Sequence: Meta-Noir Narratives is a body of ink drawings and inkjet “wet prints” made from stills appropriated from motion-picture DVDs. Each still passes through what I call a noir filter: the color image is reduced to a high-contrast, monochromatic drawing with the low-key lighting of film noir, and it is chosen and framed according to the cinematic conventions of camera angle, lighting and mise-en-scène. The filter hinders immediate recognition of the source while keeping it familiar, so the viewer meets the image with a sense of déjà vu rather than recall of a particular film.
The filtered frames are then sequenced. Rather than a linear story, they are arranged intuitively – by juxtaposing camera shots, subject matter, value and psychological effect – into non-linear, splintered chronologies that borrow from film noir’s flashbacks and character duplicity and from the fragmented narratives of Jean-Luc Godard. Repeating a frame within a sequence gives the viewer more than one way back into the line and mirrors the genre’s doubled characters.
Scale carries part of the argument. The small 4.25”x10” frames, hung in lines, emphasize the splintered chronology; the 24”x55” drawings restore what small screens lose – the vastness of a setting, an oblique angle, the lateral movement of the eye across a two-shot or a reflection. The thesis traces the method from the candidacy review through the wet-print and transfer experiments, situates it in the lighting and set conventions that German Expressionist cinema passed to film noir, and relates it to Zak Smith’s page-by-page drawings after Pynchon.