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Martin Arnold's third installment in what constitutes something of a trilogy continues where piece touchee (1989) and passage a I'act (1993) never quite left off. Throwing down the gauntlet to Hollywood's space/time system, Arnold's methodology rigorously tears asunder the film language of classic American cinema. passage a fact revealed and revelled in the family as prison, reworking a few grabs from To Kill a Mockingbird. Similar treatment was applied in piece touchee to the patriarchal ordering of heterosexual romance. Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy monstrously inflates a few seconds of old Andy Hardy footage into a wickedly subversive deconstruction of an oedipal triangle. Fay Holden's Mother Hardy raises a permissive and suggestive eyebrow (several times over) and the mayhem begins.
Arnold surgically sections single frames and reproduces them in multiplied and repeated sequence, reordering material from three films to configure a manic Holden-Rooney-Garland grouping. Sound and image conspire to expose the repressed sexual mechinalions of a few (in the original context) ordinary moments. One outrageously matched transition where Garland blows and Holden sucks explodes the iconic purity of both actresses. Garland's orgasmic "uh er", complete wilh titillating lip movement, is cut against Rooney fondling his cane!