Deanimated: The Invisible Ghost (2002) [NR]
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Written by:
Martin Arnold
Directed by:
Martin Arnold
Release Date:
October 11, 2002
Original Title:
Deanimated: The Invisible Ghost
Ratings / Certifications:
US: NR
Runtime: 60
This piece was designed as an installation piece for projection as a 60-minute loop in gallery spaces. Deanimated is literally displaced from the theater environment typical of film spectatorship, slightly blurring the boundaries between the spaces of projection and reception. "Deanimated: The Invisible Ghost," is based on the 1941 horror film "The Invisible Ghost" with the lead actors Bela Lugosi, Polly Ann Young, and John McGuire. In "Deanimated" the actors are gradually eliminated and thus the narrative loses its coherence. What remains are backgrounds, erratic camera movements that seem to move without focus throughout the room, capturing ghostly changes in light and shadows. In this project, Arnold asks fundamental philosophical questions about human existence and presence in absence. Although the actors are missing, they leave behind traces (such as smashing bullets together, dust stirring up …) and are experienced precisely in their absence as a ghostly, unreal present.
The avant-garde filmmaker Martin Arnold subjects a legendary American horror movie of 1941 to radical cinematographic surgery. Actors disappear thanks to digital technology, leaving the cinematic space to become the actual leading actor in a precise and absurdly comical new interpretation. Arnold transforms the original movie "The Invisible Ghost", in which a wife hypnotises her husband into a murder plot, into "Deanimated" - a study in the increasing disintegration of actor movies; at its close the camera's eye wanders through sets devoid of human life where the lights literally seem to have gone out. Death becomes, in "Deanimated", the fury of disappearence which gives witness to an "unbearable transition beyond existence" (Georges Bataille). The madness has been inscribed into the faces. The ecstasy of effacement, the annihilation of being, the hypostatisation of the inorganic, the searching glance, which no longer meets with any species of recognition - those are the relays which prepare the transition to a catatonic rigidity.
