The Hollow Coin
2016-Jun-12
13m
Languages
English
Genres
Documentary
Comedy
Thriller
Overview
Frank Heath's "The Hollow Coin" explores roles of authority in public space and the intersection of personal and historical narratives. The video combines documentary footage of New York City's rapidly disappearing network of payphones with audio of a covertly recorded telephone exchange between an actor and an unknowing bystander. In the surreptitiously captured conversation an attempted "information leak" is infused with an absurd story and a historical anecdote. The work's title refers to a Soviet spy who was apprehended in 1953 after mistakenly paying his newspaper delivery boy with a hollow coin that contained a microfilm of an encrypted message. Throughout the video a parallel sequence of events reveals that images from the video itself have been stored on an SD card concealed within a hollow coin and inserted into the payphone from which the call was made.

R

e

l

a

t

e

d

The Big Sleep
1946-Aug-23
Twitz from Pluto: Graff, Jackass and TV Casualty
2022-Jun-24
Ghost World
2001-Jul-20
Dead Tone
2007-May-16
The Jerky Boys
1995-Feb-03
I Saw What You Did
1965-Jul-21
Live From Longmont Potion Castle
1998-Jan-01
Red
1993-Jan-03
I Saw What You Did
1988-May-20
Where In The Hell Is The Lavender House: The Longmont Potion Castle Story
2019-Oct-26
Phone
1974-Jul-07

R

e

v

i

e

w

s