WHERE TO GO? VERTIGO! | film session

Screening of Martin Zet's 97 analog copies of Hitchcock's Vertigo. The visitors can choose which copy they want to watch. At the self-service at the installation of the VCR and a huge screen will be the author himself.

On November 14. 1999 I wrote the following text..

The questions of durability and temporality as well as the mechanisms and morphology of passing and disappearing have almost always been pathologically exciting to me. The masterpiece of Alfred Hitchcock „Vertigo“ is another victim of my obsession. The main interest was focused on exploring how the repeted analog copying effects the quality of the recording of such a length (124 minutes). This experience is to be compared with similar piece „Copies“ (August 1998), where the whole process of vanishing took only one minute (11 copies). In „Copies“, first the sound was gone, then the color. The lengh of each subsequent copy is increasingly shorter. The whole recording looks as if it is breaking up. Finally, after the whole image was transformed into mere configurations of blinking lines and points, everything disappeared. The „Vertigo“ piece on the other hand reacted in a different way. Maybe because this time I used better equipment and even left the noise filter button on the VCR recorder switched on. First went the color, then the image. The remaining data of the original recording appeared as something like dislocated bubbles. The sound started to be sufficiently abstract only after twenty one copies.

At this moment the seventieth second copy is being made. The sound of the movie changed into the sound of wailing wind, where you can still feel the voices. It’s getting more and more unbearable. It seems as if I have exposed the essence of horror. I don’t want to give up before the end of the process. I am planning to make other copies of copies….

When I first heard the word „Vertigo“ pronounced by an American I understood it as: „where to go?“

Martin Zet, November 14, 1999, Libušín