Conceived and directed by Coutts while on a year-long VARC (Visual Arts in Rural Communities) residency in 2008/9, Passing Place re-enacts scenes from six films where the site of a crossroads is featured. Including re-enactments from films such as Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (1967), Jarmusch’s Down By Law (1986) and Zemeckis’s Castaway (2000), filming was set entirely at a crossroads in rural Northumberland with a cast including local farmers, lawyers and grave diggers. Through a prescribed setting, the film uses fact and fiction, memory and site, to set the potential – if fleeting – for truth to emerge.
In a feature article on Passing Place for Moving Image Review Art Journal (2012), Maria Walsh wrote that, ‘by re-enacting films borrowed from the collective memory repertoire of cinema, “Passing Place” creates a virtual community between the on-screen participants and its off-screen viewers... [Coutts] focuses on the event of performance rather than on the medium of film per se. In this focus, the interrelationships between temporality and memory, acting and authenticity, become paramount.’
Passing Place was exhibited as part of Coutts’s solo exhibitions ‘Some Other Time’ (with publication) at Highgreen, Tarset (2008), ‘Change of Heart’, Queen’s Hall, Hexham (2009) and ‘Millions Like Us’ at Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, London (2010). The work was selected for ‘New Cinema and Contemporary Art’, by Les Rencontres Internationales for screenings and debate at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010); Reina Sofia National Museum, Madrid (2011) and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2011). The film was also selected by ArtSway, SCAN and Animate Projects for the exhibition ‘Multichannel: Variable Economies’ (2009) and was shown in a group exhibition, ‘Ha Gamle Prestegard’, Havegen, Naerbo, Norway (2009). It was also reviewed by Beatriz Martínez for Cahiers du Cinéma, Espana (2011).