David Lamelas
1946–

Born in Buenos Aires and educated in London, artist David Lamelas redirected his practice from sculpture to conceptual explorations of media-based forms in the late 1960s. Working in Los Angeles in the early months of 1974, he made The Desert People, a film he describes as a “fake documentary”—the purported story of five people who, crossing the desert by car, discuss their experiences at a Native American reservation in Arizona. Typical road-movie scenes of the journey are intercut with passages of the talking heads: four researchers provide varied accounts of their time spent on the reservation and impressions of the Papago tribe, while the fifth passenger, a member of the tribe, speaks English, Spanish, and Papago by turns. While these interview-like segments seem convincing, other aspects of the film betray the influence of the formulaic television talk shows and spectacular Hollywood films that Lamelas studied after arriving in Los Angeles. In fact, the film’s dramatic conclusion calls into question all that has come before and confounds the very genre of which it initially seems a part.