It is a commonplace of film history that the develop-ment of narrative, and in particular, extended melodra-matic narrative, by D. W. Griffith and others, transfor-med the makers of pre-cinema and early cinema into“primitives” or at best “pioneers” - whose discoveriesbecame merely means to an end. The idea that motionstudy (à la Eadweard Mubridge’s photographs and zoo-praxiscope demonstrations; and the Lumière brothers’extended cinematographic gazes on everyday and exoticsights) and magic (à la Mèliès’s “trick-film” and itsmany contemporaries) might exist as filmic ends-in-themselves, outside of narrative development, seems tohave become untenable, at least in the popular mind.And yet, motion study and magic have remained crucialelements in the history of critical forms of cinema.Indeed, for many independent filmmakers of recentdecades, the determination to critique industry filmma-king has been related to a fascination with those “primi-tive” approaches to cinema “left behind” as theindustry developed. In the case of the young Austrianindependent Martin Arnold, motion study and magichave been central tactics for deconstructing and refas-hioning conventional Hollywood visual and auditorygestures.

For Pièce Touchée (1989) and Passage à l’Acte(1993), Arnold used a homemade optical printer to ana-lyze, respectively, the visual motion in an eighteen-sec-ond shot from The Human Jungle (1954, directed byJoseph M. Newman) and the visual and auditorymotion in a brief passage from To Kill a Mockingbird(1962, directed by Robert Mulligan). In Piéce Touchée aman, apparently a husband, comes home and is greetedby a woman, apparently his waiting wife. WhileMuybridge seems to have believed his photographs ana-lyzed the motion of “reality” Arnold is well aware that

Piéce Touchée explores a Hollywood cliché that is, atmost, only a pretense of reality: a cinematic gesture thatpolemicizes a culturally approved relationship betweenthe genders. Arnold uses his optical printer to lay barethe gender-political implications of the husband’s arrivaland to transform this gesture, which has become nearlyinvisible to most viewers, into a phantasmagoria of visu-al effects that would make any trick-film director proud.Passage à l’Acte focuses on a domestic scene in which afather demands that his young son not leave the dinnertable until his sister has finished eating. Again, Arnoldlays bare the politics of a conventional media moment,in this case transforming the original scene into a bre-athtaking mechanical ballet accompanied by a sound-track that hovers somewhere between rap music sam-pling and stuttering. Indeed, stuttering - and limping,its visual counterpart - are as Arnold explains, two ofhis central fascinations.

My decision to interview Arnold may seem strange,given the fact that only two short films were in distribu-tion at the time we talked (Pièce Touchée is fifteenminutes; Passage à l’Acte, twelve). But the visual andauditory accomplishments of these films, the amount ofthought that seems encoded within them, and their con-siderable usefulness for those who teach cinema studiesfueled my interest in talking with Arnold.

Our interview began in the fall of 1991 with anexchange of letters; Arnold and I talked in person inVienna in June 1992, and we subsequently refined theconversation in a further exchange of letters. We aremuch indebted to Thomas Korschil for his assistancewith translation.

MacDonald: The two areas of Austrian independentfilm I’m most aware of are the formalist work of PeterKubelka and Kurt Kren, both of whom worked frame

MARTIN ARNOLDSCOTT MACDONALD. In: A Critical Cinema III: Interviews with Independant Filmmakers. University of California Press,

Berkeley/Los Angeles/London 1998, S.347 - 362

by frame, but not as animators; and the “materialaction-films” of Otto Mühl and Kren. Kubelka’s films, especi-ally those he did before Unsere Afrikareise [“OurAfrican Journey”, 1966], seem a background for yourwork.

Arnold: I grew up with the Peter Kubelka films. Istarted attending his lectures when I was eighteen. Inmany ways Kubelka influenced me: his frame by framethinking, his structural thinking. Kubelka wanted toadvance towards the unexplored essences of themedium. He wanted to make the most filmic film. Thecentral focus of Kubelka’s thinking is what is happeningbetween the frames. Therefore, he also tries to workagainst representation in the single frame: on one handthe very short temporal units he uses in his early filmscause the individual frames to fuse; on the other, theimages themselves are already graphically abstracted. InAdebar [1957, the title refers to a Viennese café] silhou-ettes are dancing, and in Schwechater [1958, the titlerefers to a brand of beer] the drinking models are hard-ly discernible after Kubelka’s printing processes. InArnulf Rainer [1960, ArnulfRainer is a painter], as youknow, there is no image at all in the traditional sense.

I work with feature film scenes, with popular cine-ma, so for my work the image itself is also very impor-tant, because the imagery doesn’t only show certain pla-ces, actors and actions; it also shows the dreams, hopesand taboos of the epoch and society that created it.

Kubelka became a member of the international filmcommunity at a time when a strong belief in progresswas still widespread, be it concerning the most filmicfilm, the most liberal sexuality, the most ideal model forsociety, or the newest technology. This way of thinkingsuffered severe damage in the early eighties (at thelatest). The much-praised technologies have turned theworld into a radioactive dump. Today, nobody believesin the idea of free sexuality in the wake of AIDS. Theidea of social emancipation led to the dictatorships ofthe former Eastern Bloc countries and thus proved itselfwrong. And if somebody talks about the most filmicfilm today, he too will be confronted with skepticism.

In the eighties, people paused and questioned whythe paradigms of progress and emancipation had failedso utterly in so many respects. The issue is no longerwhat should be, but what is and was.

But Kubelka, and Kren too, did the right thing forthat epoch: they filmically explored the possibilities ofknowledge about art and expression inherent in theirtime. And both made very good films.

I am influenced not so much by Kubelka’s films, butmore by his frame by frame thinking. And Kubelka isonly one influence among many.

MacDonald: Piéce Touchée is a remarkable film.How did it develop? What gave you the idea to focuson that one shot?

Arnold: A friend of mine, Walter Jaklitsch, used sce-nes of old movies to demonstrate a computerized pro-jector to me. He had constructed it in such a way that itcould project images at any speed from two to twenty-five frames per second. I remember looking at a scenefrom The Human Jungle that took place in the kitchen:while the couple is talking, the man is reaching into adrawer to get out a knife. At a projection speed of fourframes per second, the event was thrilling; every mini-mal movement was transformed into a small concussion.We were convinced that we were watching a crime storyand expected him to threaten her with the knife. To oursurprise though, we found out that he was not “themurderer”, but the husband preparing a sandwich. Iowe Walter a lot!

At that time, I already intended to work with thepossibilities of optical printing. Walter sensed my exci-tement and gave me the roll of film. At home I wentthrough it with a magnifying glass and decided to startmy optical printing experiments with the eighteen-sec-ond shot I used in Piéce Touchée, without ever havingseen it projected.

My decision to use that particular shot was veryintuitive. That representation of a man and a womanand a time and a space was a small universe that I want-ed to observe in detail. Probably I also sensed that it isespecially interesting to observe those things which we(falsely) think we have seen a million times. The hus-band coming home and the wife waiting for him arefamiliar images to everyone, especially because that sce-nario is used in all genres of conventional cinema. Everymale Hollywood hero at some point returns home to hiswaiting wife - whether he has just shot a few dozenIndians or arrested illegal alcohol distillers in theChicago of the thirties. Beyond that, the entering andleaving of rooms is itself a central impulse in conventio-nal narrative cinema of the fifties. It is the simplest wayto signal a change of place.

I also found formal factors that I was impressed by.When I discovered the quick pan at the end of the shot,I immediately thought of amplifying it in both the for-ward and backward directions, in order to destroy thecalmness of the previously symmetrical composition.The structure of space in conventional narrative cinemais as much at a deadlock as the structure of gender, andbecause of that I felt great pleasure in thoroughly sha-king up that space.

At the beginning, I tried out certain forward andbackward movements. Naturally most of the materialproduced was trash, but I repeatedly corrected andexpanded the more promising passages. In that mannerI was able to feel my way towards an end product. Also,I continued to search through the original footage forall manner of implications and possibilities. I wanted tosee what the actors were doing, what the camera was

doing, what the light was doing, which shadows wouldappear when and where, and so on.

I was never tempted to exercise any kind of concep-tual art: that is, to think up an abstract system intowhich I would fit the images.

MacDonald: How long did you work on PiéceTouchée?

Arnold: I worked on it very intensely for one and ahalf years. Using an optical printer I made myself - verysimple and very fragile - I photographed 148,000 singleimages and wrote down the sequences of the frames in atwo-hundred-page score. I learned to think movies for-wards, backwards, flipped and upside down.

MacDonald: Piéce Touchée asks that the viewerinvestigate a bit of film the way a scientist investigates acell though you’re more playful than most scientists inyour presentation of your “findings”: your exposure ofthe gender implications is as theoretically aware as it isentertaining. The woman in the shot is still, passive,waiting for the man; and when he arrives, his movementcauses her to move. When the door begins to open, herhead begins to move in the same direction, and whenhis hand closes the door, her head swings the same way.It’s as if she’s a puppet attached to him by strings.

I’ve heard you described as a film theorist; what the-orizing - by you or others - do you see as particularlyrelevant to Piéce Touchée and its exploration of gen-der?

Arnold: I am not a film theorist and I did not try tofilmically translate any theory of gender politics.

And your comparison with the scientist is only part-ly true. I suppose I do use the optical printer as a kindof microscope. But concerning the cell, the comparisonis problematic: a cell is something natural, whereas ashot from a movie is an artifact, it comes from anindustry which supplies people with pictures and storiesthat move them.

MacDonald: I’ll switch analogies. In my view, yourfilm combines the strategies of the earliest filmmakersand pre-cinematic explorers of movement. LikeMuybridge, you do a “motion study” of a social artifact(Muybridge studied the way people conventionallymoved; you study the way people conventionally movein film); like the Lumières, you explore the possibilitiesof a single shot (though a single shot from a film, ratherthan from “reality”), and like Mèliès, you use yourapparatus, the optical printer, to transform conventionalmotion into magic. While Mèliès, and the approacheshe inspired, was later incorporated into the history ofconventional narrative, you transform conventional nar-rative back into magic. It’s like a revenge on film histo-ry.

Arnold: I like the expression “revenge” in this con-text. When I look at the history of humankind, at myown history, and also at film history, I can think of a lot

ofthings I would love to take revenge for. But a revengeon the history of humankind is impossible; the revengeon one’s own history is called psychoanalysis and tou-ches upon the early enemies only in one’s own head -and with film history it is also difficult. As an independ-ent filmmaker, you fight in a very small army; lonely andbadly armed, you compete against the star wars systemsof Warners and Metro.

With respect to my relation to early cinema: yourcomparisons are certainly flattering, but I have neverseriously thought about these relations myself. To estab-lish such relationships is the task of the theoretician; anartist who indulges in such comparisons is presumptu-ous.

I like the idea that people inscribe themselves intodilferent kinds of materials, all forms of human repre-sentation and expression, from ancient cave painting tosculpture to computer art. Film is such a “space ofinscription”.

When you look at a strip of film you will at first seea regular sequence of rectangular frames that representa three-dimensional space. Those are the tracks thecamera left behind; the apparatus inscribed itself ontothe material. If you look more closely “into” the frame,you will see tracks of the people and objects that werein front of the camera at the time of the recording. Inamateur films an individual inscribes himself into thematerial with his family; in commercial-narrative moviesan industry inscribes its actors, modes of representation,and stories into the material. It is here that the traditionof representation is being written, and those culturalidols, Man and Woman, and their ideal life together arebeing established.

Into the original strip of film I used to make PiéceTouchée, the society of the fifties had inscribed some ofits codes of representation and a lot of its social norms(above all, those concerning gender). And all this wasand is apparent in a couple of frames: it is not necessaryto watch the complete movie to recognize the obviousand not-so-obvious messages inscribed in it. But Iapproached the material very openly: at first I was inter-ested above all in the strong sensual effect that is crea-ted by running the film forward and backward. I hadthe impression that the movements on the screen wereextending to the body of the spectator. During the pro-jection of my first sketches I was repeatedly rocking inmy chair, as if I were attached to the figures by strings.Many people experience Piéce Touchée as very erotic;I’ve been asked again and again why it’s so sexual. Ithink that this impression originates on a formal level,as the product of that irregular vibration. The represen-tation of genders adds to this and channels this instinc-tive mood. In the beginning I was surprised myselfabout the multiplicity of possible ways to influencemeaning. Naturally this led me to search the original

material for those aspects of the imagery that create par-ticular meanings. lt was fascinating to see that minuscu-le shifts of movement could cause major shifts in mea-ning. But also, the sensuality and energy of a work ofart always work on a level where it is not yet (or notanymore) possible to talk about “representation”.Forins, colors, contrast, and rhythms don’t affect thespectator in the realm oflanguage and logic; they com-municate on deeper levels: I would situate the discoursethey take part in in the unconscious.

MacDonald: You do more than discover what’s inthat shot: you transform it.

Arnold: lt was fascinating to see the moments inPiéce Touchée where certain events are created just bythe forward and backward movement. An example isthe “sequence of the kiss”, when the woman is endlesslyblinking her eyes while he is massaging the back of thechair and swinging his hips. In the original shot there isno blinking; she has her eyes closed much longer; andhe just takes his hand off the chair.

The game of producing new meanings is introducedin a less lascivious way right at the beginning. We seetwo frames repeated over and over, showing a motion-less woman in an armchair. After longer observation,one might notice that one of her fingers is rendered outof focus. As a third and fourth frame are added, the fin-ger starts to move and the spectator is inclined to attrib-ute a certain meaning to it. We see a “trembling” finger;which ultimately becomes a “beating” finger. Movemententers the picture, meaning is seen.

MacDonald: In that opening moment, the man turnsthe hall light off, and you work with the relevant framesuntil, finally, his gesture of turning off the light becomesa flicker - a reference, I assume, to a basic element ofcinema technology and to those “structural filmma-kers”, including Kubelka, who have explored flicker intheir work. In North America and in England, critics(and some filmmakers) have seen a schism betweenfilmmakers who explore the mechanical/chemical basesof cinema (Ernie Gehr, Tony Conrad, Paul Sharits) anda later generation who explore the issue of gender(Yvonne Rainer, Laura Mulvey/Peter Wollen, SallyPotter). Often, the assumption is that these two approa-ches are in conflict. I’ve always assumed both approa-ches mean to lay film bare, and confront conventionalcinema and conventional audiences. Piéce Touchéecombines both investigations: it’s very much about themechanics of cinema and about its gender (and other)politics.

Arnold: I go back to the term “inscription”. I thinkthat in the sixties, avant-garde film was concemed withinscription into the material, whereas in the eighties itwas concerned with inscription into the tradition ofrepresentation.

In any case, I don’t see any contradiction betweenthe two approaches. The politics of cinema don’t beginwhere gender roles are stereotyped (or challenged).Representing the world in linear perspective (inGerman: Zentralperspektive, “central perspective”)through the optics of the camera is already an ideologi-cal undertaking, in which not only the object, but a cer-tain view of this object is being portrayed. The optics ofthe camera construct a world the way certain humanssee it, a world in which they can experience themselvesas its center. This is already a politics of representation.

If we go a step further and consider the dominantpractice of the cinematic apparatus in society, we areagain confronted with political ventures. There are ide-ologies for telling stories and for presenting time andspace. In classical narrative cinema the rules for repre-senting temporal and spatial sequences are pre-determi-ned precisely. What was once called “realism” in cinemadoes not develop on its own. It is forced into being by amultitude of prohibitions and restrictions. Of course,there are similar phenomena of exclusion on the narrati-ve level: certain stories are told, others not.

The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion,reduction, and denial, a cinema of repression. In conse-quence we should not only consider what is shown, butalso that which is not shown. There is always somethingbehind that which is being represented, which was notrepresented. And it is exactly that that is most interest-ing to consider.

In my childhood, Hollywood’s love and crime storiesinstilled in me great expectations of adulthood. I abso-lutely wanted to be a part of that exciting world. WhenI grew up, I was tremendously disappointed. Was thedisappointment caused by the fact that Hollywood’smale heroes spend more time kissing and shooting thando real-life people? Was it the pleasure received fromHollywood’s stories, which in contrast to those of reallife, always have a definite beginning, a definite end,and a definite meaning? Or was it just the voyeuristicopportunities Hollywood gave me to intrude into theprivate living quarters of strangers to watch their mostintimate emotions? There is no one answer to thequestion of what constituted the attractiveness ofeinemaduring my childhood. But one thing is for sure: I owe toit my current use of that apparatus.

Of course, theories that film artists themselvesattribute to their work are to be taken with a grain ofsalt. In the sixties some filmmakers attempted to get to“the essence of film” the “ultimate elements” of themedium. On one hand, it is necessary, of course, to dealwith the elements of the apparatus one works with.Through this exposition one can advance its creativepotentials and contribute to an understanding of thepossibilities of the medium. But if one describes thefilm exclusively, “essentially” as a set of mechanical,

physical, and chemical variables, then one curtails theobject to be defined. Film is all of that, but a lot moretoo! It is also essential to look at what film actually is insociety.

And yes, the hall-light passage is a joke on structuralfilmmaking. I had a lot of fun confronting “flicker” aholy relic of avant-garde film, within the earth-boundreality of a narrative movie, to send the “essential” film-thinking into a filmic living room, where obviously littleessential thinking is happening.

MacDonald: Was the location of the eighteen-secondshot within The Human Jungle important to you?

Arnold: The husband has just come home from agangster chase. He’s the inspector who pursues a killerof blondes. It is very late. His wife has already beenwaiting for hours, and in the following kitchen shot sheadmonishes him to work less and to care more abouther. It is not a key scene, and the setting isn’t represen-tative, because the major part of the plot takes place atthe police station and in nocturnal (studio-) Chicago.

MacDonald: Why the title Piéce Touchée?“Touchée” in English means a concession to an oppo-nent for a point well made.

Arnold: Literally translated, “Pièce Touchée” means“touched piece,” but this French term also stands for arule in international chess competitions. If you touch afigure, even if it is just by chance, your competitor maysay, “Pièce Touchée,” which means that you have tomove that piece. The German equivalent isberührt/geführt (“touched/conducted”). I like all of theassociations of this phrase, not only those connectedwith gender, but those connected with the mode of pro-duction: I “touched” and “conducted” my snippet offilm very often (148,000 times) to make Piéce Touchée.

MacDonald: I assume the film uses the sound of theoptical printer as the accompaniment to the visuals.This sound seems to function in a variety of ways. In ageneral sense, it suggests that the imagery you appropri-ated that is, the actions of the man and the woman areproducts of the industry, of a machine or a set of machi-nes/technologies. But I wonder if it doesn’t go furtherstill. At times, the man and woman seem to “dance” toyour rhythm. It’s clear that you controlled their motionsso that from time to time they would be “in sync” withthe sound you chose. Is this a way of suggesting, “con-fessing,” your own inevitable complicity with the“machinery” of representation as it has developed in theindustry? After all, without the industry, you’d have nofilm.

Arnold: The sound in Piéce Touchée does not ori-ginate from an optical printer. One hears a very nar-rowly laid loop which reproduces the sound of thedoor being opened, distorted in recording. Ofcourse, I was aware of the fact that the sound is sug-gestive of projectors, blimped cameras, and in the

case of Piéce Touchée, of an optical printer.The choice of this sound was formalist. I only start-

ed to deal with the sound after the picture had alreadybeen completed, and at first I wavered between twoextremes, sync sound and silence. Sync sound turnedout to be impossible, because of the very small meas-ures of time I had used for the picture. The qualities ofa sound are hardly audible at lengths of a twelfth or atwenty-fourth of a second. At that level, every soundbecomes a peeping noise and adds a childish, seeminglysarcastic tone to visual events. After the first trials withsync sound, I realized that I had to save that conceptfor my next project, where I could create the soundalong with the picture from the beginning. As youknow, that’s what I did in Passage à l’Acte.

As a silent film, I did not like Pièce Touchée. I belie-ve that silence in cinema confers a certain monumentali-ty on the events on the screen. And further “no sound”never equals silence. At screenings of silent movies theaudience produces its own sounds and thus highlightsthe events by blowing their noses, coughing, andmoving about in their seats. After silence had been eli-minated as a possibility, I tried to work with soundloops of simple variations. In fact, I tried to constructdifferent loops for the different parts of the film. But inthe face of the very complex picture track, these loopslooked like a “very ambitious try,” at best.

Well, what remained was the most simple loop, arepetition of a small piece of the original soundtrack,but without its referential or representative character. Iproduced a few loops like that, listened to them alongwith the picture and finally decided on the one that atleast in part conveys aspects of sync sound:

it’s the sound of the door opening. Although thesound, with its complete simplicity, is not comparableto the picture, I believe that it conveys a kind of tensionthat goes along perfectly with the tension of the picture.

MacDonald: Passage à l ‘Acte is an interestingexpansion of Pièce Touchée in its foregrounding of syncsound. But it’s also different in the sense that you use animage from a film that many more people will recognizeimmediately. I recognized Gary Merrill in Pièce Touchéewhen I first saw it, but had no idea what film the shotwas from. To Kill a Mockingbird is popular, one ofGregory Peck’s major films, a multiple Oscar winner. Itwill be recognized instantly. What do you do in terms ofpermissions?

Arnold: Nothing. You can’t get old film material inEurope as easily as you get it in the United States. Idecided to use what I could get, a scene from a stolenGerman print of To Kill a Mockingbird. Sometimes I amafraid there may be consequences, but I’m not makingmoney with my films, or I’m making so little that I can’timagine anyone will be interested. When I decided touse the scene from The Human Jungle, I tried to find

out who had the European rights. I located a distribu-tor who told me on the phone that he didn’t have therights anymore, but that it was completely senseless forme to waste my time:

as long as no one was getting poorer or richer, whowould care? But before he said that, he did ask threetimes if I was making advertisements.

MacDonald: Have you been working on Passage à l‘Acte since finishing Pièce Touchée?

Arnold: No. It was very hard to work for a year afterPièce Touchée. I did a promotional tour for that film -mailings to festivals, festival visits.

Then I tried to work with image and sound in anot-her scene from The Human Jungle, but I didn’t feelcomfortable with sound at that point.

MacDonald: How did you choose this particularscene from To Kill a Mockingbird?

Arnold: I had two interests in the scene. First, Iwanted another domestic moment. Second, because Iwanted to integrate sync sound into my repetitive pat-terns, the scene had to have a certain density on theauditory level: to put it simply, it had to be loud andeventful. At this point, it was already clear to me that inPassage à l’Acte I would not work with a single shotonly, but with a whole scene. I was interested in howmy forward and backward repetitions would work onthe cuts, especially with shot/countershot patterns.Moreover, I felt challenged to coordinate the actions ofa whole group of people.

Those points of departure soon merged into the ideaof choosing a scene of a family at the dinner table,where the family, home, and gender theme could pairbest with my formal ambition to work with repetitionsof sounds. There would be a lot of clatter and scrapingat the table, the shrill voices of the kids, and the lowervoices of the grown-ups who “educate”, that is, repeatcertain orders to furnish the kids with a decent behavio-ral repertoire. However, even if you know generallywhat you want, and are determined to rip films offinstead of buying them, it’s not easy to get your handson the right scene. I taped a lot of things from TV, andfinally chose the scene from To Kill a Mockingbird - ascene that is not vital for the narrative structure of theoriginal movie and which does not have anything to dowith the central theme of racism. The race issue madeTo Kill a Mockingbird famous, and I would have beenafraid to use a scene where, for example, the black manis on trial. I wouldn’t want to play around with thatmaterial. In any case, the scene I chose is a family scene,not different from many other family scenes, whereparents and children are sitting at a breakfast tableeating.

It’s true, as you’ve said, that if somebody knows ToKill a Mockingbird, he could associate the rest of thefilm to what I am doing. But that wasn’t my intent. I

did go through a phase during which I was uncertainabout this issue, since some writers I am acquaintedwith brought it to my attention. When the film wasfinished, the same people began to talk about the “fami-ly” as a matter of fact - the visual impression of my filmwas evidently stronger than their “better knowledge” ofthe original source.

MacDonald: I don’t know the phrase “Passage àl’Acte.”

Arnold: In spite of evident differences, Passage à l‘Acte and Pièce Touchée have quite a few things in com-mon. The two snippets are similar to each other. Bothare scenes from classical Hollywood cinema, whichshow scenes of everyday family life. And I manipulateboth pieces in continuously repeated forward and bak-kward movement. I wanted to express these commonaspects with another French title. This time, I found mytitle in a dictionary for psychoanalysis and psychiatry.

“Passage à l’Acte” has several levels of meaning. Incommon usage, it means “transition into action.” Inslang it means something like ‘lust do it.” In psychoana-lysis it is a (dated) expression for impulsive actions thatare not explainable within the usual system ofhumanmotivations, the impulsive actions of violent characters.The English term “acting out” is only partly congruentwith the concept.

MacDonald: I don’t know anyone who has explo-red film sound quite the way you do. In the sixtiesthere was a tradition among many avant-garde film-makers of making silent film as a reaction againstcommercial movies on the very problematic assump-tion that film was, essentially, a visual medium. Ofcourse, some avant-garde filmmakers have worked incomplex and subtle ways with the connections bet-ween sound and image: Bruce Conner in Cosmic Ray[1962] and other films; Kubelka in Our AfricanJourney; Larry Gottheim in Mouches Volantes [1976],Four Shadows [1978], Mnemosyne, Mother of Muses[1986]; Morgan Fisher in Standard Gauge [1984]; SuFriedrich in The Ties That Bind [1984] and Sink orSwim [1990]. But except for Frampton’s CriticalMass, I don’t know predecessors for your work withsound. Do you?

Arnold: I think I have been influenced not somuch by American film as by contemporary Americanmusic. Hip-hop, for example, is full of sampled phras-es that are being repeated for longer or shorter dura-tions. Often, turntables are used to move records for-ward and backward. Such techniques are also used inmore complex forms of contemporary Americanmusic-John Zorn, for example. Christian Marelay cutsup old records and puts the parts together in newways. He also employs obstacles which make theneedle jump forward and backward.

By the way, recently I listened to a popular programon Austrian radio in which amateur inventors had thechance to talk about their work. An ice cream vendor,who is also crazy about records, called in. He hadinvented a frozen record; he filled the pressing moldwith water, and with certain (I am sure very elaborate)techniques he froze it in his freezer. A great idea: canyou imagine how it feels when Marilyn Monroe’s “I’mThrough with Love” melts away on your turntable?

I myselfbegan to put together a tape of”scratcheddreams” two months ago. A friend of mine let me useher teenage record collection. Back then she had liste-ned to her favorite passages over and over again liftingthe needle and putting it back within the same song. Indoing so she had scratched those passages so severelythat now the needle gets stuck, endlessly repeating cet-tain grooves: “Dream lo-lo-lo-lo-ver where are you-u-u-u. . . . “ Thus the psyche of a young girl has engraved itsdesires into the record - now a document situated

somewhere between the unconscious of a single per-son and popular culture. This is a good example of howan individual can inscribe herself into popular cultureand shift its messages towards collapse.

But let’s get back to our topic. There was also astrong tendency towards radical new interpretations inthe music of the eighties. Here, too, something is beingtransformed; “musical meanings” are being shifted, beit in John Zom’s ingenious interpretations of jazz giantslike Omette Coleman, Kenny Dorham, and SonnyClark, or in the case of some guys from the “Nato”label puffing “Running Bear & Little White Dove”through a musical meat grinder with a lot of humor.

MacDonald: You discover many sounds one wouldnormally not hear, and you discover what new soundsyou can build out of those. What was the process?

Arnold: For Passage à l’Acte I transferred the soundfrom the 16mrm print of the scene onto magnetic film,to separate it from the picture. That way it was possibleto discern on the editing table what was happening atwhich frame of the picture and of the soundtrack, andhow long the different picture and sound events were.

On the level of the soundtrack my manipulationslead to a strong “equalization” of simple sounds andlanguage. Through the continuous repetitions, the bak-kground sounds appear to be much londer than in theoriginal narrative structure; the mechanism of selectionwhich normally favors perception of language seems tobe disengaged. Noise and language become soundevents of equal value and importance. But this is notonly due to repetition, but also to the fact that the for-ward and backward manipulations not only undermineparts of the structure of language but make a previouslyunstructured sequence of noises appear to be structu-red. Since the noises now follow a certain order, langua-ge loses its sovereignty, its special status, which it gains

exactly because its sequence of sounds is structured.Moreover, the phrases heard in Passage à l’Acte are

such clichés that nothing personal is being expressed.Who is it that’s talking? Society’s norm speaks throughlanguage and language speaks itself, and apart fromthat, nobody speaks! In the film we don’t experiencepeople determining the conversation, but the conversa-tion determining the people. This is the same way inlife: we did not invent language ourselves. Through theacquisition of language, our entrance into synbolicorder and thus into societal order is accomplished. Andthere is no escape from language (and society) exceptfor becoming mad. This holds true for us as well as forthe protagonists of Passage à l’Acte, though they are evi-dently treated worse: they are not only victims of theorder of family, society, and language, they are also vic-tims of the order of Hollywood cinema, and, in myhands, of independent cinema as well.

MacDonald: What draws you to the optical printer?Arnold: In a certain sense the optical printer is an

apparatus that works against the camera. The cameraproduces images in quick sequence in order to reprodu-ce movement. With the optical printer one proceedsfrom the single image, from the “brick” of the repro-duction of movement, to a novel movement. The decisi-ve question here though is, what kind of movementshould be produced?

In Pièce Touchée and Passage à l’Acte I work with amore-or-less continuous forward and backward motion.I start with frame x, go forward to frame x + 1 and thenfrom x + 1 back again through x to x - 1. In PièceTouchée I am not skipping any frame. In Passage àl’Acte, I do skip frames (every second frame within thebackward movement) but in a way that the forward andbackward motion remains intact. If I had chosen a dif-ferent process, there might have been jumps in themotion. Both methods would be based on the apparatusof the optical printer and would lead to a restrucuringof the original material. However, the filmic productswould be very different. With the second procedure, Iwould break up the filmstrip and thus visualize, prima-rily, one of the technical possibilities of the optical prin-ter. The actual movements of the actors would drift intothe background, disappear behind the demonstration ofthe machine, since the abrupt movements of a machinehave only a slight equivalent in human motion. But withmy procedure in Piéce Touchée and Passage à l’Acte,there is an equivalent. We are familiar with steppingforward and backward in life: taking “two steps forwardand one step back” is associated with insecurity. Whena body trembles, we perceive anxiety or nervousness.My filmic interventions infuse the characters’ actionswith tic-like twitchings, that once in a while become sodominant as to seemingly create new actions out ofthemselves. The same holds true in Passage à l’Acte with

respect to sound. If you play a word backwards, thenthe tape player as a machine will become audible. But ifI play a word forward repeatedly, varying where I start,then something happens that we know from life. Therepetition of words and sentences confers an “insistingcharacter” on them; one can associate them with litaniesand orders. The repetition of syllables produces theimpression of stuttering.

Recently Maureen Turin wrote a text abont PiéceTouchée [“Eine Begegnung mit dem Bild” (“AnEncounter with the Image”), in Alexander Horwath,Lisl Ponger, Gottfried Schlemmer, Avantgardefilm(Vienna: Wespennest, 1995), pp. 301-307] in which shedeseribes the tapping of the finger in the beginning ofthe film as a symptom at first a - symptom of thewoman, then a symptom of the apparatus, and finally asymptom of the viewer. I liked that a lot and it alsomade me question my own associations with symptomslike tics and stuttering, both of which fascinate me. Myapparatus produces movement through breaks, andthus has a “tic” itself. I reinforce that tic by letting the

apparatus run forward and backward. It lets me enterinto these different worlds and take viewers and liste-ners with me.

Psychoanalysis suggests that in the case of a tic, themovement that is actually acted out is superimposedover an opposite or at least different movement, whichhad to be repressed as a consequence of censored wis-hes, ambivalences, and aggressive urges. Stunted to arudiment, they vainly try to overcome the manifestaction. Something similar is true for the phenomenon ofstuttering: a message that is in conflict with what actual-ly is being said wants to be expressed.

To put it in general terms: in the symptom, therepressed declares itself. Hollywood cinema is, as I saidearlier, a cinema of exclusion, denial, and repression. Iinscribe a symptom into it, which brings some of theaspects of repression to the surface, or, to say it in moremodest words, which gives an idea of how, behind theintact world being represented, another not-at-all intactworld is lurking. Maybe this is the revenge on filmhistory you mentioned earlier.