No, your computer isn’t possessed by gremlins (but how awesome would that be?). This 1993 short film experiment, "Passage à l’acte," by Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Martin Arnold, manipulates an otherwise brief scene, relatively unimportant to the main plot, from the classic "To Kill a Mockingbird."
The film, which repeats almost every second from the scene a couple hundred times before moving onto the next, is described by The Seventh as, "a stuttering nightmare vision of turmoil underlying a conventional 1950s American family." However, just like any avant-garde art, the context lies in the eye of the viewer, so have fun coming up with your own interpretation of what this all means to you.
In a purely technical sense, the film is quite an achievement, as long as we keep in mind that it was made in 1993. Nowadays, a kid on iMovie could pull this off in ten minutes. But in 1993, especially if it was edited on film, how many times did Arnold have to look at the same 24 frames of grainy, scratchy footage before he began hallucinating John Goodman running after him, brandishing a shotgun through a fiery hallway, screaming “I’ll show you the life of the mind!”?
Watch below.
Five minutes in, just when you are thinking, "how could this possibly get any better?" the kids start speaking and it really takes off. Just wonderful.
Check out 24 Hour Psycho if you havent already.
Peter Tscherkassky's Outer Space is similar, using footage from The Entity.
It's on youtube but Indiewire won't let me post the link on here.
Anything is art; art happens in the viewer. This thing happened to be pretty damn hilarious to me. Thanks to the Playlist for breaking up the newsday with some nifty filmmaking.
Oh I get it. It's "Art"…