Martin Arnold’s Extreme Film Editing
Martin Arnold is an experimental filmmaker from Austria, who studied both art history and psychology. Both are equally important to his films, which appear a little like midday movies on acid.
I have heard two stories as to how Arnold makes his films. One is that he is incredibly old-school, material focused, making many thousands of copies of short sequences of 35mm film, and then cutting and compiling these fragments by hand. Another account is that he employs digital techniques to repeat a small number of frames many times more than would be possible through traditional means.
Either way, the technique yields psychologically powerful results. Sound is left embedded to the relevant frames, and together these materials reveal ‘hidden’ (or inserted) subtexts to the original source material, such as anger, control, abuse, and - more often than not - Oedipal tendencies.
Perhaps the most famous is Passage à l’acte (made in 1993 - click the title to see a small selection on You Tube - which takes several seconds from the 1960’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird, and draws out the tension to elephantine proportions. Just as extreme is Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), which takes Mickey Rooney and other actors’ scenes from the Andy Hardy movies, to explore love in many twisted forms. To watch the full 40 minute version as it was intended (well, if you were shrunk to the size of a mouse) - here it is below. Click to just about any point in the timeline to see something visually astounding.
