Psychogram Of A Movie

Course code: ART2040 Intermedia
Teacher: Chantal Gervais

Proposal

'Der Totmacher' (1995) is a docudrama based on the protocol, that was written during the examination of Fritz Haarmann, a murderer, who killed 22 boys between the years 1918 and 1922. the movie uses a very minimalist setup and plays in only one room, where Prof. Dr. Schultze, a psychologist, interrogates Haarmann. He was entrusted to find out, whether Haarmann is sane and can be held responsible for his doings. There is no introduction and thus the viewer doesn't know anything about the person 'Haarmann'. He appears to have a rather naive and and well-tempered character in the beginning. but step by step, Schulze reveals a layer after another, he dissects the personality of Haarmann and throughout the interrogation, Schulze enters the deep abysm of Haarmanns thinking. The viewer is disgusted and at the same fascinated by the figure of Haarmann. The movie draws a profile of a personality, that triggers very strange and repulsive emotions.

what i would like to do in this project, is to dissect the moving picture in a similar manner, as Schulze is dissecting Haarmanns psyche. there is a technique called 'slitscanning', that i would like to implement in puredata. this technique has a long history and was used by many artists. there are several forms and methods of slitscanning, though all of them have in common, that they use a representation of data, which is different from the original source material in a manner, that different parts of the data are rearranged and/or taken from different times. i would like to cut out one pixel column from each frame and concatenate column by column, so that a new static image is created. if it is possible to do it in realtime (in terms of processor speed), i would like to do it in realtime, so that the resulting image is scrolling from right to left. the movie could still be watched, but it would be represented without sound and in a much more abstract way. the result would lose completely the narrative aspect of the original work and could be interpreted as the 'psychogram' of the movie itself.

Original Work

title: Der Totmacher
medium: movie/docudrama / 16mm
director: Romuald Karmakar
year: 1995
country: Germany

Realisation

i developped a patch with puredata/gridlow to implement the technique described above. i decided to take one specific scene of the movie and apply the process only on this part. the scene was taken in one shot and lasts over 6 minutes. an important aspect of this scene is also the way how it was shot. the camera resides in a conitnuous movement along a circle around both protagonists, the Schultze and Haarmann. the camera switches again and again between the perspective of Schultze and the one of Haarmann. This continuous movement gives interesting results, when slitscanning is applied.

the output is a static image, that constantly scrolls from left to right, while the movie is played in realtime and the columns are extracted. after one cycle, the process continues and the scene is played back from the beginning again, but then another column of the frame is taken, which creates a different each for each cycle. after 672 cycles, all data has been used once and 672 images were created, and each took 6 minutes to create. it takes 2 days and 19 hours to watch all images.

Excerpt

Watch an excerpt of the work:

Psychogram Of A Movie
lenght: 6'24"
filesize: 241MB
format: avi / mjpeg