English artist John Stezaker is known for his witty, surrealist collages, made from found images. He also makes flicker films, presenting collections of found images of similar subjects one per frame, twenty-four frames per second. The individual images don’t linger long enough on the screen for us to distinguish them. They become scrambled, collaged in time. Stezaker’s films turn on photographic clichés, the tendency to photograph similar subjects with similar compositions. For Kiss (2019–20), he compiles old film stills of couples kissing or preparing to, reanimating their chaste stasis into a jittery eroticism. In Train (2012–21), similarly composed photographs of steam trains regain their throbbing, piston-driven vitality, as they pump out smoke. Kisses and trains have always been cinema archetypes. Stezaker’s films nod to Thomas Edison’s risqué The Kiss (1896) and the Lumière Brothers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1895).
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