The anonymous waves White Page Gallery is proud to present This film has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted to fit this screen. by Canadian film maker Khanhthuan Tran.
This film has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted to fit this screen. (2019) references contemporary instances of film appropriation such as Anne McGuire’s Strain Andromeda The (1992) and David Claerbout’s The Pure Necessity (2016). Two distinct layers of appropriated film are superimposed to depict a series of scenes showing people watching a disaster film on television. Together, this recontextualizes the original actors’ performances and mise-en-scene in an attempt to disrupt the surface illusion of reality, trying to break the image, and expose a hidden reality. The disaster film genre is thematically transformative: from destruction arises reconstruction, form follows function: disaster cinema is used as a metaphor for the transformation of film, from analogue to digital and the transformative process of modification within film appropriation.