For at interval, I captured the entirety of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, then removed all spoken dialogue from the film. Time is slowed down, through emphasis on stutters, gasps, and oral fumbles, and paradoxically sped up, through an immense shortening of the film – from one hour and thirty minutes, to just over thirteen. Here, I’m citing the in-betweens, using time and rhythm to accent the impossibilities within language.

“More remarkable work from Nathaniel Stern as he reworks, in the most curious of ways, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. Interesting that although the working method here seems almost diametrically opposed to the hands on, performative approach found in the odys series here too is that same sense of the fragility & vulnerability of human beings and their bodies & psyches & of the unreliability of the language we use to try & make what we want to happen & to relate or lie about what did.” – Michael Szpakowski, DVblog

at interval was produced for the t-minus 2006 festival, an exhibition and DVD produced by Joshua Goldberg and Chris Jordan, New York City. It was the first video produced in an ongoing series of generative works, where I use simple formulas to edit and compress popular movies, revealing secret biases, hidden meanings and complex relationships just below the surface.