Martin Arnold: cinemnesis

Martin Arnold is a contemporary Austrian experimental filmmaker. His short films make use of familiar Hollywood footage put through an optical printer to create effects of jarring, twitching and rhythmic vision. The sequence is stoped and started over and over from one frame and incrementally moves slowly ahead in a jumping fashion. The effect is nervous and jumpy and allows the viewer to contemplate further in an abstract fashion the notion of film and the ideas of memory and machinery. The ideas of Freud along with other thinkers like Derrida have informed the filmmaker. Ideas about memory and what is etched into the brain being in fact a vision which is clear and yet highly effected by emotions, places and thoughts. Displacing and decontextualising recognisable found footage causes the stable and reassuring images to become mildly disturbing. The human condition becomes technical and the nature of film is altered as what we thought of as mundane and everyday is oddly out of context. These short films are interesting and at the same time cause a mild discomfort.