by Jule Rozite

Nicolas Provost’s film Long Live the New Flesh caught my attention because of its innovative use of the digital technique data moshing in order to transform excerpts from classic horror films and play with the audience’s reaction to them. The technique is actually the controlled and deliberate use of a data error called compression artefact. What occurs is that parts of an image or video are removed because they are too complex to be stored on DVDs or in certain digital formats. In videos this creates the effect of adjoining shots leaking into one another. The parts of a scene in which there is no movement seemingly freeze and stay on screen for longer than intended until the next movement wipes the previous image away, but traces of it can still be seen wherever there has not been any movement. The texture of the image changes too and becomes less clear and more pixelated which also influences the colour scale. The basic bright primary and secondary colours digital images are made up of emerge and mix with the original colour scheme. The origins of the technique are hard to determine, but it has lately been used in several more commercial projects, advertisements, and music videos, whereas earlier it was limited to more experimental artistic projects such as this film.

Provost’s choice to use this technique on scenes from well known horror and gore films cleverly toys with the audience’s expectations. Most audiences will be very familiar with the genre, even if they have not seen the particular films used in this short film. By only using short fragments, and the most climactic and gory ones at that, from films such as The Shining or American Psycho Provost robs the audience of the thrill of fear one usually expects from this genre as the build-up to these scenes has been omitted. The gory scenes are therefore easier to watch detachedly and with a cynical eye. Seen out of context like this, and because of the way the film is edited, the scenes can even seem funny and evoked laughter from the audience several times. The gap between image and audience is made even larger by the effects of data moshing as the images become unclear and the colour scale distorted making it impossible to get emotionally involved with what is happening on screen.

Surprisingly this feeling of alienation wears off a few minutes into the 14 minutes long short film. The imagination fills in the gaps created by the techniques the director uses, and the continuous expectation of more violence and blood does not lead to apathetic viewing, but rather to tense anticipation of the next horrible murder.

As tired as artistic commentary on contemporary media’s oversaturation with violence might seem, I saw Long Live the New Flesh as a fresh new take on the subject. The bloodiest scenes of these (in)famous films were chosen to quite literally get close to the centre of humankind. The data moshing and editing mirror this by stripping away the context and meaning of the scenes (the flesh, so to speak) to also expose the core of digital film itself; the technique reveals that the images are actually nothing more or less than mere pixels.