Desktop Documentary

Not having bitten anyone at the age of 25 makes the young vampire Victor feel quite inadequate. New hope blooms, however, when he meets Sophia, a young doctor.

How can one find “spaces of agency” (bell hooks) in a racist film? How can unseen, unacknowledged labor be rendered visible videographically? And why is a VHS tape of "Gone with the Wind" preferable to all remasterings?

Picking up on Pierre Schaeffer’s musical theory, this video essay looks at the final scene from Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly as a source of concrete sound. No additional sounds were used. The stroboscopic audio is nothing but the original soundtrack, dissected and interrupted by clicking manually from frame to frame.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo is a film about the drive to repeat and reproduce lost things, and the failure to do so. What would it mean to repeat the images of this repetitious film with the help of AI — but as disturbing (failed) dreams rather than an exact replica? We begin to imagine a new film within the one we know. AI gives us back the history of cinema — as an uncanny double.

What happens when we scale things? Increasing or reduzing size may seem an innocuous practice which only changes the measurements of an object. But in fact, scaling provokes brutal breaks and uncanny tipping points where things become radically and irrevocably different. This is what the vision machines of film with its variable image sizes always tried to tell us: how things by being scaled can fall apart – a lesson perhaps not only about our perception but also about our fragile world at the verge of tipping points.

What is there to see when characters turn their back on us? Back views in cinema are experienced as disturbances of their visual regime. But by hiding the faces these images point towards another presence, both familiar and uncanny to us all: there’s an off-space we all carry with us but can never look at without optical help. The part of us, where we become strangers to ourselves.