Martin Arnold (Vienna, 1959) deconstructs scenes from classic Hollywood films into small fragments that he slows down and repeats frenetically. The result is a series of loops that disrupt the continuity of the original material and strip it of its narrative meaning. As a result of this radical process of alienation and denaturalization of the relation between sound and image, the scene becomes a Dadaistic gag in which the characters’ actions acquire surprising new meanings. In this way, the family breakfast scene that Arnold deconstructs in Passage à l’acte (1993) becomes a violent exchange of blows and monosyllables between the film’s characters. Similarly, in Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), the sequence of a son kissing his mother suddenly seems like something quite different, conveying a quite distinct type of affection to that of a mother-son relationship.
