Subliminal Faces in Liminal Spaces

1930s movie trailers were slapped together by monkeys with optical printers: scenery and character faces regularly explode with incoming images in fancy "wipes" which serve no purpose except to make the transitions energetic and to advertise the lack of continuity. Freeze the frame and the liminal moment becomes nightmarish, like the surreal effects of Max Ernst's decalcomania or William Burroughs' fold-in technique. Warring images form photomontages as impossible to process as a gunshot to the head.

By David Cairns