Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy

(Martin Arnold, Austria, 1998)

A boy hugging and kissing his mother: what could be more innocent than that? But when we view this at the start of Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy, the gesture is no longer innocent. The boy’s fluttering and rubbing gestures are lascivious and masturbatory. Even better, Mom seems to be enjoying the devilish moment of intimacy, which is endlessly wound back and replayed: her teeth are bared, her tongue flicks, her eyebrow raises in perverse curiosity. It’s a nightmare – or a sweet dream, take your pick.

How did this amazing spectacle come to be? Let me back up and describe the process, as far as I can reconstruct it, by which the artist Martin Arnold made this crazy diamond of a film. He collected fragments from three Mickey Rooney films from the same brief period: Andy Hardy Meets Debutante (1940), Babes in Arms (1939) and Strike Up the Band (1940). The first is part of the Andy Hardy series starring Rooney; the other two (directed by Busby Berkeley, no less) are not.

Almost every previous commentary on the work (mine included) assumes that Arnold drew upon one or several Andy Hardy films. But, in fact, the image with which I began this text hails from Strike Up the Band; the mother is played by Ann Shoemaker. (I am eternally indebted to Dan Streible for his careful research into the sources of Alone, which has led me to here substantially correct the initially published version of my text.)

By ultimately titling the work as he did, Arnold foregrounded (a little misleadingly!) the centrality of Andy Hardy as the central ‘subject’ of his film. This was a series of popular, light, sentimental, family-based romantic comedies that ran from 1937 to 1946, with a commercially unsuccessful reboot in 1958. Arnold’s principal choice of the Hardy franchise, and the way it becomes echoed in the two other films chosen, is itself not innocent or naive – or rather, it is based on a desire to overturn the innocence and naïveté of the source material.

The Andy Hardy cycle is well-known as the prototype of all the ‘happy family’ series that have swamped American television ever since that medium infiltrated the majority of homes. What better icon to desecrate, therefore?

Arnold arrived at (by my count) seventeen shots. Then, crucially, he put them into an order that completely subverts their original meaning. In the process, he also conjures a Frankensteinian, yet wholly coherent, Holy Family from the three different films: Mickey as Son, Mother from Strike Up the Band, Father from Babes in Arms, and a Girlfriend (Judy Garland) spliced together from the two non-Andy films. (Thanks again to Dan!)

We start with breaking the primal Mother-Son taboo. Then Dad steps in and gives his Son a hard slap. Suddenly an escape route appears for our tormented teenage Oedipus: a nice Girl his own age. But Mom is freaked out by being replaced. When Boy and Girl eventually kiss – eternally – it might signal a happy ending. Or maybe not.

That’s the outline of the scenario that Arnold constructed, but it’s nothing compared to the work he does on the footage, frame by frame (this kind of filmmaking, in the way that Peter Tscherkassky, too, has pursued it, takes years to produce just a few minutes’ worth of new footage). There are no digital shortcuts here courtesy of a computer; it’s all done manually, with a filmstrip and a camera. By constantly refilming his source several frames forward, and then skipping back – with many brilliant variations on this process – Arnold makes every gesture, every movement, strange. And every sound, too, because he is also treating the original soundtrack in the same frame-by-frame manner. The results are truly incredible.

Across the instalments of a loose “found Hollywood footage” trilogy, Arnold built up, in his own unique way, an evolution of cinema history. The first, pièce touchée (1989), married its treated images (15 seconds of The Human Jungle, 1954) to a throbbing, industrial soundtrack – it’s the most abstract and formalist of the trilogy, because its ‘content’ is almost wholly insignificant. The second, passage à l’acte (1993), investigated the cultural meaning in a fragment of the humanist classic To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), and also used that film’s original soundtrack as the basis for its lethal game.

Alone takes a step further into the inferno, by treating a musical – and I promise that, once you have experienced Alone, you will never see or hear, in the same way, Judy Garland singing on any recording or in any film.

The cuts between shots, and the transitions between scenes, become more powerful here than in any normal fiction film. As Mickey cries and apologises, and his Dad slaps him – over and over – we slow down for the psychic hurt and accelerate for the painful blow. As Judy sings a clear note, it becomes a trumpet blast, cut up and hurled against the image of the angry Mom neurotically kneading her fingers.

Montage is reborn in these microscopic duels. And when Mickey comes dancing over to Judy in his new suit, Arnold renders this in an unbroken, ghostly motion that transforms their everyday movements and their banal words – “You’re beautiful!” – into a creepy testimony from the dead.

I have claimed that Arnold attacks what is innocent, diverting and perverting it. He also attacks what is natural. These human beings from 1939 & 1940 now seem, after this merry demolition, both more than human and less than human. They become animals, hissing like snakes and screeching like cockatoos. They are like berserk, malfunctioning androids, caught in a programming loop. They are cracked actors with spasmodic gestures and stuttering voices.

Even their words, disarticulated and broken down to their smallest sound-particles, refuse to make the same old sense: when Judy complains of being left “alone”, it now seems that she is invoking “Allah”! What would Donald Trump make of that?

I have shown Alone to people who have never before seen an experimental film in their lives. Some are appalled and make haste to run away from the violent, sensory overload. But others are entranced, and immediately want more of this weird world of hyper-manipulated images and sounds. What better advertisement for avant-garde cinema?

MORE Austrian avant-garde: I Dream of Austria

© Adrian Martin 1 December 2021