LOOP | Agnieszka Kurant: Cutaways

As part of the exhibition Agnieszka Kurant: Errorism at Kunsthal Gent, Art Cinema OFFoff is honored to present the artist’s 2013 film Cutaways in loop in the cinema. 

For Cutaways, the Polish-born, New York-based artist Agnieszka Kurant (1978) teamed up with the legendary, award-winning film editor Walter Murch (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now). Cutaways is based on characters that were originally scripted and shot but completely removed from the final cut of different major American feature films. Kurant invited three original cut-out actors to play their respective characters after a span of many years: Charlotte Rampling as the nameless hitchhiker in the car-chase thriller Vanishing Point (Richard C. Sarafian, 1971), Abe Vigoda as the lawyer McNaught and best friend to Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul in The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974), and Dick Miller as Monster Joe, the owner of the junkyard in Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994). The new scenario in which the three characters interact is based on the respective original screenplays, even appropriating some of their lines. 

Economically, editing out a character means that these cut-out actors are never credited in the final film and often not even remunerated. This resembles the notion of ​‘phantom ware’ in technology, where ideas that were abandoned by corporations are still patented, creating some sort of cemetery of frozen phantom capital. Not having the copyrights for any of these characters, Kurant was threatened by Twentieth Century Fox with a cease-and-desist. Cutaways is about these phantoms of invisible labor and these half-baked, half-made surplus characters and storylines that haven’t left any apparent trace in the films, yet they strangely belong to them and gain an autonomous life here.

• Through the links above, you can watch the deleted scenes of Vanishing Point and Pulp Fiction
• Opening on Friday September 29 at 20:00 in the presence of the filmmaker

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