Page Contents

• Description
• Other Credits

Description

As a step in the argument of a paper about cinematic space, I referred to a film by Melies called India Rubber Head. The point of the example was to show that on film, there is no phenomenological difference between the enlargement of an object and its motion toward the viewer, a point the significance of which I have now mostly forgotten. Since I hadn't seen the film, I used a description of it by film scholar Christine Noll Brinckmann. The film sounded interesting, so we decided to make it according to the description and did so last December. When I showed it in Germany in February, an angry film scholar asked me if I realized that not only had the Melies film been misdescribed, but the remake didn't even follow this misdescription, and also, the original film was FUNNY. He went on to explain that the central issue in the remake, the decrease in size of the table as the head increased, was not in the original, which was made by double exposure of a head against a black velvet background. I asked him if he didn't think all these errors and lapses of memory didn't make the film better. He though not. Any way, I hope that the idea of flaws and disrememberings, mistaken descriptions and the impossibility of following instructions, are the issues of the piece.
[Source: Grahame Weinbren]