Break it down, Martin! Yo, I'm tr-tr-tr-tr-tr-tr-tr-try-try-try-try-tryin' to.

December 4, 2008 12:44 PM

Cinemnesis, filmmaker Martin Arnold's 41 minute compilation of the films of his "compulsive repetition" trilogy, is available to you online. The quality is lacking, small details are missed, but I thought you'd enjoy these nonetheless. Time codes for the three pieces and more inside.

"The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented. And it is exactly that that is most interesting to consider."

pièce touchée, 1989
passage á l'acte, 1993. Begins at about 15:15
Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy, 1998. Begins at about 26:40.

Alone is, apparently, the one with the broadest appeal. Try it first if you don't like the beginning of pièce touchée.

His new(er) installation work, Deanimated, is the screening of the The Invisible Ghost, a Bela Lugosi picture, with a flawless removal of selected characters throughout, lending it a perplexing and uproarious sense of haunted emptiness.

He does not own a Tivo. I asked.

posted by Ambrosia Voyeur (6 comments total)

Scholar Akira Lippit's take on the work from Afterimage.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 1:00 PM on December 4, 2008

Excellent post! Martin Arnold is a genius. In freshman year of college my film professor showed my intro film class "Life Wastes Andy Hardy" as part of his introduction to avant-garde film. To see that film projected on its original film print on a giant screen in the dark was a harrowing experience (it didn't help that the sound was turned way up). Some of the students laughed a little uneasily, and some of us just sat there in stunned silence. The sight of those actors forced into such bizarre contortions and repetitions was unspeakably creepy to me. It was like the characters in the film were reduced to glitching, malfunctioning automatons. Martin Arnold is like a mad technician, tinkering with the underlying clockwork of the film in a way perfectly calibrated to unsettle me in the deepest way possible.
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 1:29 PM on December 4, 2008 [1 favorite]

When I read "compulsive repetition trilogy", I instantly thought of The Beaver Trilogy.
posted by Deathalicious at 5:08 PM on December 4, 2008

Something about the first piece gave me the wicked giggles. I unfocused my eyes a bit, and the whole thing turned into some sort of dadaist slapstick comedy. I... think I like it?
posted by FatherDagon at 9:34 PM on December 4, 2008

I like that other fool Artavazd Ashoti Peleshyan. He's on youtube: 1 2 3 and on Sergei's site. Sweet post AV. Where's that photo of you in that Mefi shirt that you cut into a tanktop I like that too.
posted by pita at 11:45 AM on December 5, 2008 [1 favorite]

I feel dizzy.
posted by not_on_display at 10:49 AM on December 12, 2008