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| Martin Arnold's 'Pièce Touchée',16mm Film, b&w, 16 min. Screen shot. |
Martin Arnold is an Austrian experimental filmmaker know for his obsessive reworkings of found footage. Lots of critics conccider him as a representative of the generations of artists making the transition between experimental film and video art.
In 1989 he did an 16mm film called 'Piece Touchee' based on a single 18-second shot from a 1954 film called 'The Human Jungle' (directed by Joseph M. Newman). What was the original movie about is irelevant -at least for his piece. By editing and stretching out the 18-second sequence into a 16 minutes piece.. he is attempting to create, or possibly unearth, narratives concealed within the mundane film from which he sampled. Thus, in 'Piece Touchee' are fitured a man and a woman. Their figures on the screen flip back and forth between frames as the motion is repeated and reversed and therefore, one can conceptually translate these movements and/or to identify through out the densification and dilutions hidden meanings that reference to the overall arising visual context of the movie he sampled.
In this one, a woman is reading something on the sofa. A man -husband- enters the room. By the editing, we can see the mans figure going back and forth and therefore, entering (the house) and stepping back (leaving the house). He might have a girlfriend, he might want to say that in his wife but he doe not have the balls to do that. Whereas, in the original movie he (the man) enters and kisses his wife straight away, Arnold calls him a liar and he proves his point through reworking his spectacular, stereotypical male entrance as the 'Piece Touchee.
View an excerpt here.
Nikos Georgopoulos
London,
May 2012
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