TRAMAINE de SENNA - AMBIGUOUS SPECTACLES/ A GAY STORY

TRAMAINE de SENNA

ARCHIVE > 2012 - 2013 >

AMBIGUOUS SPECTACLES/ A GAY STORY

"Ambiguous Spectacles"

"A Gay Story"

Set Two - Seven Paintings

2014 - 2015

and

Set One - Three Paintings

2012 - 2013

“Sometimes, however, Hitchcock and his technicians took little efforts to conceal it [rear- projections] ... Hitchcock used it in a self- consciously dramatic, at times even excessive or voyeuristic way. Rather than blending actors and spatial context, the rear-projection technique outlines them and sets them apart ... The landscape is presented as a distant unreachable realm. When used to maximum poetic effect, rear projections mimic the effect of a (day) dream ... This also applies to Hitchcock’s use of matte shots that combine images of separate shots or live action with painted backgrounds. ‘The beauty of matte is that you can become God. From an art direction point of view, you can do whatever you like,’ Hitchcock stated ... ‘Suppose it’s a big building, a house, or a mansion that you can’t afford to build. You’re going to build the door of the mansion, and everything else is painted.’”^92

1. ORDER ONE: Hitchcock entered Hollywood during its golden years of stage production, the 1930s and 1940s. The majority - including the beginning - of his career occurred when building sets was the norm; every studio had an art department for films to be constructed and shot within sound stages. Hitchcock went from a blank slate (versus shooting on location) to the construction of a scene, a home, an environment. Authenticity through the mastery of creating a reality to appear as real towards the audience was essential to tell a story. This is similar to the argument of architects Mark Wigley and Semper Gottfried regarding “masking the mask” in materiality:

“The denial of reality, of the material, is necessary if form is to emerge as a meaningful symbol, as an autonomous creation of man ... The untainted feeling led primitive man to the denial of reality in all early artistic endeavors; the great, true masters of art in every field returned to it—only these men in times of high artistic development also masked the material of the mask.^29”^93