The Somnambulist

Victor Balanon pays homage to classic films by appropriating images from film stills of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1975 arthouse film, The Mirror and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 spy thriller, North by Northwest, and animating the charcoal drawings. These works reflect the artist’s keen interest in how images are disseminated and received by audiences through mass media and popular culture. In this video work, Balanon has taken the figure of a running woman from The Mirror but sets it in a narrow, dimly-lit tunnel. The work reflects the ability of video animation to simplify the complex imagery of cinema while retaining its associations with movement, time, and light. The images come full circle – from movement to stillness and back again to movement – but the way audiences experience and relate to these images, and the realities that they represent, is very much dictated by the artist’s chosen medium.