Jennifer West’s experimental piece is a strange reverie on disposability in which analogue footage of film title cards is physically distressed
A cheese dream of strangeness is one way to describe this brief experimental piece from 2016 by the
Los Angeles artist and collagist Jennifer West, who scratches, distresses and generally scrunches up celluloid film stock and then makes digital files of the results.
In Film Title Poem, she has taken analogue footage of film title cards (evidently from DVDs or
YouTube, as the progress bar is often to be seen alongside the bottom of the screen), and done so in semi-darkness, with these images weirdly and incompletely picked out with a torch, as if being discovered by a burglar. The point of this darkness is presumably so that all the vivid shapes and lines and doodles that have then been scratched on to the physical surface of the film will show up white more clearly.