Amy Allcock

Every so often I come across of a piece of art that challenges my most fundamental beliefs. The most recent piece to do so is Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy by Martin Arnold, an experimental film which remixes several clips from the clean-cut 1940s Andy Hardy series staring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. Arnold painstakingly takes the frames, speeds them up, slows them down and repeats them turning a wholesome movie about family values film into an erotic Oedipal musical. The effect is quite shocking - it absolutely blew my mind that that an innocent hug between mother and son could be transformed into an erotic embrace by simply changing the speed and frequency of frames, while still maintaining the general structure and narrative order. The level of manipulation, although laboriously intensive from the artists point of view, was relatively low yet the effect of this manipulation was staggering in that it changed the accepted and widely endorsed meaning and message of the piece. Arnold states that “the cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented”, and believes that as an artist he is merely bringing forth what is actually, and unconsciously, latent within the piece. I’m not sure that I totally agree with him, and as with any type of Freudian analysis it is equally hard to credit or discredit such an interpretation. Whether it is there or not seems irrelevant - what scares me the most is that it can be made to appear as though it is there.

Unfortunately, the full film can only been seen in screenings and exhibits, but there is a short clip available on the artists web site. This clip isn’t one of the best from the film, however it does provide a feel for the technique used. For a more in-depth description and analysis of the film, check out this insightful review by Michael Zryd.