Brendan Dawes
Cinema Redux (2004)
DVDs have opened up many new ways for people to spend more time obsessing over their favourite movies, and one the oddest products of this new technology is Cinema Redux.
Graphic designer Brendan Dawes has sampled his favourite movies, one frame per second, and arranged them to make giant digital posters. Each minute of the movie is represented by strips of 60 tiny frames going down the length of the poster. Scan it quickly and you get an instant visualisation of the rhythm and timing of the film.
So far Dawes has processed nine titles, including The French Connection, Get Carter, Road to Perdition and The Conversation. Each finished print is an odd cross between conceptual art and storyboard, from which you can take in a couple of hours of fast cuts and long takes - what Dawes calls the "unique fingerprint" of each film.
There are surprising moments of colour - the red Dali dream sequence in Vertigo; the blue cinema screen in Taxi Driver.
Film students, academics and obsessives with time on their hands may use Dawes's grids to postulate new theories about the language of film.
Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock)
The French Connection (1971, William Friedkin)
Deliverance (1972, John Boorman)
Serpico (1972, Sidney Lumet)
