Passage à l’Acte (1993) is one of the cunning works from Austrian filmmaker and video artist Martin Arnold, and the footage is from the famous Hollywood movie – To Kill a Mocking bird(1963).
Inevitably, most of the audience do not have the chance to watch the two last-century film either actively or passively. Before the film Passage à l’Acte entered to my eyesight, I was seeking the video artist who dealt with the found footage film among the list. So if the audience watches several seconds of the film, some wonders may be in their head. They must consider it just an ordinary family scene and feel strange about the back and forth playing form and confusing soundtrack, actually it is a bit like the screen stuck while the DVD is playing. With curiosity, I continued to finish watching the film (the whole film is like the above description) and just read the background of it. I was attracted to this film not because it remade from a brilliant movie, but the film is so charming as an experimental film through the form of media archaeology.
As the remaking work, the two films To Kill the Mockingbird and Passage à l’Acte are entirely different. To Kill a Mockingbird obeys all the conventional Hollywood narrative strategies of the era to represent the novel in 1960 by Harper Lee in the most extent. Evenly balanced compositions run together according to traditional rules of continuity editing. It also bears mention that the film, as well as the novel, worked within a specific cultural and historical context. At that time, racial politics remained a prominent and contentious issue within American society. 1 however, for Martin Arnold, he wanted to make another one film just like Pièce Touchée which is a found footage film as well with format variable made in 1989. At that time, he was considering two respects when choosing the particular scene: he wanted another domestic moment, and he tried to integrate the synch sound into his repetitive patterns, the scene had to have a certain density on the auditory level: to put it simply, it had to be loud and eventful. Coincidently, he got a stolen German print of To Kill a Mockingbird since it was very troublesome in EU to get old film material from the United States (The property possession problem discussed in another article). So he chose to lay bare the politics of the everyday media moment, in this film transforming the original scene into a breathtaking, often hilarious mechanical ballet accompanied by a soundtrack that hovers somewhere between Hollis Frampton’s Critical Mass (1971), rap and stuttering.
As a result, the filmmaker took the material from the traditional Hollywood cinema but remade it in the form of non-narrative experimental films with an original, playful soundtrack. I have a reasonable guess here that this is a kind of emotion dissipating in the process of cross-cultural communication. For the American audience, To Kill a Mockingbird serves as a prominent touchstone for book-to-film adaptations. It becomes a traditional assignment in high-school English classes to compare and contrast the book and the film.1 As Bruno suggests that film is a mobile map – a map of differences, a production of socio-sexual fragments and cross-cultural travel. However, without the particular social and cultural atmosphere, Martin Arnold could not reach the emotional resonance with the people in a faraway nation and just considered it as the material of his films.
Although Passage à l’Acte is not a world-famous film as 24 Hour Psycho won the Turner Prize, it is still playing on the Internet (in the form of piracy, the property is quite a crucial problem). The eleven-minute video art seems like a book which is worthy to every viewer’s attention to read it. Inside the film, there is Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird; an Oscar film with three winners and eight nominees in 1963 (like the green book this year, perhaps), Martin Arnold’s ingenious design on the soundtrack; the dissipation and reproduction of emotions in cross-cultural communication, and even an ordinary conversation at a family dining room table in regular daily basis…
Reference:
1 Herbert, D., 2006. To Mock a Killingbird: Martin Arnold’s Passage à l’Acte and the Dissymmetries of Cultural Exchange. Millennium Film Journal, (45/46), p.93.
2 Bruno, G., 2018. Atlas of emotion: Journeys in art, architecture, and film. Verso Books, p.74
3 Arnold, M. and MacDonald, S., 1994. Sp… Sp… Spaces of Inscription: An Interview with Martin Arnold. Film Quarterly, 48(1), pp.2-11.
Since Passage à l’Acte is based on the film To kill a Mockingbird, and Joseph Cornell uses a lot of bird in his box art, it is quite an interesting coincidence in my blog. So I made such a above box, just want to show more works about the artist Joseph Cornell.
What's Inside the Box? 