“To Become, Shift, Transfer, Copy and Erase JANET LEIGH”

experimental film, 2009-2012 (see also “Psycho Stage Set Party”)

WATCH A TRAILER OF THE FILM HERE

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“Camera angles and editing remain loyal to the original shower scene from Psycho, but tiny differences or flagrant changes make its construction transparent.

The famous shower scene from Hitchcock's Psycho serves as the starting point for examining whether an actor and the character they play can be separated, by making several variations. And can the bare bones of a scene be revealed by removing the actor entirely? The set was previously exhibited as an autonomous sculpture.” Edwin Carels, IFFR 2013


Winner of the VEVAM Go Short Award for Best Dutch Film, 2013


What happens when people who are more accustomed to watching movies than to making them, tackle one of the most famous and complicated scenes of all time? What do you get when all they have to their disposal is a minimal budget and a trailer full of scrap wood?


“JANET LEIGH” is a short film about repetition and looking at differences and details. And about auditioning to the bathroom mirror for a role in the Mother of all Murder Scenes.


Watching YouTube movies in which people mimic their favorite film scenes I especially encountered many amateur versions of the shower murder in Hitchcock's “Psycho”. Children, adults, men and women take up knives time and again in order to throw themselves, dressed up with wigs, onto friends who are stark-naked and screaming in bathrooms.


What struck me is that the original scene is always recognizable, despite the often poor acting or shaky camera shots. Certain images, like that of the water drain, the shower head or the curtain, are so iconic that they determine much of the scene, even when they are inferior copies of their original.


In my “Janet Leigh” film the actors are gradually removed from this famous scene until there is nothing left but sound, light, props, camerawork and editing. My re-enactments of the scene are, just like the YouTube copies, produced in a less professional way than the original. Yet they remain clearly “the” murder scene. However, the viewer slowly grows an awareness that goes beyond the narrative content of the scene and makes him/her focus on details and differences. Through this he/she becomes aware of all other, surrounding circumstances that contribute to the construction of the scene. “JANET LEIGH” can therefore be read as an attempt to alter the viewer’s perception of something that is very familiar (the original scene) in order to view it fresh and anew.

It gives YOU, THE VIEWER, the opportunity to rethink this key-moment in Western Cinema while you swap seats with the protagonist.


For my film I was inspired by, amongst others, John Cage's music piece “4'33” and Jerome Bel's dance choreography “the Last Performance”. In these performances a silence, void or vacuum is created, emphasizing everything that surrounds it. Thereby one becomes aware of how the audience relates to these works.


JANET LEIGH touches upon a subject that is commonly known in the arts as “the Void”. Artists as Yves Klein (“Leap into the Void”), Anish Kapoor (“Descent into Limbo”) and Kazimir Malevich (“the Black Square”) have dealt with it.


WINNER OF THE VEVAM AWARD FOR BEST DUTCH FILM AT GO SHORT FESTIVAL, NL 2013

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