Deanimated (2002)

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.
- Written by Thomas Miessgang