Everything I knew
about America I learned from the movies. My work is about the cultural
role of cinema and its relationship to everyday life. My main sources
are home-movies, but I also incorporate footage from the fringes of the
industry – educational and instructional films, travelogues etc.
From this material, I make new movies that comment on cinema as a cultural
phenomenon.
Home movies tend not to follow a narrative. They are simply records of
events, special and quotidian: a wedding, a birthday party, a child’s
first steps, the new car, and a family vacation. By looking closely at
this database, familiar cinematic scenes begin to emerge: a woman in a
white dress runs down a road in a shot that seems like a 50’s melodrama;
two men in trench-coats cross a field to shake hands, as if meeting in
a spy movie. A man in the corner of a room smokes like Bogart. Freed from
their original contexts, the isolated moments take on an iconic quality.
I am using found 8 and 16 mm footage that I categorize and catalogue.
I transfer the celluloid to video by scanning filmstrips, which I then
re-animate and edit. Each scan consists of three filmstrips that are placed
next to each other; they relate on both the horizontal plane (the surface
of the screen), and the vertical plane (one sequence following the other).
The individuality of each filmstrip is maintained within the moving triptych.
Each window is framed with the visual information that is usually hidden:
the sprocket holes, the optical soundtrack, the type of film, and the
date it was processed.
I carefully select the highlights from all this found footage: a facial
expression, a body gesture, a car passing by, and a camera movement over
a landmark. These condensed scenes are usually as short as three seconds.
They often differ in format, style, or content, but because they appear
in the same cinematic space, the composed elements suggest new meanings.
For example, a sequence of a kid dancing in a suit and hat, sharing the
screen with pink flamingos and a street parade, alludes to a musical.
In another, images of a woman taking a bath, juxtaposed with the view
of a hotel room and an airplane are comparable to scenes from Hitchcock
movies. The musical and suspense movie (made by Hitckcock or not), like
other codified genres of cinema, offers the viewer a formulated experience
firmly established on well-defined rules and responses.
I make movies by playing with these conventions and manipulating bits
of discarded footage. The movies can be classified because they consist
of a series of iconic elements, such as titles, sounds and shots. The
tiny films become comments that contain the essential components of the
phenomenon (or genres) they refer to. It is summing up what I know about
that genre (phenomenon): a western, a musical, and a “foreign”
film seen through the experience that is made in Hollywood. The films
become agents, through which I am trying to learn about the society that
produced it.
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