The goal of experimental film and perhaps all film is perceive the world in new and unexpected ways. Both Piece Touchee and Close Quarters take an intimate part of the world, both familiar and comfortable, and exult them creating new beauty and terror and awe. Martin Arnold’s Piece Touchee takes a very short clip of found footage from The Blackboard Jungle and by manipulating the movement between frames creates an elaborate dance out of a middle-aged man walking through the door, greeting his wife. The dance, however, is not an erotic one, more erratic and terrifying. The simple act of kissing his wife on the cheek becomes violently beautiful as he jerks back and forth over her head and visibly spins over her. However, the actual content is irrelevant in the face of the formal beauty that Arnold creates by manipulating this piece of found footage.
Jim Jennings similarly seeks out and evokes a deeper beauty from the quotidian not through carefully manipulated frame progression but through meditations on the composition of his apartment. Nothing appears in this film that isn’t easily recognizable and used daily. Likewise, nothing is seen outside of the world that isn’t seen through the drawn blinds. With in these parameters, Jennings uses the extreme, natural lighting, creative angles and graphic matches to turn his flat into a text for the extraordinary mundane. His solving of these limitations create brilliance: by cutting between the silhouette of a bird flying past and the cocked head of his cat he creates a subtle interaction that was most likely not there; by considering the lateral lines of his blinds as a refrain through out the film, he creates a moment of awe by rack focusing the normal shot of the blinds to see a crystal clear world through the confines of a tiny hole in one of the shades.
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