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2 Spellbound

Les LeVeque

1999 00:07:30 United StatesEnglishB&WStereo4:3
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Image Processing

Description

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.

About Les LeVeque

Les LeVeque is an artist who works with digital and analog electronic technology. His projects include single and multi-channel videos and video/computer-based installations. His projects have been exhibited and screened internationally. His work is also represented by Kerry Schuss Gallery in New York City.

"In the work of Les LeVeque we encounter insights born — not only the formal strategies deployed, (condensation, expansion, reversal, mirroring...) — but of the ecstatic destruction of the reified "realities" of the consciousness industries, the purveyors of the spectacle. They remind us — and even now we are in need of that reminder — that these "realities," presented as eternal, are in fact shallow pliable, not fixed. They are subject to investigation; they may be reconfigured as games in which we are in control, where the terrors and seductions to which they subject us in their unilateral discourse may be altered according to our will, for our pleasure and amusement, for our provocation, for increasing our understanding of the machines of consciousness that process us. They are important viewing, and they are considerable achievements. They remind us that the insights and efforts of a single individual can be deployed via computational means to wreak havoc with the massively and expensively constructed tissue of lies that envelope us. And just as important: they are smart and they are fun."

— Keith Sandborn, January 15th, 2010