Gone

CECILIA DOUGHERTY'S MOVIES are singularly droll.

In 1993, Dougherty collaborated with Leslie Singer to make Joe-Joe, a Pixelvision portrait of Joe Orton in which the gay British playwright is actually two lesbians (Dougherty and Singer) who dine on macaroni and cheese and witticisms in their Mission apartment when they aren't receiving prizes at glamorous awards ceremonies.

Dougherty's newest video, 2000's Gone – playing next Wednesday in the New PFA Theater's "Double Vision" program – presents a different form of characteristically droll double trouble. A re-creation of an episode from PBS's pioneering "reality TV" series, 1974's An American Family, Gone uses split-screen projection to illustrate the distances and differences between mother Pat Loud (Amy Sillman) and gay son Lance (Laurie Weeks).

Gone's dramatized version of a previous era's documentary tactics also calls to mind Elisabeth Subrin's 1997 Shulie, which remade a 1967 public TV profile of Shulamith Firestone (at the time of the profile, three years before she authored The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone was a frustrated student at a male-dominated arts school in Chicago). But unlike Subrin, who aims to circulate and further complicate a suppressed piece of second-wave white feminist history, Dougherty isn't concerned with the formal rigor of fashioning a shot-by-shot copy. She's happy to allow wisecracks to form in the system.

Gone's title hints at the inherent futility of making a duplicate. Instead, the video's casting and Dougherty's direction reveal the past's present-day manifestations and disguises. The video's rendition of an American family – the Louds – is performed by Dougherty's friends. Sillman, a New York-based painter, brings an irritated semi-exhaustion to suburban California mom Pat ("It was not a great flight, there were a lot of children on the plane"). There's wry and righteous humor in the casting of Weeks – whose name was removed from the credits of Boys Don't Cry by Kimberly Pierce, with whom Weeks initially coauthored the screenplay – as Lance Loud, perhaps the first "out" presence on national television.

Trying on clothes and a new skin, Weeks offers a comic impersonation of self-absorbed gay boy posturing ("I feel much better in a shirt than in a sweater"). Lance is living in the Chelsea Hotel, a landmark that Dougherty shoots from a particular angle: more than once Gone offers twin pictures of the Chelsea's neon sign, viewed at across-the-street distance, from above. Perhaps this POV mirrors a shot from the original television series, perhaps it reflects Pat's perspective on her flighty son's venture into the art world, or perhaps it represents Dougherty's sardonic affection for arty prototypes. Perhaps it is what it is.

Regardless, Dougherty's two-screen projection of the hotel invokes Andy Warhol's 1967 Chelsea Girls. There's no Ondine in Gone, but An American Family's PBS-approved superstar framework also lacked a presence as extreme as Warhol's meanest speed queen. Dougherty makes time for some health and fitness jokes by her pals and pauses the drama for a music-vid passage set to Le Tigre (Johanna Fateman of the group is responsible for Gone's sound design). The most raucous section of the 38-minute video is a bra-snapping, wall-punishing dance performance (the main event of "Pat's first night in town," according to the intertitles) by Jennifer Monson that's equal parts parodic and cathartic.

Editing dialogue so that conversation overlaps, Dougherty – like Jennifer Payne, whose Hollywood Inferno makes up the other half of "Double Vision" 's double bill – emphasizes mutual disengagement. Pat doesn't listen to Lance; Lance doesn't even hear Pat. "You might as well have a good look at it while you're here," mom tells son shortly before leaving his hotel room, a home that she obviously believes is temporary. The second she's gone, he turns on the TV.