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‘Martin Arnold has constructed a cinema machine – not simply a custom optical printer or recycling system, but a kind of mnemographic machine, an apparatus that writes and rewrites memories on the surfaces of film. Arnold’s cinema functions by incorporating exterior forces, an outside source of energy that presses upon the projected images. In turn, the machine exports text, forming a kind of open economy. …
‘Arnold’s cinema, however, is not a smooth machine. The breakdowns, short-circuits and gasps that define his cinema create a violently neurotic machine. (Neurotics, Freud reminds us, distrust their memories to a remarkable extent.) Arnold’s machine stutters and twitches from the moment it is turned on. This is due, in part, to the fact that Arnold’s cinema barely holds together under the strain of a constant tension between its elements. It is a machine that thematizes even as it reproduces the scene of its own breakdown, obsessively and compulsively.’ — Akira M. Lippit, Canyon Cinema
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Stills
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Interview
from Avanto Festival
How did you end up making films after studying something else?
Martin Arnold: The thing is I was always interested in making films, and especially experimental films. I got interested very early because back then the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna was very active in showing all kinds of classical avant-garde works – let’s say Kubelka, Kenneth Anger, Brakhage, Michael Snow – so you really could see these things in this town. The only problem back then, and I think it’s somehow still a problem, was that the Arts Academy didn’t have any classes for film or media, so there was no chance at all to study these things so I enrolled in psychology and art history. I always made films when I was a student, smaller projects, but essentially I never really liked them that much. So then at the end I finished the studies and I thought that I would never become a film-maker because the movies were so bad! I was sad, you know, but then I came up with pièce touchée. The film worked well and from that point on I was a film-maker.
How did you develop your film-making techniques of looping and stuttering images and sound?
MA: I was interested in using single frames, and I think the film-maker who influenced me most in this approach was Peter Kubelka who was very active in giving lectures in Vienna and always insisted that film was composed of single frames, and that we should think of film in terms of single frames. So that’s how I got interested in single frames. Together with a friend, I built my own optical printer which is a tool that you can use to re-photograph single images, single stills, from an already existing film. When I started doing these things I tried all kinds of structures like running it forwards, then running it backwards, then I even inserted breaks and worked with extreme time lapse and also slow motion. So I did all kinds of things and ended up with this continuous forwards and backwards movement because I found them the most interesting. I used popular movies like B-pictures in my experiments and felt that if you break the continuum – if you jump from frame 2 to frame 12, then jump back to frame 3 and then to frame 16 – then this would insert breaks into the movement of the actors. What I found convincing in these continuous forwards and backwards movements was that I didn’t actually break the gestures of the actors, but I could somehow extend them or change them, which means that I not only got to work in a formal way, but I also got to influence the gestures and the actions that we can see in the movies, so I could command somehow what was happening in the image.
Your films feel and sound like music or miniature musicals in many senses. What is your relationship to music?
MA: I’m not sure if I have a particular relation to music. I mean, like many people of my age I’m interested in American music of the 80’s like John Zorn and the people around John Zorn. I’m also interested in hip hop, although I’m not an expert. And of course I’m also interested in all kinds of sampling strategies. Although I think in terms of my films a lot of it comes from film itself. I was always surprised to find out that running a film backwards – all of these strategies – are very old. That’s what the Lumière brothers did at the Grand Café in Paris at the time when they first showed their films. And then there’s the Len Lye movie Doing the Lambeth Walk – Nazi-Style, where he used footage from Triumph of the Will. So I think a lot of it essentially comes from film itself.
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Further
Martin Arnold Official Website
Martin Arnold @ Canyon Film Cooperative
Sixpack Films
‘To Mock a Killingbird: Martin Arnold’s Passage à l’Acte and the Dissymmetries of Cultural Exchange’
Martin Arnold @ Frieze Magazine
Martin Arnold @ MUBI
‘Wrinkles in Time’: Jonathan Rosenbaum on Martin Arnold
Martin Arnold @ Senses of Cinema
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14 films
Piece Touchée (1989)
‘Piece touchee (1989) is a brief exegesis of a woman reading and a man coming to visit her. This footage comes from an unidentified movie from the 1940s, and opens innocently enough with the woman sitting in a chair enjoying her book. There’s no movement at first, but this is deceptive; an almost imperceptible motion starts to happen with her hand moving slightly up and down, a sign of the slight agitation that eventually explodes as something attempts to open the door. Suddenly this homely scene takes on the feel of a horror film, with what may be a monster repeatedly, terrifyingly straining at the door. Arnold builds on this arid atmosphere of entrapment and incipient chaos to the point where a kind of vertigo sets in. In a literally dizzying sequence, Arnold introduces maniacal flash-cuts and repeatedly replays and interrupts a scene in which the camera pans across the woman rising and the man walking; this will have some viewers holding their chairs.’
Passsage À L’Acte (1993)
‘Passage a l’acte (1993) makes a simple breakfast scene from To Kill a Mockingbird look like a surrealist nightmare. The 1950s family is the target here. Those who know the film will recognize the characters as a father, his two kids, and a neighbor woman, but the film transforms them into a crazed version of the postwar family. While “Mother” sits with a frozen smile and Father (Gregory Peck) reads the paper, sonny boy gets up from the table and opens and closes the screen door repeatedly. The slamming of the door sounds like gunfire, hinting at an unnamed aggression occurring somewhere just outside this sacred space of the ’50s home and perhaps at disturbing forces at work within this family. Arnold’s exploitation of these characters is pitiless; like an evil puppeteer he repeats a shot of Gregory Peck screaming words and parts of words to stultifying effect, while the son twitches back and forth with some unknowable frustration and the daughter makes gutteral noises that attain a kind of robot rhythm.’
Don’t (1996)
‘Commissioned for the 100 years of Cinema celebrations in Vienna.’
Viennale Trailer: Psycho (1997)
‘Martin Arnold has adopted a fragment from the shower scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s legendary thriller PSYCHO, rendering and composing it anew with the possibilities of digital retouching. The result is a short yet intense piece of contemporary aesthetics. Devoted mainly to density and omission, it visualizes the cinematic narrative on all its levels as a cinematographic and aesthetic mise en scène. Simultaneously, it reveals that a resolving adaptation of traditional cinematic forms can also create suspense, excitement and pleasure.’
Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998)
‘In Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), Arnold stitches together a strange sexual scenario from three of the Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney vehicles. In the opening scenes, Andy embraces his aging mother, but subtle repetitions give this homespun scene an unexpected erotic charge. Arnold brazenly rechoreographs Andy’s movements to make it appear he’s humping the old gal from behind. Meanwhile Judy is singing in another room, but it’s no ordinary song. She’s made to emit disturbing “peeping” noises, sing backwards, and lingers on phrases like a stuck record: “There must be someone waiting … waiting … waiting … waiting …” The effect is both comic and chilling, as she stands pathetically with outstretched arms waiting for Mickey, who, perhaps because he’s just left his mother’s bed, never quite connects with poor, frustrated Judy.’ — Gary Morris, Bright Lights Cinema
Deanimated (2002)
‘In Deanimated (2002), Martin Arnold subjects a legendary American horror movie of 1941 to radical cinematographic surgery. Actors disappear thanks to digital technology, leaving the cinematic space to become the actual leading actor in a precise and absurdly comical new interpretation. Arnold transforms the original movie The Invisible Ghost, in which a wife hypnotises her husband into a murder plot, into a study in the increasing disintegration of actor movies; at its close the camera’s eye wanders through sets devoid of human life where the lights literally seem to have gone out. Death becomes, in Deanimated, the fury of disappearence which gives witness to an “unbearable transition beyond existence” (Georges Bataille). The madness has been inscribed into the faces. The ecstasy of effacement, the annihilation of being, the hypostatisation of the inorganic, the searching glance, which no longer meets with any species of recognition – those are the relays which prepare the transition to a catatonic rigidity.’ — Thomas Miessgang
Shadow Cuts (2010)
‘Martin Arnold directs his deconstructive impulses to the heritage of Walt Disney. The resultis a neurotic re-animation that comes to life in the darkness between images, where the viewer meets his dreams and demons. How much do we miss when we blink our eyes? Intense repetition and subtle variations evoke surprising nuances from existing film material. Through a stroboscopic effect, Mickey and Pluto seem to have become involved in a veritable flashing light relationship.’ — Viennale
Soft Palate (2010)
‘SOFT PALATE is a neurotic re-animation of Mickey Mouse and Pluto that comes to life as Mickey’s sleeping body rhythmically builds out of the darkness one body part at a time.’ — CineCity
Haunted House (2011)
‘The frames of a 40’s cartoon film are dispersed into their original graphic elements by means of digital de- and reanimation, the character in the foreground as well as the house behind it. Mental connections to Freud and Lacan are most welcome.’ — MUBI
Tooth Eruption (2013)
‘Recomposing teeth gestures.’ — TMDB
Whistle Stop (2014)
‘Daffy Duck is caught in an animation loop. Martin Arnold dissects the industrial animated film production with its extreme division of labour, where body parts of the characters are isolated on different cels and moved separately, in loops and outside their habitat, separated from the background. Daffy’s beak wiggles, his wing hands flutter in the black void.’ — André Eckardt
Full Rehearsal (2017)
‘Arnold seems to discover psychoanalytic underbellies in the most popular form of post-war family entertainment, animation, and its most iconic characters.’ — Letterboxd
Background Check (2020)
‘In my blackouts you can still see cats twitching, mice spitting, and Marilyn looking down from the starry sky. In English we speak of events taking up space (“take place”), but what happens when the space is not a place, so to speak, but an empty space? A black hole.’ — Martin Arnold
Fluids (2022)
‘What does it mean when the background is no longer visible? What does a background erasure mean compared to a free-form select of the foreground? And is there a complete erasure of the background at all, or are traces always left behind that can at least be guessed at?’ — Martin Arnold
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p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hi, jay! Thanks, cool to be back in this form. RT has been received very well so far, thank you. The Japanese horror festival said no. It’s not ‘horror’ really. We’re waiting to hear back from some European festivals. Hopefully news soon. There are some North American screenings that I’ll announce soon. Yay and no surprise about HaRpEr’s dissertation! How are you? What’s the newest on your fronts? ** horatio, Hey. Welcome back to us all! What’s the job? Fingers crossed and then doubly crossed for us both re: MIX NYC. Great about your art book project initiation. Peter S. treasures being mysterious about what he’s up to. Understandably, I guess. I suppose I’m interested in taking his work at face value. Its complications don’t seem difficult to access with close attention. Not sure about the political aspect. I know he’s into Andrea Dworkin, so there’s that, but people are so hellbent on looking for ways to legitimise their interest in his work, and I think there’s a fair amount of self-protective speculating going on. Curious to see where you land. I’ll find that podcast, thanks. Haha, thank you for drawing me, and of course I’m honored by its manner of destruction. Happy to support your film as best I can, of course. Have a wonderful today and beyond. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, B. I’ll write to you today about your post. We’re being really lucky on the summer heat front so far. It’s refreshingly rainy and dreary out today. I hope your blast is waning. ** Charalampos, We’re back, yeah. Thanks! Good to see you, natch. ** Jack Skelley, Great to see you last night my time. Apologies for the ‘Rashomon’ kvetching. Or any ill effect, I mean. I hope your daughter is rising to her feet as I type. ** julian, Hi, julian. Ditto. Thank you so much about ‘God Jr.’. It’s being transformed into a graphic novel right now, and I’m so curious to see what happens to it. I’m sure there’s some theme park/haunt influence in there, or as filtered and translated by the video game, which is a not dissimilar form, just with the added plus of being holographic, I think. Thank, pal. You good? ** Tosh Berman, Hi, T. Haha, no, I can’t possibly imagine our films being in-flight entertainment, wow. People do watch ‘serious’ if a lot more conventionally built films on planes and seem to get things out of them, so maybe? I watched the rather odious ‘Oppenheimer’ on my last flight, only because it was a time-eater, and I had no problem seeing everything that was wrong wth it. I love watching squished blockbusters where they’re robbed of the overblown spectacle aspect. They become almost purely mechanical, which is a boon because their machinations are the only aspect about them that interest me. Great to see you, bud. ** Carsten, Thank you, the beauty goes both ways. I know of Roadside Press, Driftwood Press, and Serving House Books but not well enough to have a bead on what they do. Great luck with the submissions! We’re in that phase with our film and, boy, it’s no fun. ** Steve, Hey! May the new server stay un-full. I saw about those floods, crazy. We’re between heatwaves here unless we get really lucky and the summer is as mild as summers used to be over here. Yeah, same about the Playboi Carti. I hope he learned his lesson, which I guess means I hope the new album is not a giant hit. ** Chris Kelso, The 22nd, that’s tomorrow! All the luck you need. Once you’ve shot a film and get what the process is like and so on, that aspect gets easier. Our films have gotten increasingly ambitious, so there are always new good and bad things that pop up. But I love shooting a film, it’s great. And the casting and the editing, etc. It’s just the fundraising and then trying to give the film a life out in the very restrictive world that films have to live in: festivals, screenings, eventual streaming if you’re lucky. Books are so much easier. Anyway, blabla, have an amazing first shooting day! ** Hugo, Hi! Pere Lachaise has a lot more going on for it than the catacombs, so wise choice. I thought the last hour of ‘Jurassic World’ was efficient, mindless fun. The first 90 minutes of character and plot development was kind of a drag. Zac is obsessed with dinosaurs and has much higher standards for these kinds of things, and he hated it. You’d have to ask him why though. Great luck with your new work! Nose to the grindstone and all of that. ** PL, Oh, right, Twitter’s censoriousness. I like that story. Incest is an interesting fetish, or its grip on its adherents is interesting. I’d have to think about a voyeur story. No doubt, but I’m blanking. Hope you’re doing well too. Sounds like it. ** Bill, Hey!!! Trip back was bad movie-filled and basically uneventful. I had the weakest jetlag I can remember having, mysteriously. That was the best part. Nice about the gig. Where are you traveling to? Ah, urgh, about Crossroads. So subjective, that stuff. If I come across any interesting festivals in my festival hunting, I’ll pass them on. ** Dominick, Hi!!!! The festival was good, fun. RT went over really well, differently than it had at the premiere. The audience seemed to get more emotionally involved in the queer imbedded storyline, which was interesting and I guess not a surprise since it was a queer festival. I’m good. I’m still heavily involved in trying to get the film shown all over the place and finishing the script for the next film. All film, basically, and that will be the case for a while. It’s nice when ordinariness is a plus. I know how that is. Oh, you’re off! Enjoy the trip and your fam. I hope love jiggled your sleeping brain cells awake. Love explaining exactly how intelligent or not bunny rabbits are, G. ** scunnard, Hi, J. I’m fine. Just busy with film stuff as seemingly always. Great about the showcase. And about Jonathan interviewing you. Say hi to him for me. I miss that guy. ** Audrey, Yes indeed, I still remember you. You’re highly memorable. Good to see you! You’re here. Yeah, maybe we can meet up. Give me a shout with your schedule, etc. You have my email? denniscoopere72@outlook.com. Sorry about the rain, but it’s better than a heatwave, trust me. Thank you about LCTG. We’d love to show RT in Seattle. I’ll see what’s possible. I do like Silver Jews, yes, and I agree about Berman. He’s pretty incredible. I did see ‘Pavements’. I really enjoyed it while thinking parts weren’t so successful, but I love Pavement so much that I was blissed to watch it. Giant congratulations on finally being able to start hrt! I think everyone I know has had a really good experience when starting hrt. It should be very interesting and maybe physically strange a bit at first, or so I hear, but that’s so great. I’m very happy to see you, and, yeah, if I don’t see you in person I hope to see you back here asap. Love, me. ** HaRpEr //, Hey. The director gave Zac and me a file of ‘Castration Movie’. I’m just waiting for the free several hours to watch it. I agree with you about ‘Pavements’. They’re so fucking great. I just love them. And Malkmus’s writing was so on fire. I don’t know the situation, of course, but crashing at your parents’ place might be a stabilising thing right now? If that relieves you of the stress of job hunting, that’s big in and of itself. I’m not 100% sure, but I think Michael Salerno isn’t going to publish Kiddiepunk books anymore. But wait and see because he is a bit mercurial. Excellent about the work in progress. Classic books: I actually think Kathy A using ‘Great Expectations’ made for one of the best titles ever. ** Good Old Gee, Hey there! So nice to see you, pal. I’m good, busy with the RT rollout, and good. Mildish summer so far here, whew. Apart from some little trips for film screenings, I should be here most of the summer if you come. Love back, and kisses too, me. ** rewritedept, See the dentist as soon as you can. Teeth can be connected to the brain and stuff. I hate dentists too, but it’s never as awful as you think, I think. I’ve heard of Tropical Fuck Storm, but that’s it. I’ll investigate. Aster: I liked ‘Beau is Afraid’. The earlier ones I liked but wasn’t in love with. Great day to you too! ** Alice, Hi. Loveliness seeing you on my end too. Pere Lachaise is, yeah, kind of divine. I’ve hit it up numerous times, to wander and even for one funeral. Mm, no stories related other than not being able to find some famous grave I was told was there. I can’t remember whose. I’m happy you found After8 helpful, and S&Co is a swell place to be inside, for sure. Apart from the reading, what’s up with you. Not that reading such books isn’t more than enough. ** Steeqhen, And ditto. I thought about seeing Charli, but it was too expensive and then it was sold out. But the film distributor that’s releasing RT here is releasing a documentary about her next month, so I’ll see that at least. I keep a kind of really basic organiser thing where I note upcoming things and things I do on eventful days. It is real helpful. 7038634357 is great. Fantastic that he/they are playing there. I wonder if he/they are coming over here. Huh. Really great person too. Thanks for the list. I don’t know a bunch of them. I’ll search around. ** Sypha, Haha, well, I mean, your love of Gaga is not news exactly is what I meant. But interesting to hear she remains imperfect. Hey, my abiding GbV love is not exactly a secret, is it? Indeed: Wes for your birthday. You good? Writing? ** Gallows Fruit, My total and great pleasure, Joe. It seemed to go really well. Thank you, buddy. ** Right. Today I have revived my blog’s Day concerning the singular and amazing and crazy-making filmmaker Martin Arnold for y’all. Have as much fun as you can. See you tomorrow.
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