(Re)counting love: Martin Arnold's pièce touchée
Summers, Francis (2011) (Re)counting love: Martin Arnold's pièce touchée. In: Transmission: HOSPITALITY, 1-3 July, 2010, Sheffield Hallam University.
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Martin Arnold’s film pièce touchée takes possession of a pre-existing film and applies a strategy of re-counting frames through duplication and re-ordering. The sequential progression of the multiplied frames is metaphorically re-counted as the film is run backwards and forwards. As Arnold describes it: ‘I start with frame x, go forward to frame x+1 and then from x+1 back again through x to x-1.’ From the original’s order of 1–2–3 with pièce touchée we arrive at a new count, something like 1–2–1–0.
This paper will argue that there are three modes of love present in this filmic recount. First, the normative love presented in the original’s scene, a husband returning home to a wife. The second love is that of the (mis)identification with an ideal image, an ambivalent scene of narcissism and aggressivity: what Jacques Lacan terms ‘hainamoration’. Such a condition is demonstrated through Arnold’s re-arrangement, which lingers over the filmic body whilst doing violence to its narrative unity. The final form of love under discussion will be what Alain Badiou terms ‘the scene of the Two’: a disjunctive scene that refuses the fusional ideal, posing love as a shared investigation of the universe.
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