Dreams, Hopes, Taboos
With a nice touch of irony, REDCAT curators will counter the familial joy of Thanksgiving with some of the most obsessive explorations of domestic life in all of cinema by featuring the work of Austrian filmmaker Martin Arnold this Monday night. The artist, who began making films in the late 1980s, is known for taking tiny snippets of film - a few seconds in some cases - and rolling back and forth across single frames to create stuttering, dancing analyses that showcase hidden dynamics of power and violence within everyday interactions.
The 16-minute film Piéce Touchée from 1989 borrows an 18-second shot from a film called The Human Jungle. In it, a woman sits reading, a man returns home, and they kiss. Concealed in this seemingly mundane sequence, however, is a world marked by power and violence revealed through their seemingly casual gestures. In short, a kiss becomes an assault. In Passage à l 'Act, Arnold uses a scene from To Kill a Mockingbird, discovering a subtext of parental tyranny and youthful rebellion through obsessive scrutiny of each frame. And in the third film of what became a trilogy, Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy, Arnold examines shots from the Andy Hardy series starring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, again discovering angst, conflict and aggression in seeming banal interactions.
Arnold makes his films using a hand-built optical printer that allows him to rephotograph each frame to create new arrangements. For Piéce Touchée, this meant rearranging the frames of the 18-second original sequence with 148,000 re-edited frames that were organized according to a 200-page "score." In other words, Arnold is meticulous!
And the result of this attentive work? The films are at once majestic in their precision and wrenching in what they reveal; they're visually spectacular once you've settled into the intricate rhythms and pacing built from repetition and alternation. And the sound functions with tremendous force, suggesting a mechanized world and its ritualized behavior. Arnold eloquently shows us the repressed angst underlying our everyday actions. Discussing the his work with critic Scott MacDonald, Arnold nicely characterized his efforts by noting that "the imagery doesn't only show certain places, actors and actions; it also shows the dreams, hopes and taboos of the epoch and society that created it." Arnold will attend the screening...
the details:
Martin Arnold: Something Hidden
REDCAT
Mon., Dec. 1, 8:30 p.m.
213-237-2800
www.redcat.org