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A, 1998, 16mm, 15 min
Regie, Buch, Schnitt, Ton, Produktion/Director, Screenplay,
Editor, Sound, Production: Martin Arnold |
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In his new film Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy which, together
with pièce touchée and passage à lacte, forms a sort of trilogy
of compulsive repetition, Arnolds campaign of deconstruction
of classic Hollywood film codes finally turns to film music. The
process links in with the other two films. The family scenes,
which in the original last only seconds and are not particularly
notable, are surgically sectioned into single frames. Using repetition
of these single cells and a new rhythm a kind of cloning procedure
Arnold then creates an inflated, monstrous double of the original
cuts lasting many minutes. The hidden message of sex and violence
is turned inside out to the point where it simply crackles. In
Alone.
the crossing of three harmless teenager films gives
birth to an Oedipal drama in which not only mother love mutates
to sheer lust. Since passage à lacte, and contrary to other found-footage
filmmakers who choose to remove their work into the realms of
silent nostalgia, Arnold has re-worked the sound track along with
the image. Because of this what one hears in Alone.
is the
serie, rasping silence of sound film, preg-nant with suppressed
tension. And exactly at the point where the illusion of full,
living present is seemingly at its strongest in the screen presence
of Judy Garland singing one senses the machine, and, implicitly,
death, at work. |
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