PIÈCE TOUCHÉE

by Martin Arnold (1989)

16mm Film, b&w, 16 min, stereo




Martin Arnold’s mesmerizing breakthrough film, “Pièce Touchée”, is based on a single 18-second shot from a forgotten film noir (”The Human Jungle”, Dir. Joseph M. Newman, 1954). Woman sitting in a chair. Man enters the room. Man and woman kiss. Exit man. Arnold uses an optical printer to replay the same action over and over, slow it down or play it back and forth.

It begins in an apartment with a woman sitting in a chair and reading. For a long time (at least, in terms of film viewing), the image is completely static. Arnold has replaced the original audio with a mechanical droning that remains constant throughout the film. Eventually, a man opens a door directly behind the woman, and Arnold plays this movement back and forth, as if the man can’t decide whether he’s coming or going. Then he walks over to where the woman is sitting, and by playing the action back and forth, Arnold turns this motion into a kind of spastic dance. The woman stands up, and she and the man begin walking to the other side of the apartment, the camera tracking with them. In addition to playing the action back and forth, Arnold splices in shots of the same action flipped horizontally and vertically. The editing in places is so rapid, it looks as though two mirror images have been superimposed over one another. What matters isn’t what the footage shows (which is fairly banal) but how Arnold manipulates his raw material.

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, however, is not a smooth machine. The breakdowns, short-circuits and gasps that define his cinema create a violently neurotic machine. 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.

To watch the video click on he link below -- and the impatient viewer starts right at the 2 min mark. Enjoy !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9JJc7TEsZI