Memories for a Private Eye # 1 is the first part of a trilogy investigating my personal archive, using fictional films and images from different sources to tell the story of a traumatic memory from the past, centered around a car bomb. Marc McPhearson, the detective in the Otto Preminger’s Laura (1942) was the film’s main character, an investigator tasked with delving into my personal archive and memory. Here we find him walking into Laura’s apartment in a classical fondu enchainé /cross fade transition between two shots: a first shot from the street into the building, cross fading into a second shot of him entering the flat. The cross fade is a classical cinematic code for transiting smoothly from one space to another using the ellipse to condense ‘useless’ narrative time. Images from one shot overlap with images from the next shot, often resulting in unique and surprising compositions. Here, the detective remains stuck in transition, stretching out the overlapping composition. The video uses the same tools to expand the notion of condensed time itself and becomes doubly enchained in an eternal
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