German film museum illuminated by Samuel's Hitchcock30

Info: Details Views of the following Movies, from top to bottom:  To Catch a Thief (1955) The Trouble With Harry (1955) The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) The Wrong Man (1956) Vertigo (1957) North by Northwest (1957) Psycho (1960)

 From Frankfurt, Germany-- The transformed data of 283.500 film-frames taken from 30 films of Alfred Hitchcock were condensed by Benjamin Samuel onto a transparent medium of 1,8m². Framed in a backlit light-box, the artwork will illuminate the foyer of the newly refurbished German Museum of Film in Frankfurt/Main.

Benjamin Samuel was partly inspired by the conversations between the two directors Alfred Hitchcock and Francois Truffaut.

”Hitchcock’s work is extraordinary, not only because of the single movies by themselves, but also due to the significance of his films in the context of his complete oeuvre”, Benjamin Samuel explains. 

Thus the artist developed an algorithm to extract the colorvalues of film-frames from all of Hitchcock’s films since his move to Hollywood, from REBECCA (1940) to FAMILY PLOT (1976), a total of approx. 56 hours of film, resulting in synthesized color-bands. What emerges is an abstract play of colors and shadows. 9450 film-frames were extracted from each individual film. 

Example:

 • PSYCHO (1960) has a total running time of 109min = 109min x 60sec = 6540sec 

• A total of 9450 film-frames were extracted, at equal temporal intervals. 6540sec ÷ 9450 = approx. every 0,7sec a film-frame was extracted 

• At 24 frames/second, about every 16th film-frame from the movie PSYCHO was used. 

The German Museum of Film receives the corresponding artwork entitled “Kubrick 13+9+10“(2012) by Benjamin Samuel as a loan. The source for this work were 107.445 film-frames from the 13 movies by the director Stanley Kubrick.

 Both works may be viewed from the 18th of September 2012 onwards, in the Foyer at the German Museum of Film, Schaumainkai 41, Frankfurt/Main, Germany