Martin Arnold
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Deanimated: The Invisible Ghost
Martin Arnold
This piece was designed as an installation piece for projection as a 60-minute loop in gallery spaces. Deanimated is literally displaced from the theater environment typical of film spectatorship, slightly blurring the boundaries between the spaces of projection and reception. "Deanimated: The Invisible Ghost," is based on the 1941 horror film "The Invisible Ghost" with the lead actors Bela Lugosi, Polly Ann Young, and John McGuire. In "Deanimated" the actors are gradually eliminated and thus the narrative loses its coherence. What remains are backgrounds, erratic camera movements that seem to move without focus throughout the room, capturing ghostly changes in light and shadows. In this project, Arnold asks fundamental philosophical questions about human existence and presence in absence. Although the actors are missing, they leave behind traces (such as smashing bullets together, dust stirring up …) and are experienced precisely in their absence as a ghostly, unreal present.
Deanimated: The Invisible Ghost
Shadow Cuts
Martin Arnold
In a later group of short film loops such as Soft Palate (2010) and Whistle Stop (2014), Arnold seems to discover psychoanalytic underbellies in the most popular form of post-war family entertainment, animation, and its most iconic characters such as Mickey Mouse (using two of Mickey's shorts, one of them Mickey's Delayed Date), Tom And Jerry, Daffy Duck (Draftee Daffy) and Goofy (How To Play Golf).
Shadow Cuts
Pièce touchée
Martin Arnold
Arnold's source material is a piece of footage from the 1950s, eighteen 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 camera pan, his wife follows after him. In Arnold's film the sequence takes 16 minutes. Cadre by cadre, it becomes an exciting tango of movements. But Pièce Touchée is more than just a matter of forms; The reflections, distortions and delays it displays challenge cinema's stable system of space and time.
Pièce touchée
Full Rehearsal
Martin Arnold
In a later group of short film loops such as Soft Palate (2010) and Whistle Stop (2014),[5] Arnold seems to discover psychoanalytic underbellies in the most popular form of post-war family entertainment, animation, and its most iconic characters such as Mickey Mouse (using two of Mickey's shorts, one of them Mickey's Delayed Date), Tom And Jerry, Daffy Duck (Draftee Daffy) and Goofy (How To Play Golf).
Full Rehearsal
