Les LeVeque Videoworks: Volume 2

2 Spellbound is a frame-by-frame re-editing of Alfred Hitchcock’s 111-minute psychoanalytic thriller (1945) into a seven-and-a-half-minute dance video. Converting narrative suspense into visual velocity and exploiting the symmetry of Hitchcock’s camera by reversing every other frame, 2 Spellbound generates a hallucination of transference—an ecstatic dance where bodies and identities intermingle and shift.

“Normal forgetting takes place by way of condensation. In this way, it becomes the formation of concepts. What is isolated is perceived clearly.”

—Sigmund Freud, The Psychology of Everyday Life (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. VI), 1903

This title is also available on Les LeVeque Videoworks: Volume 2.

In this work, Alfred Hitchcock's 128-minute film Vertigo (1958) has been condensed at the rate of one frame every two seconds. The condensed film was then duplicated four times, shifting the horizontal or vertical orientation of the frame with each duplication. The four films were then reassembled frame by frame, generating a stuttering kaleidoscopic montage where Oedipal narratives of desire and obsession are shifted and displaced.

This title is also available on Les LeVeque Videoworks: Volume 2.

Backwards Birth of a Nation is a re-editing of D.W. Griffith's 187-minute film, Birth of a Nation (1915), into a pulsating 13-minute black and white phantasm. By means of structural strategies of condensation, the frame by frame inversion of black and white, and playing the resulting work from end to beginning, an apparition is brought forth where images of racism float to the surface and are contextualised as a part of the flow of United States history.

This title is also available on Les LeVeque Videoworks: Volume 2 and Reconstruction Trilogy: Les LeVeque.