In the film Provenance, Amie Siegel represents the global trade of furniture from an Indian city to various parts of the world. The piece of furniture that she mostly focuses on is the chair. At the beginning of the film, we saw photographs of some very old buildings in India that serve as factories for the production of furniture. The factory looks practically dark and abandoned; however, the same photographs also reveal color and light, specifically sunshine. In one of the images that I have attached, it is possible to see a single chair standing outside in the sunlight. From that point, we begin to recognize its significance and value. Throughout the rest of the film, we see all sorts of chairs in different colors and different positions, sometimes surrounded by other chairs standing upright, and sometimes overturned on top of each other.

As the film progresses, we begin to see other styles and forms of chairs in distinguished shapes and colors, though the focus is always on the basic structure of those chairs, which remains the same all throughout. As the film begins to take a more modern setting, we are introduced to a myriad of other pieces of furniture that are capable of replacing that one, old traditional chair. In a series of photographs, we see couches, sofas, beach chairs, stools and a bed, but the one aspect the remains common to all of these photographs is the fact that the same chair is always present as well. In one of the scenes, a man takes an old looking, half-broken chair and begins to break it apart even further, leaving only its fundamental wooden structure. After destroying it completely, we suddenly realize that the chair has been transformed into a newer, modernized piece of furniture. It was absolutely amazing to notice the transformation of something so dull into something so beautiful.

At the final stages of the film, those pieces of furniture that were produced in the Indian factory are being transferred to other countries as merchandise. Once they arrive to auction houses in Paris, New York and London, I was surprised to discover that their monetary value is as high as $70,000 (!!!) Although this seems surprising at first, we quickly realize that the meaning behind this film is to represent the historical and artistic values that are hidden within those pieces of furniture. The film’s unique demonstration of the movement of the furniture around the globe points at its unique history, which consequently influences its fluctuating value. This film made me realize that something as simple as a chair may, in fact, have such high artistic significance that people often fail to acknowledge it with the proper recognition and admiration. The conclusion: don’t ever judge a book by its over.