Après-Coup proposes an examination of the cinematic vocabulary of the psychological thriller and horror genres from the 1940’s through the 1980’s. Films such as Marnie, The Bird with the Crystal Plummage, Eyes without a Face, Nightmare on Elm Street, Dead Ringer, The Girl who Knew Too Much, The Dark Mirror, Sisters, Repulsion and Hellraiser are disassembled and reconfigured in order to isolate their codes and conventions. The result is a narrative constructed through a sequence of cinematic instances (images, sounds and objects) that deliberately mis-remember the films themselves.

Stock characters, cinematographic techniques, sound effects, scenographies, props and other conventions therefore appear in isolation: the woman in peril, the monster inside, mental traumas transmogrified into physical form, twins or doubling, flashbacks, telephones, scissors, hair, blood and mirrors. These elements are mixed and made into new combinations in order to produce what is at once a derivative and yet original way of viewing cinema. Presented in the gallery through models, film sequences, soundtracks and props, “cinema” becomes frozen, broken down into its parts, and turned into clues for the visitor to construct a narrative founded from a collective, cultural memory of film watching.

The term Après-Coup (in English “afterwardness”) is a Freudian theory which proposes that memory re-prints and mis-remembers. It is a concept that is often deployed in thriller and horror narratives, where past events, especially traumatic ones, are exposed, revisited, or provoked through various psychiatric techniques.

The term, then, can refer simultaneously to a psychoanalytic theory, a plot device which produces a range of cinematic conventions, and a viewer’s own relationship to cinema and cinematic experiences. Films remembered merge into films never seen and a new relation to one’s understanding of cinema emerges. Out of old and sedimented conventions, Après-Coup proposes new cinematic experiences and memories.

In collaboration with Bill Turpin and Nick Williamson

Installation at the HEAD, Geneve, Sept – Dec 2011, photographed by Baptiste Coulon and Raphaelle Mueller

















Rebecca (2011)



Rebecca (2011)



Rebecca (2011)



Rebecca (2011)



Rebecca (2011)



Rebecca (2011)



Hair (2011)



Metronome (2011)



Polygraph (2011)