Review by Fernando Figueroa

Do you remember Dog Day Afternoon? Thanks to the entertaining criminal portrayed by Al Pacino, we now know that Warner Brothers used newspaper clippings instead of consulting the prisoner himself, who turned the bank robbery into a media circus. Well, the real bank robber from August 1972, John Wojtowicz, stars and actively participates in this short film, The Third Memory. Pierre Huyghe includes him not only as the narrator of his own story, but also as an actor who recreates the event on a set that mixes elements of the real bank and the fictional one from Dog Day Afternoon.

The short film is called The Third Memory because the memory of the now obese Wojtowicz was distorted not only by his years in prison but also by Al Pacino’s version of the robbery. Something like this:

First memory: The actual robbery (memory completely lost); second memory: Lumet’s film version; and third memory: Wojtowicz’s reinterpretation, which is already confused and contaminated by the success of the film and the media. The real mugger distorts his memory thanks to the aspects of the real event invented by Warner Bros.

A piece of trailer: https://wp.me/aguJCZ-bP

The irony is that in order to stage this brief scene and prove his thesis, similar to that of Giovanni Sartori, Baudrillard or Guy Debord, director Huyghe had to recreate a set using elements from the memory of the former mugger Wojtowicz and from the Warner Bros. film. Huyghe uses the real mugger to highlight the veracity of what is consumed in the media (cinema) and to question the true authorship of the right to tell the truth about what happened. The director had to consult the telephone directory to find the ex-convict Wojtowicz who, paradoxically, lives a few blocks away from the bank he robbed and for which he served time in prison.