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Lippit, Akira M.: Martin Arnold's Memory Machine. In: Afterimage.
The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism.
Vol 24 No. 6, Rochester, NY 1997, p. 8 - 10.
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Arnold has constructed, in his films pièce touchée (1989), passage á l'acte
(1993) and Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), a cinema machine - not simply a custom optical
printer or recycling system, but a kind of mnemographic machine, an
apparatus that writes and rewrites memories on the surfaces of film. Arnold´s cinema, however, is not a smooth
machine. The breakdowns, short-circuits and gasps that define his cinema
create a violently neurotic machine. Arnold´s machine stutters and
twitches from the moment it is turned on.This is due, in part, to the fact
that Arnold´s cinema barely holds together under the strain of a constant
tension between its elements. It is a machine that thematizes even as it
reproduces the scene of its own breakdown, obsessively and compulsively.
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MacDonald, Scott: Martin Arnold. In: A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independant Filmmakers.
University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London 1998, p. 347 - 362.
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"While Muybridge seems to have believed his photographs analyzed the motion of "reality"
Arnold is well aware that Piéce Touchée explores a Hollywood cliché that is, at most, only
a pretense of reality: a cinematic gesture that polemicizes a culturally approved relationship
between the genders. Arnold uses his optical printer to lay bare the gender-political
implications of the husband's arrival and to transform this gesture, which has become
nearly invisible to most viewers, into a phantasmagoria of visual effects that would make any trick-film director proud."
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