A quick Halloween experiment: Psycho Unraveled. West LA, 10/31/12.
“Unraveling” the famous Psycho shower scene. Rather than the characters being juxtaposed sequentially on a single movie screen, they have separate physical spaces behind a pair of apartment windows. “Unraveling” Psycho’s linear screen space allows us to put the film’s separate, “face-to-face” character shots on-screen at the same time. But editing the “unraveled” film calls for a different approach than simply cutting the individual character shots together and running them on adjacent screens. Using extended cinema space opens up opportunities for narrative to extend its use of space, rhythm, and negative space as cinematic devices. It clearly also affects the context of the film: Does the Psycho murder seem more misogynistic or less so when it’s projected behind the curtains of an apartment instead of a movie or TV screen?
“Psycho Unraveled” is a first experiment in unraveling linear cinema for spatial presentation. It was presented as unannounced public art on Halloween 2012 in the Palms district of Los Angeles. Since the visuals are hard to make out in the documentation, you can see a composite of the source videos as they ran in the show here.
“Psycho Unraveled” is part of my sabbatical research at iotaCenter.
Psycho Unraveled. West LA, 10/31/12 from Amy Alexander on Vimeo.