"Arnold has constructed, in his films PIÈCE TOUCHÉE (1989), PASSAGE À L'ACTE (1993) and LIFE WASTES ANDY HARDY (1998), a cinema machine - not simply a custom optical printer or recycling system, but a kind of mnemographic machine, an apparatus that writes and rewrites memories on the surfaces of film. Arnold's cinema functions by incorporating exterior forces, an outside source of energy that presses upon the projected images. In turn, the machine exports text, forming a kind of open economy. ...
"Arnold's cinema, however, is not a smooth machine. The breakdowns, short-circuits and gasps that define his cinema create a violently neurotic machine. (Neurotics, Freud reminds us, distrust their memories to a remarkable extent.) Arnold's machine stutters and twitches from the moment it is turned on. This is due, in part, to the fact that Arnold's cinema barely holds together under the strain of a constant tension between its elements. It is a machine that thematizes even as it reproduces the scene of its own breakdown, obsessively and compulsively." - Akira M. Lippit
An 18-second sequence originally from a fifties American "B" movie is reproduced frame by frame and altered as to its temporal and spatial progression. Given factors: her and him, the scenographic space and the time spent in that scenographic space. Awards: Golden Gate Award 90, "New Visions," SF Int'l Film Festival; Best of the Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival; Best of Category, Athens Film Festival; Jury Citation, Black Maria Film Festival; Gold Award, Houston Int'l Film Festival; Certificate of Merit Award, Chicago Int'l Film Festival; Special Mention, Festival Int'l du Jeune Cinema, Montreal; Special Mention, Int'l Contest of Short Films, Huesca-Spain; Audience Award, Int'l Short Film Festival, Bonn, Germany.
Exhibition: NY Film Festival, 1990; Semaine de la Critique, Cannes Film Festival, 1990; Collective for Living Cinema, NY; SF Cinematheque; National Film Theatre, London; Mus�e National des Arts Africains et Oceaniens, Paris; Millennium, NY; LA Filmforum; Pacific Film Archive; Stanford University.
1989, 16mm, b&w/so, 15m, $45
Given context: a Hollywood text from the early sixties; a family breakfast with husband, wife, son and daughter.
Inscribed: a re-petition of what is diminished, set apart and alien; a symptom.
Four people at the breakfast table, an American family, locked in the beat of the cutting table. The short, pulsating sequence at the family table shows, in its original state, a classic, deceptive harmony. Arnold deconstructs this scenario of normality by destroying its original continuity. It catches on the tinny sounds and bizarre body movements of the subjects, which, in reaction, become snagged on the continuity. The message, which lies deep under the surface of the family idyll, suppressed or lost, is exposed - that message is war.
"The first shock, the first flight, the fear at the beginning of the film: The son jumps up from the table and throws open the door, which sticks in an Arnoldian loop of hard, hammering rhythm. He is compelled to return to the table by a mechanically repeated paternal order, 'Sit down.' And at the end, when the two children spring up, finally released from their bondage, Arnold is again caught at the door; at the infernally hammering door, as if it were completely senseless to try to leave here - this location of childhood and two-faced cinema." - Stefan Grissemann
Exhibition: Oberhausen Film Festival; Semaine de la Critique, Cannes Film Festival; Rotterdam Film Festival; Melbourne Film Festival; Sydney Film Festival.
1993, 16mm, b&w/so, 12m, $40
"In his new film ALONE. LIFE WASTES ANDY HARDY which, together with PIÈCE TOUCHÉE and PASSAGE À L'ACTE, forms a sort of trilogy of compulsive repetition, Arnold's campaign of deconstruction of classic Hollywood film codes finally turns to film music. The process links in with the other two films. The family scenes, which in the original last only seconds and are not particularly notable, are surgically sectioned into single frames. Using repetition of these 'single cells' and a new rhythm - a kind of cloning procedure - Arnold then creates an inflated, monstrous doppelg�nger of the original cuts lasting many minutes. The hidden message of sex and violence is turned inside out to the point where it simply crackles." - Dirk Schaefer
1998, 16mm, b&w/so, 15m, $65