MARTIN ARNOLD IS A GUEST OF PAF 2009
One of the confirmed exclusive guests of this year's Festival of Film Animation (10th – 13th December) will be the Austrian visual artist and experimental filmmaker Martin Arnold. He has become famous especially for his work with so called found footage and fragments of classical Hollywood genre films, in which he reveals unthought images that are normally hidden, thanks to additional editing. Arnold changes e.g. shots of family idyl into a fighting scene, uncovers erotic subtext or hidden sources of aggression.
Arnold will present mainly videos and films in Olomouc that were made after 2000, one of them being the concept Deanimated, which was treated as an exhibition in 2002 at the Viennese Kunsthalle. Arnold will introduce this project to the festival audience in the form of a lecture with projections.
In the Deanimated project Arnold deals with motif of vanishing that is well-known from criminal or horror films. He clears away central film characters by means of digital technology, uses morphing to shut mouths engaged in dialogue, or he plays monumental film music, so that he can achieve dramatic effect in nondramatic moments within film narration. There remain only marks of situations originally captured on the film; tiny material proofs of events, whose origin remains unexplained, though: swirling dust, sounds from guns, panic that mirrors in the face of a woman while looking into the unknown, etc.
Arnold does not aspire to substitute old stories with new ones in the Deanimated. He rather tries to draw attention to the presence of the absent, images that he creates do not communicate with the viewer through logic and speech, but they touch especially upon the realm of his unconsciousness.
Martin Arnold was born in 1959 in Vienna, he studied psychology and art history at the University of Vienna and after that he used to teach at several American universities. He was a co-founder of the Austrian distribution company Sixpack Film.
