Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Westminster
'Actor'
This artist’s film-and-video project is concerned with the use of archive material through appropriation. A 10-minute, single-screen video that reworks extracts of feature film footage from 50 years of cinema in which the actor Alain Delon appears, the work constructs a new narrative based on the actor’s actions in sequences across the various narratives of multiple films. The soundtrack is created from an assemblage of archive film music. The film has been exhibited in various galleries and cinemas and was acquired by the BFI National Film Archives, London, in October 2013.
Please see portfolio for further documentation of research dimensions.
The use of found footage originated in modernist assemblages such as Léger’s Ballet Mécanique (1924) and Fluxus-inspired works such as Conner’s A Movie (1958). 'Actor' forms part of a contemporary body of work that indexes, scrutinises and manipulates processes of illusion, and also deals with issues of representation in mainstream or Hollywood cinema through practices that focus on narratives of desire, memory and identity (for example Marclay’s The Clock, 2011, and the work of Breitz). These practices can be characterised by a dual concern: to hold up a mirror to cinema’s mechanisms and operations, and to make subversive use of its signs. The specific intervention of 'Actor' asks how the spatial and temporal manipulations offered by montage can be applied to film archives in order to interrogate issues of identity and masculinity inherited from mainstream historical approaches. 'Actor' utilises rigorous strategies of appropriation and quotation to rework 50 years of fiction film. Delon was chosen as his films span from 1957 to 2007, the second half of a century of cinema in which the languages of western cinematic narrative were consolidated. Delon’s filmography was researched and transformed into a seamless 10-minute short. Sound is a single repeated piece of film music used to enhance the link between shots and provide continuity. 'Actor' advances the imaginative and critical scope of work on the film archive by rejecting the entertainment primacy of cinema and the narrative logic of plot in favour of developing a new set of observations around masculinity. By thematically connecting disparate sequences of material, 'Actor' offers an innovative methodological contribution to experimental moving image practices concerned with the problem of unifying spatio-temporal discontinuities inherited from the use of found cinematic material.
