Three Films by Martin Arnold
Three Films by Martin Arnold
Tuesday, July 29, 2025 at 7pm
Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
Pièce Touchée, 1989, 16mm, 15 mins
Passage à l'acte, 1993, 16mm, 12 mins
Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy, 1998, 16mm, 15 mins
Stuttering, shuddering motion-studies extended from mere seconds of old Hollywood movies, Martin Arnold’s trilogy caused a sensation among cinephiles at the end of the 20th century, reinvigorating found footage practices by bridging film-as-film aesthetics with the algorithmic patterning of digital video.
Arnold first hit upon the process that would animate this suite via a 16mm print of an obscure noir. His friend had run it through an analytic projector connected to a computer, making it possible to advance the film as slowly as two frames a second. “At a projection speed of four frames per second the event was thrilling,” Arnold recalled in a later interview. “Every minimal movement was transformed into a small concussion.” Inspired by this experience, and the frame-by-frame editing techniques of Peter Kubelka, Arnold took home the print and isolated a single 18-second sequence of a man entering a door to greet a seated woman, meticulously re-editing and expanding it to a 15-minute film, Pièce Touchée, over the course of a year and a half, by reproducing individual frames with a simple, homemade optical printer. “I photographed 148,000 single images and wrote down the sequences of the frames in a 200-page score,” Arnold explained. “I learned to think movies forwards, backwards, flipped, and upside-down.” As a result, the actors’ hesitations and tics become isolated and amplified; microscopic gestures, by repetition, turn mesmerizing and musical; an otherwise forgettable moment of narrative transition grows improbably rich.
For Passage à l'acte, Arnold turned to more recognizable source material—a brief clip from To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)—showing Gregory Peck sitting down to a meal with a woman and two children. Included here are not only the images but the sounds of the original, broken up and reassembled into a musique concrète composition of slamming doors and altered voices. “Arnold's exploitation of these characters is pitiless, like an evil puppeteer” critic Gary Morris observed. “He repeats a shot of Gregory Peck screaming words and parts of words to stultifying effect, while the son twitches back and forth with some unknowable frustration and the daughter makes guttural noises that attain a kind of robot rhythm.”
The Freudian undertones suggested by Passage à l'acte’s plasticized family scenario become a symphony of symptoms in Arnold’s masterwork Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy, which reworks several sequences from the once immensely popular Andy Hardy movies of the 30s and 40s, starring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland as teenagers. Here, two icons of seemingly innocent Americana are stretched and redoubled, their language and body movements transforming into a minuet of jitters and animalistic bleats, recast in an Oedipal drama. “The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction, and denial, a cinema of repression,” Arnold says. “Consequently, we should not only consider what is shown, but also that which is not shown. There is always something behind that which is being represented which is not represented. And it is exactly that that is most interesting to consider.”
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 6:30pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.
Light Industry is supported by our members and, in part, by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, as well as the Mellon Foundation through the Coalition of Small Arts New York. Public assistance is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.