The Brighton Film Festival

November – December 2011
University of Brighton Gallery

Austrian film-maker Martin Arnold directs his deconstructive impulses – with a darkly humorous twist – to the heritage of Walt Disney.

SOFT PALATE is a neurotic re-animation of Mickey Mouse and Pluto that comes to life as Mickey’s sleeping body rhythmically builds out of the darkness one body part at a time.

Martin Arnold is renowned for his radical re-imagining of tiny sections of Hollywood movies. In films such as Pièce touchée (1990) Passage à l’acte (1993) and Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (2001), the intense repetition and subtle variations evoke surprising nuances and create new meanings.

“The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. In consequence we should not only consider what is shown, but also that which is not shown. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented. And it is exactly that which is most interesting to consider.” – Martin Arnold

Courtesy Galerie Martin Janda