within the walls (original version)

This work is a single-channel video. It has been shown at the Traverse Video Festival in the city of Toulouse, France, under the sponsorship of the National Centre for Cinema and the Animated Image of the French government.

This video is a collage of isolated moments from Alfred Hitchcock’s crime drama Number Seventeen (1932). A custom algorithm transforms each frame into a semi-abstract configuration of colored lines. This approach plays with and subverts figuration and narrative. The rhythm of the video is determined algorithmically, based on the visual complexity of each image. An image that is graphically more complex is held longer on the screen. The collage of different moments both invites and frustrates the construction of a coherent narrative action and a narrative space.

Within the walls of an enclosed space, identities become unstable. Figure becomes ground, the body becomes its shadow, and the self becomes other. Characters blend into and emerge out of the enveloping architecture. Strangers gather and perhaps crimes are committed.

The work can be seen as a combination of experimental rotoscope animation and found footage cinema. The soundtrack is composed in the manner of musique concrete, using brute sounds from the original movie soundtrack. Hitchcock himself adopted a similar approach many years later in The Birds (1963).