Reviews (1)
Arnold took the Hollywood horror film Invisible Ghost (1941) with Bela Lugosi in the lead role as his working material and reworked it - in addition, largely atypically to his characteristic artistic techniques known from his previous films - into a new product that speaks to the underlying principle of Hollywood movies. Deanimated because Arnold gradually erased one character after another from the original film (which was completely re-edited). As a result, we do not experience the traditional Arnoldian repetition of cyclic movements of characters, but rather the repetition of scenes in which the center and main character is emptiness. The presence in absence and absence in presence of the "invisible ghost," which is the very principle of Hollywood film = tension, anticipation, and the self-deceptive illusion of the viewer wanting to believe in an empty cause, setting up the plot and generating excitement, which ultimately can function even in the factual absence of the creator of tension. The viewer is thus forced to fill in the emptiness, indicated by the very structural relationships of American films, and "see" the ghost where it is not (stairs, curtains, trees, hallways, etc.) because it was never there in the original source, even though it was beautifully depicted there (in other words, it doesn't matter who assumes that structural role). /// Arnold, however, also plays with the film in other ways, and here too, the characters find themselves in originally unimaginable = repressed situations, which change their character.
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