Pushann Pushann

synopsis

A several-second passage depicting a woman's agitated face is repeated in a loop that decomposes, distorts and reassembles her expression and gesture into an image of masochistic violence, whipped by gusts of voice synthesizer-induced, destroyed sound. The author appropriates the videotape and, through jerks of fast-forwarding and rewinding, it disintegrates the temporality not only of the original shot but also of the event depicted.

“Each of the video works on my tape is created from only one carefully selected segment of appropriated footage. It is that single segment that is expanded by disassembling and reassembling the frame structure from its original seconds of an event, to however many minutes of that event are necessary to reveal its submerged secret, its concealed crime, as in Pushann Pushann…”

Source: Raphael Montanez Ortiz: Computer-Laser-Video, Digital Media and the Arts.

biography

Raphael Montañez Ortiz (1934) is an artist, performer, essayist, activist, and experimental video maker, as well as the founder of the important El Museo del Barrio in Harlem. Since the 1950s, he has created collages of films shot on Super-8, which he ritually dismembered with a tomahawk. Since 1985, he has been working on a series he calls “digital/laser/videos”: fragments from commercial films subjected to destruction with the help of a computer program.

more about film

director:	Raphael Montañez Ortiz
producer:	Raphael Montañez Ortiz