Tender Duplicity

1992, color, sound, 35 mins.

Objects of aggression are suggestively fashioned from sensuous playthings, inviting the viewer to indulge in the prurient pleasures of patriotism and self-righteous hostility. The objects combine and juxtapose to form a seductive visual catalog of the vocabulary of war, garlic-pressed through a lattice-work of light and sound on the film's emulsion. As the tension builds between the objects in front of the camera and the activity on the surface of the film, a complex musical architecture is triggered across constantly shifting foregrounds and backgrounds, activating incongruous polarities between figure and ground, sound and image, pleasure and aggression, clarity and purposeful obfuscation.

The film was shot with an antique camera that records an optical soundtrack directly on the film while shooting. The footage was then systematically fogged and flashed with segments of white light, which caused both the image and sound to be erased; thus the flashes of light that appear in the film are followed one second later by a dropout of equal duration in the sound. The points between flashes (gaps), as well as the gaps themselves, become syllables of a language that is all but oblivious to the relentless posturing of the photographed images.