This Time You’re Safe, but I’ll Kill You Anyway…Sooner or Later, video, 6 min. 24 sec.
Excerpt: 2 min. 10 sec.
*FLICKER WARNING*
This Time You’re Safe, but I’ll Kill You Anyway…Sooner or Later is part of a series of work where Lear intercuts different film scenes together two frames at a time to create new and uncanny audio-visual film experiences. With this animation-style technique, images and scenes across films fuse together as one, generating a uniquely strange encounter with the familiar. The raw material put to use here is from three Dario Argento giallo films (Italian horror-whodunnits). Giallos are famous for using the point-of-view technique (known as POV – a subjective camera angle that reveals to the viewers what a character is seeing and psychologically experiencing). “Killer POV” scenes – where the eye of the camera stands in for the eye of the killer – were isolated from the films The Cat o’ Nine Tails, Deep Red and Opera, scenes where we experience the movements and sights of the killers while keeping their identities concealed. The animation treatment creates a new rhythm, simultaneously fast and slow: the fast being the motoric b.p.m. of the two-frame clips beating in succession, the slow being the motion of each scene as it now takes over 4 minutes to experience any one of them. The result is an all-at-once journey as the killers navigate rooms, courtyards, hallways and stairwells. Dizzying and disorienting, mesmerizing and hypnotic, clues appear and disappear around the next corner as traces of narrative disband into abstraction. The title line “This time you’re safe, but I’ll kill you anyway…sooner or later” are words uttered by Argento’s Deep Red killer who chastises his prey from behind a closed door, unfazed by a foiled attempt. Three provocative soundtracks mixed together two frames at a time generates mystery and tension as we await the inevitable…
(Best viewed full screen by clicking on Vimeo logo in bottom right corner and viewing on Vimeo).
Screenings at:
CRASH International Fantastic Film Festival, Goiania, Goias, Brazil (2022)
MOTELX Lisbon International Horror Film Festival, Lisbon, Portugal (2021)
Awards:
LA Indie Horror Festival, Los Angeles, USA (2022): Honourable Mention