What if you took a film in which all the traditional elements—dramatic through line, character development, narrative causality—were reliably in place, and then perfectly undid them all? In this utterly engrossing and iconic work of editorial alchemy, artist Anne McGuire disassembled Robert Wise's 1971 thriller The Andromeda Strain (presented on Sunday, May 8 in the museum’s Oscar® Sundays film series) and put it back together with each of the film's individual shots in exact reverse structural order. The result is an uncanny experience, creating a destabilized disaster narrative in which every expected property of cinematic storytelling is subverted. Cause-and-effect becomes effect-and-cause as McGuire genetically engineers her source material to uncover an entirely new and strange layer of narrative engagement.

McGuire’s video works often interrogate the basic tropes and structures of the moving image, as well as our interest in creating spectacle out of everyday experiences. However, Strain Andromeda The—the first in a series of conceptually related works by the artist, including Adventure Poseidon The and Snatchers Body The Of Invasion—manages the inverse, creating an un-spectacle in which the increasing paranoia and complexity of a pandemic narrative is gradually smoothed into reconstituted simplicity, literally shot by shot.

DIRECTOR: Anne McGuire. 1992. 126 min. USA. Color. English. Digital.

Academy Museum film programming generously funded by the Richard Roth Foundation.