For more than a hundred years, the mechanical recording of the body by the camera and on film as well as the viewing of its reproduction through projection has become habitual.
The experimental film-maker Martin Arnold questioned the codes of this habituation in his film work of the 1980s by inventing and employing a technique that can be seen as an analogue precursor of today’s digital-visual sampling methods.
What does the performative retelling of the manipulated retelling of a filmic retelling of a brief occurrence (14 secs) look like? And its renewed digital live retelling and projection?
Immer jagte er Blondinen [He was always after the blondes] is a hybrid form dealing with media translations that can be read as installation, film, video, dance or performance.
The performance follows Arnold’s 16-minute variation or pièce touchée of a 14-second excerpt from the Hollywood movie Human Jungle as its model, and projects the experimental version of the original version of a simple action back onto the body.
The body is thus placed in a situation in which it is asked to achieve something impossible: the simulation of mechanical speeds and effects.
Film is the matrix for the choreographical construction of the sequence. This is a translation with aspects of re-construction – and to be exact, wholly new construction. These courses of movement have never previously existed. De facto, the real action forming the basis of the piece touchée lasts 14 seconds. (A man enters the living room, switches off the light in the hall, closes the door after himself and goes towards his wife/a woman, who is waiting in a chair reading, and kisses her casually, saying a few words in greeting). It is, however, not these 14 seconds that are treated performatively but Arnold’s version (piece touchée). Simultaneously the 16 seconds are translated into physical action. This real action is recorded ”live” via video camera and projected in its turn. The model of the manipulated original by M. Arnold is the choreographic score for both the perfomers and the cameraman – whereby the latter is challenged just as much as the performer to pit himself against the impossibility of a ”precise” translation (in the sense of a reconstruction).
The material cannot in principle be reconstructed, as the cut-and-paste film technique/technology utilised together with its effects (including axial reflections and also the extremely short intervals between these), cannot be reconstructed by bodies and their potential. In the sense of a reconstruction of the film through dance, the attempt is impossible to realise successfully, failure being an integral part of the attempt. In this respect the performative transposition is played out in the knowledge that the undertaking is hopeless: at best the temporary simultaneity of some of the movements or brief sequences can be achieved on a level of relative similarity, assuming a high degree of precision on the part of the dancers/performers...
However, the built-in failure of the reconstruction’s attempt opens up in its turn new perspectives of construction – through the questioning of the bodies and their imitatory abilities new materials of movement arise as variations of the “original” on a meta-level. At the same time shifts arise within the symbols and narrative structures of these movements.
Seen frontally, it is not only the performers who dance against the door frame and the images with their representations in their frames – the three levels run simultaneously. The gaze of the onlooker carries out its own personal editing process – from the media translations and the resulting frictions.
The parallel montage of the (live) performance in the installation of the simultaneous filmic representations creates a kaleidoscope-like effect of multiplying images – but different to the kaleidoscope effect itself (which is a multiple reflection of one and the same image) in that each of the images present is an ”original”, which resembles the other images to a greater or lesser degree.