Imagine Dorothy clicked her heels not just three times, but some 5829 times. That thought might bring you a smidgeon closer to the frantically fragmented worldview of Berlin artist Dennis Neuschaefer-Rube, whose fascination with the crossover between film and still images leads him to splice and dice classic movies into their thousands of frames. Re-arranged into a video of its own, ‘The Wizard of Oz Experiment’ regurgitates the entire film using exactly the same imagery as the original, but now taking on the appearance of glitchy abstract video art – a phantasmagoria of tiny images relayed too quickly for your retina to take in. What’s more, the ‘experiment’ is now also available as a book, in which all 140,000 filmstills are compiled: each page shows one minute of action – the page number handily corresponding to the minute of the film from which the stills were taken. Like an acid-trip Eadweard Muybridge, Neuschaefer-Rube at once presents a canny deconstruction of film and pop culture, and a flash of visual brilliance.
Catch a two-minute preview of The Wizard of Oz Experiment at www.vimeo.com/27761707, or check out the book on www.stilledfilms.com.
