Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy1998

In his new film Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy which together with piece touchee; and passage a l'acte, forms a sort of a trilogy of compulsive repetition, Arnold's campaign of deconstruction of Hollywood film codes finally turns to film music. The process links in with the other two films. The family scenes, which in the original last only seconds are not particularly notable, are surgically sectioned into single frames. Using repetition of these 'single cells' and a new rhythm – a kind of cloning procedure – Arnold then creates and inflated, monstrous doppleganger of the original cuts lasting many minutes. The hidden message of sex and violence is turned inside out to the point where it simply crackles. In Alone. ... the crossing of three harmless teenager films gives birth to an Oedipal drama in which not only mother love mutates to sheet lust. Since passage a l'acte, and contrary to other found-footage filmmakers who choose to remove their work into the realms of silent nostalgia, Arnold has re-worked the sound track along with the image. Because of this what one hears in Alone. ... is the eerie, rasping 'silence' of sound film, pregnant with suppressed tension. And exactly at the point where the illusion of full, living present is seemingly at its strongest – in the screen presence of Judy Garland singing – one senses the machine, and, implicitly, death, at work. – Dirk Shaefer