MARTIN ARNOLD. THE INTERRUPTED IMAGE.
Sunday 1 June 2003, at 3pm
London Film School

REMISE
Martin Arnold, 1994, 35mm, colour, sound, 1 min
Advertising trailer commissioned to promote the Kunsthalle Remise arts centre in Vienna.

JESUS WALKING ON SCREEN
Martin Arnold, 1993, 35mm, b/w, sound, 1 min
Advertising trailer commissioned for the “Jesus Walking on Screen: Jesus on Film 1898-1993” season at Stadtkino Wien.

DON’T – DER ÖSTERREICHFILM
Martin Arnold, 1996, 35mm, b/w, sound, 3 min
Arnold’s contribution to the “100 Years of Cinema” anniversary is based on footage from a bizarre post-war propaganda film that intends to demonstrate tradition and national pride in order to regain Austrian independence from the UFO flying ‘World Police’.
“Don’t was commissioned for the 100 years of cinema celebrations in Austria. I don’t think it’s a great piece, it’s a bit too much like Bruce Conner, but I enjoyed playing with the footage. The original film was such a stupid movie. It’s called 1 April 2000 by Wolfgang Liebeneiner (1953), and was the first film produced in Austria after the war. I think the church and all kinds of institutions to get together some money for it. Back then, we still had the allied forces in Vienna; what we call the contract of the free state of Austria was signed in 1955. The film was shot in the period when the Austrian’s didn’t have any government, we were controlled by the allied forces and this fact is reflected in the film, people were already fed up because they wanted to have their own government. In the story they decide not to obey the allies any more, so the allied forces call upon the World Police for help, and the World Police are in flying saucers. The Viennese show the World Police how nice they are, how beautiful the women are here and how good the wine tastes, to convince the World Police they should be free again to make the allied forces leave. It’s so crazy it’s unbelievable!” —Martin Arnold

DEANIMATED: THE INVISIBLE GHOST
Martin Arnold, 2002, video, b/w, sound, 56 min (excerpt)
What remains of a feature film if the cast are removed ? What remains of the plot if the protagonists are removed ? Digital compositing techniques were used to erase characters from a 1950s murder mystery starring Bela Lugosi, creating a study of absence and the void.
“I had always wondered how an empty feature film would look; a feature film without actors. The idea was always on my mind, but with no possibility to do it. Nowadays, working with computers and graphic design software, it’s possible at a level where it’s affordable, though of course it meant I had to change my way of working. I had an invitation from Kunsthalle Wien, and so I told them about this erasure project and that it would be nice to set it up in an empty theatre. The idea is that you’re confronted by an almost empty screen, actors only show up from time to time, and I also wanted to have a space where you would have too many seats, to reinforce this feeling of emptiness. With only one or two people in the room, they would really feel alone, at an empty movie.” —Martin Arnold

PIÈCE TOUCHÉE
Martin Arnold, 1989, 16mm, b/w, sound, 16 min
The celebrated trilogy in which Arnold applies avant-garde techniques to found Hollywood footage. The dazzling frame-by-frame manipulations expose the unconscious psychology hidden deep within harmless ‘industrial’ cinema. At turns enlightening, intense, sexual and profoundly amusing.
“Arnold’s original material is a piece of ‘found-footage’ from the 1950s. 18 seconds long and very typical for the period. A quiet take: a living room, a woman in an armchair. Her husband opens the door, kisses her, then moves out of the picture accompanied by a disturbing pan, his wife follows him. In Arnold’s film the sequence takes 16 minutes. Cadre by cadre, it becomes an exiting tango of movements. But pièce touchée is more than just a matter of forms. The reflections, distortions and delays it displays challenge Hollywood’s stable system of space and time.” —Alexander Horwath

PASSAGE À L’ACTE
Martin Arnold, 1993, 16mm, b/w, sound, 12 min
“With passage à l’acte it was still done in an analogue way, this was still the time of non-linear editing systems became available. I was working on a flatbed and I had the image track with each frame numbered, and I had the magnetic sound with it. I tried to figure out what was going on in the image, let’s say between frames 10 and 15, and what’s going on in terms of the sound at that point, which noise comes up when. Essentially, I was always moving between the optical printer and the flatbed, to listen to the sound. I had to discard many things because sometimes the image was good but the sound didn’t work at all, and sometimes the sound was really nice but the image was boring. It was a long process to get the moments together where both sound and image made sense to me.” —Martin Arnold

ALONE. LIFE WASTES ANDY HARDY
Martin Arnold, 1998, 16mm, b/w, sound, 15 min
“In his new film Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy which, together with pièce touchée and passage à l’acte, forms a sort of trilogy of compulsive repetition, Arnold’s 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 doppelgänger 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 l’acte, and contrary to other found-footage filmmakers who choose to remove their work into the realms of silent nostalgia, Arnold has re-worked the soundtrack along with the image. Because of this what one hears in Alone… is the eerie, rasping “silence” of sound film, pregnant 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.” —Dirk Schaefer

The installation Deanimated: The Invisible Ghost will be exhibited at the Fact Centre, Liverpool from 4 July to 24 August 2003.

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