Michael Maziere

Assassin video installation, GB, 2005

The figure of the assassin dominates contemporary media and cultural history. Assassin explores the seductive spectacle of crime as manifested in cinema through the subjective depiction of the archetypal character of the assassin. Assassin takes as it starting point the plotting of a murder of a couple in love. Using a mosaic of film fragments – clips, music, subtitles, dialogue from French cinema – Assassin creates a new text in which the binding effects of narrative have been dissolved. Part picture puzzle, part fragmented image-sequence the film operates as a form of inner speech, often disconnected and incomplete. By reworking the image and dialogue of these cinematic meta-narratives Assassin restores a singularity to notions of collective memory.