User:Emily/Thematic Project/Trimester 02/04

Intro to physical book

This book was produced using images and texts (subtitles) taken from the Roman Polanski's film, “The Tenant”. The images and texts are extracted at moments when characters say the word "know", and then the frames and texts are reassembled into the form of book. Some of the pages are designed to be shorter than the rest, which provides the opportunity for the reader to read across pages, and at different intervals.

“The Tenant” is a psychological horror film directed by Roman Polanski. The main character, Trelkovsky, is confronted by a mental conflict after he moves into the new apartment. The relationships among himself and the other neighbours become weird. He undergoes a transformation, and becomes the previous tenant. In the end, he dresses up again as a woman and throws himself out the apartment window in the manner of the previous tenant, Simone. He ends up bandaged in the same fashion as Simone, in the same hospital bed. But ultimately we see Trelkovsky and Simone's close friend Stella visiting Simone in the hospital.

I was obsessed by the whole transposing from one person’s life onto another and the mutative relationships among the main charater and other tenants that we see through out the story. These transformations triggered the production of my book. Sampling all incidents through out the story, I juxtaposed all the dialogues containing the word "know". Each sentence that was extracted from the script became my re-constructed narration, and altered the perception of events. An external way of reading the film is presented in this book with all the existing images and texts.

Digital Book

From Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara, to the game of Exquisite Corpse developed by Surrealists writers, then to experimental literature group Oulipo, later on to William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, even earlier work The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr(1819-1821) by E.T.A. Hoffmann, all their works showed the fantasy and power of cut-ups.

Several years later, a question-and-answer varian on the Exquisite Corpse produced a curiouly resonant definition:"What is André Breton? An amalgam of humor and asense of disaster; something like a top hat"