still being prepped), it’s a further iteration of Franco’s appearances in the US soap General Hospital, in which he played a homicidal performance artist called Franco – appearances that were arguably a kind of performance art in themselves and have already been fodder for gallery-based work. Francophrenia (or: Don’t Kill Me, I Know Where the Baby Is) uses documentary footage shot alongside the climax of Franco’s storyline, which took place at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

“It was about bringing high art and low art together, where the shoot becomes a kind of installation at the museum,” says Ian Olds, co-director of Francophrenia. Olds wasn’t directly involved with the General Hospital project but he had edited a conventional behind-the-scenes documentary about Saturday Night Live that James Franco directed, and Franco gave him the MOCA footage to see what he might make of it.

“I didn’t think there was the material for a straight documentary,” he says, “but what occurred to me was the idea of a fictional third level of Franco.” Francophrenia initially shows the actor engaged in the business of show – getting his make-up done, doing multiple takes, engaging with autograph hunters. There’s a certain innate surreality to the situation but then things get really weird with the introduction of an increasingly megalomaniacal and paranoid fictional voiceover (“I begat this motherfucker!”; “transcendent, my ass!”). “When I show it to people, it seems like either a comedy or a horror movie or both,” Olds chuckles.

“James gave me and my writing partner [Paul Felten] the freedom to explore, manipulate and mess with his image,” he continues. “He didn’t try to intervene or protect his celebrity. He became both the creator and the subject of this experiment.” The voiceover was intended to be recorded by Franco but Olds’s own temporary track proved to have a compelling allure. “There was something about the distance created by this internal monologue being read by someone else. It was a playful way of engaging with everyone questioning what’s going on with Franco – is he for real?” And is he? “I really can’t speak for him but I think he’s a genuine guy, using his celebrity to find ways to engage creatively. He’s not trying to create some easily digestible image – he’s really following his instincts about what interests him in art.”

Olds and Franco have a shared interest in work as a subject. “On the one hand, Francophrenia is a reimagining of the internal life of this fictional Franco. But if it was just that it would be a gimmick; it doesn’t have value unless there’s something real that’s glimpsed. At its core, it’s a portrait of labour: production in the dream factory; the creation of emptiness, for lack of a better word; this monstrosity of industrial image-production where the crew labours and the actors serve their parts and this imagined celebrity is glorified and consumed and all to what end? It does appear to be vapid and empty and maybe soul-crushing. If people say our film is an empty pursuit, I couldn’t say they’re wrong – but hopefully it’s a reflection on emptiness.”