By frag_editorial [WARNING: the video contains extreme strobing and flashing light effects]
I keep being fascinated with Lana Turner and her star image. I keep thinking about how her troubled personal life and her melodramatic roles in films such as The Bad and the Beautiful, Peyton Place, or Madame X seemed not only to intersect but to form an actual feedback loop, one reflecting the other.
And then I think about how this feedback loop is further prolonged by the role Lana Turner and her star image plays in the oeuvres of two artists that I feel most directly influenced by: John Waters and, in particular, Matthias Müller. My repeated return to Lana Turner is triggered by their return to a star who seemed to be haunted by returning roles and patterns of behaviour.
A few years ago I tried to take these feedback structures literally when I did some first experiments with TouchDesigner. The footage I used is a kiss between Lana and John Forsythe in Madame X (1966) which I fed through different feedback loops in TouchDesigner so that the clip of Lana is turned onto itself, eventually destroying itself.
I was fascinated with what these experiments did to the image of Lana, how it looks as if her star persona is falling apart in front of our eyes, a defacement in every sense of the word, eventually dissolving everything into just strobing glitches.
But somehow I did not continue with these experiments. And now I don’t even know the particular setup of nodes and functions in TouchDesigner that I used to create these effects. I fear that I won’t be able to recreate it.
Also, I remember that when the strobing glitches happened, the effect was so extreme that the screen froze and I feared I had broken my whole computer. It definitely felt I had gone into a dangerous zone here.
If you watch and continue on this route you do so at your own risk.
About the maker
Johannes Binotto, PhD, is professor in cultural and media studies at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, experimental filmmaker, and video essayist. He is co-currently co-leading together with Kevin B. Lee and Evelyn Kreutzer a SNSF research project on the video essay. His video essays are screened at numerous film festivals and received several awards. All video essays can be accessed on his personal website: transferences.org/videoessays
Contact
Website: https://transferences.org
Facebook: facebook.com/johannes.binotto
Instagram: @sennahojottonib/