Touched Piece (EOTWS)

End Of The Week Shorts #44 extract: Touched Piece (1989)

This is the kind of experimental or essay film that just gets on my nerves. Touched Piece takes 18 seconds from the 1954 film, The Human Jungle, and manipulates it into a 15 minute jittery dance through the reversal, repetition and inverting of the footage. Director, Martin Arnold, did this to try to reveal a Freudian concept; through stuttering it is implied that you are repressed. He then makes the characters of this film stutter to imply that they are sexually or spiritually repressed by Hollywood (which he says is 'a cinema of exclusion, denial and repression') and the American culture of the 50s. The point of this short is then Arnold projecting his feeling that the characters don't want to be in a relationship, they don't want to be the traditional husband and wife, and that the Hollywood film noir reveals this subconscious truth. 

Whilst some may then find this intriguing, I have to say that these ideas, which seemingly signify an unenlightening meeting of politics and psychoanalysis, just tire me.