Jean Curran tells Stephanie McBride that in her editing of cinematic work she is stopping the movie, asking the audience to go back to the fundamentals
While cinema captures the world at twenty-four frames per second, and modern phone cameras have even faster exposure times, Jean Curran’s work involves the opposite – stretching milliseconds of screentime across hours and days. The Waterford-based photo-artist specialises in the time-consuming art of dye-transfer printing from frames of Technicolor film.
In a 2019 project, she fashioned a series of handmade prints from Hitchcock’s classic 1958 film Vertigo. For her latest work, she enlisted the official support of Jean-Luc Godard, Brigitte Bardot and StudioCanal to create a set of thirteen handmade dye-transfer photographic prints, derived from the original negatives of their 1963 film Le Mépris.
Le Mépris is, according to Martin Scorsese, ‘one of the greatest films ever made about the actual process of filmmaking’. At one level a story of an unravelling marriage, Le Mépris is also about competing European and American approaches to translating and turning Homer’s Odyssey into a movie. It becomes a reflexive essay on cinema itself, the antagonisms between artistic integrity and commerce, and the movie star as muse/icon.
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