2 Spellbound ~ Les LeVeque

2 Spellbound is a frame-by-frame re-editing of Alfred Hitchcock's 111-minute psychoanalytic thriller (1945) into a seven-and-a-half-minute dance video. Converting narrative suspense into visual velocity and exploiting the symmetry of Hitchcock's camera by reversing every other frame, 2 Spellbound generates a hallucination of transference—an ecstatic dance where bodies and identities intermingle and shift. VDB Les LeVeque, a New York City-based sculptor turned video artist, has spent the last decade exploring the idea of machine interface by mathematically reprocessing a variety of mass media forms, such as Hollywood films, advertisements, presidential broadcasts, and publicly televised hearings. His use of algorithm and computer interface demonstrates how new technologies reposition the cinema and raise issues of political and theoretical urgency for media practices and activism. Reverse-engineering old technologies like analog film with simple mathematics, he develops a high-tech aura through low-tech means. The algorithm functions as the spine on which the visual field hangs; rather than being embedded in the machine, these processes expose the machine operations themselves. In 4 Vertigo (2000) and 2 Spellbound (1999), LeVeque employs algorithmic procedures through cutting and pasting by hand one frame per minute of screen time into the editing software Premiere. In these earlier works, he used a time-based corrector, a jitter patch, and old Amiga computers to manipulate the materials systematically exported from the original films. 2 Spellbound reverses every other frame, disposing of the psychoanalytic desires embedded in Spellbound using speed, symmetry, and dance music. PATRICIA R. ZIMMERMANN