A film by Jason Dee

“I wish there could be an invention..” utilises a scene from Hitchcock’s classic film Rebecca (1940). The director used an obvious back-projection (a film within a film) to express the illusory trap that Joan Fontaine’s character is entering. By looping this backdrop around the frozen actors, Dee uses digital software to add another temporal layer to this trap.

A limbo world is created, where old documents of now deceased actors are suspended within the confines of an infinitely repeating ‘present’. This digital reconfiguration seeks to tease out the underlying tensions normally hidden beneath a film’s linear flow: the relationship between stillness and motion, and the uncanny influence this has on our perception of reality and fantasy, past and present, life and death.

Fixed by each other’s gaze, the couple also seems blinded by their stillness, no longer sentient subjects moving through space and time.

Digitally altered found footage