Abstract
In a trilogy of digital videos — Vienna in the Desert (2005), Between 2 Deaths (2006), and Capturing Rose (2007) — filmmaker and video artist Wago Kreider exposes cinephilia’s morbid side. The videos are dreamlike, elegiac returns to three Hollywood classics of the 1950s: Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954), Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), and Niagara (Henry Hathaway, 1953), respectively. Meditative, lyrical, obsessive, the pieces merge videographic pictures that return to or evoke the locations of the Hollywood originals and are characterized by a haunting sense of repetition and absence with displaced or distorted pieces of the movies themselves. The relationship between film, video, and sound is different in each: film sound lifted straight from a scene of Johnny Guitar but without its picture, another location — a video landscape — in its place; sound slowed and stretched to endure a perpetually dissolving alternation between original film and video return to the scene of Vertigo; straight sound from the climax of Niagara, asynchronously accompanied by cryptic, decontextualized close-ups excerpted from the film and lyrical, misty videography of the Falls in winter. In each, the human figure is painfully elusive: either not seen at all, or appears as a ghostly or fragmented presence. Actors’ voices, where they are heard at all, are traces that reverberate amidst fugue-like unfolding in locations that bespeak eternity and entropy (the Salton Sea, Mission Dolores graveyard, Niagara Falls).
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Works cited
Aragon, Louis. “On Décor.” Hammond 55–59.
Breton, André. “As in a Wood.” Hammond 80–87.
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973.
Burgin, Victor. The Remembered Film. London: Reaktion, 2004.
Epstein, Jean. “Magnification.” 1921. French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907–1939: A History/Anthology. Vol. 1. Ed. Richard Abel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988. 235–41.
Felleman, Susan. Art in the Cinematic Imagination. Austin: U of Texas P, 2006.
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 1920. Trans. and Ed. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton, 1961.
—. “Fetishism.” 1927. Collected Papers. Vol. V. Trans. and Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1950. 198–204.
—. “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through: Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis, II.” 1914. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. XII. Trans. and Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1978. 146–56.
Hammond, Paul. “Available Light.” Introduction. Hammond 1–48.
Hammond, Paul, ed. The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writing on the Cinema. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1991.
Legrand, Gérard. “Female x Film = Fetish.” Hammond 218–20.
Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion, 2006.
—. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.
Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies, Volume I: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. Trans. Stephen Conway. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
Truffaut, François. The Films in My Life. Trans. Leonard Mayhew. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978.
Usai, Paolo Cherchi. The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Dark Digital Age. London: BFI, 2001.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2012 Susan Felleman
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Felleman, S. (2012). Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through: Three Screen Memories by Wago Kreider. In: Perkins, C., Verevis, C. (eds) Film Trilogies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371972_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371972_12
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-32120-9
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-37197-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)