Visual interpretations of Amelie

In a film studies course, we are of course engaged in the process of interpretation -- which for us consists of critical observation and analysis. There are other ways to interpret and respond to creative work, however, and one of which is, well... creatively. There is a lot of Amelie fan art out there (a Google image search of "Amelie" and "illustration" will show you what I mean), but for some reason, I've always liked this particular cartoon by Stephanie Pena. As far as capturing what we have to infer about the character and her motivations (since she so infrequently lets her guard down), I think that this is pretty right on:

Annie Hall remixed with stock footage!

There is a current show at the Cliften Benevento art gallery in New York that features, among other pieces, a work of video art that takes all of the audio from Annie Hall -- that is, the entire vocal track -- and replaces the video with corresponding stock video takes from Getty stock photo and footage archive. According to Contemporary Art Daily: 

In Anhedonia, Aleksandra Domanović superimposes the audio track of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) onto stock footage from the Getty Image archive. Replacing the film’s visuals can be conceptually understood as a reversal of Allen’s debut, What’s Up Tiger Lily? (1966), a comedy where Allen added new dialogue instead of translating the material co-opted from a 1965 Senkichi Taniguchi feature. On a semantic level, the fixed score in Annie Hall – a film with little incidental music – is reordered. Using the original soundtrack of the film as script or guide, Domanović exchanges one layer of visual information for another to produce an original object that oscillates between the literal, the allegorical and the obtuse. Enabled on a material level by the development of the Getty archive -70 million still images and 30,000 hours of stock footage and growing – Domanović points to the dulling relationship between pleasure and an over-abundance of visual information. Anhedonia, a psychological condition marked by an inability to experience satisfaction from normally pleasurable actions like eating, exercise and sex, compounds the exhibition title in their complicity with the relations of visual excess and pleasure; both are also derived from Annie Hall.

You'll recall, of course, that Anhedonia was the working title of the film until very late in the production process. This might be of interest to some of you; I certainly found myself kind of mesmerized by it. The video itself can be viewed here, and it is certainly an uncanny experience... at once familiar, and at the same time radically and entirely this other weird thing altogether.