"We'll Revisit the Scenes of Our Youth"

A scene from Max Ophul’s Letter From an Unknown Woman shows a couple looking through the window of a fairground train ride at a painted panoramic landscape powered by an old man behind the scenes.

By digitally freezing and flattening the couple against the shifting surface of this 19th Century technology they are transformed into another layer of obsolete representation. The telescoping of pre-cinema, classical cinema, and digital media contained within this frame opens a vertical rupture in the film’s narrative surface within which the woman’s reflection and the man’s cigarette smoke hover. Technologies from different eras interact within this ill-fitting, fragmented space, revealing illusory qualities and structural boundaries that encourage viewers to reflect on the relationship between past, present and future found in cinema’s increasingly hybrid form.