Christian Marclay at Anthology Film Archives

UP AND OUT
by Christian Marclay

Image track: BLOW-UP (1966) by Michelangelo Antonioni.
Sound track: BLOW OUT (1981) by Brian De Palma.

"The creative premise of UP AND OUT is stupefyingly simple. Christian Marclay lifts the picture from Antonioni's BLOW-UP and the soundtrack from De Palma's BLOW OUT (two movies which are not unrelated, the former about photography and latent voyeurism, the latter about sound recording and latent eavesdropping) and thrusts these partial cinematic systems along unaccustomed courses of solitude. Each has been forcibly divorced from the sounds or images of a now-absent partner, towards which its structure and meaning were originally devised. In Marclay's video, they never quite conjoin but relentlessly, and independently, hurry ahead to their assigned ends. The clandestine liaisons which they occasionally seem to carry on, vertically across time, occur only as conjurations of the spectator's imagination... "UP AND OUT is a Cage-ian gambit, a forcing together by chance of two readymade elements which do not necessarily belong in the same space. The thematic and rhythmic kinship of one film to another (De Palma was a terrific student of his predecessors) makes the coincidences all the more delectable and persuasive. Marclay reveals the formulization of cinema to stand outside our conventional notions of time. We are invited to introduce our memories - the experience of watching movies, perhaps the experience of watching these movies - complex temporal engagements which we habitually suspend in the cinema. With UP AND OUT, Marclay submits the vectors of time to perceptible scrutiny."
-Ben Portis, Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Published in CHRISTIAN MARCLAY: CINEMA, Oakville Galleries, Oakville (Ontario) 2000.

Friday night screening only: Film critic Amy Taubin will be present for a conversation with Christian Marclay following the screening.
Upcoming Showings:

* Sunday Oct 28 8:00 PM
* Saturday Oct 27 8:00 PM
* Friday Oct 26 8:00 PM