This piece was made for the project ‘Technically Sweet’, curated by Copenhagen-based artists Yvette Brackman and Maria Finn and presented at Participant Inc and Anthology Film Archives, New York, January-March, 2008.

The exhibition took as its starting point an unrealized screenplay, 'Technically Sweet', written by Michelangelo Antonioni in the late 1960’s that was due to shoot with Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider before producer Carlo Ponti pulled out and the project was cancelled.  (Antonioni and Ponti subsequently went on to make ‘The Passenger’ with Nicholson and Schneider.) The curators had Antonioni’s screenplay translated into English for the first time and invited 12 international artists to ‘finish’ the film with works in all mediums, based on their interpretation of the manuscript.

‘Temps Mort: Dead Time’ is based on a short wordless scene that occurs early in the screenplay, in which ‘T’, the Jack Nicholson character (played by Jan Leyssens), meets 'The Contessa' (Susan Romanoff), with her nurse (Nanci Thayer), in the doorway of a pharmacy. They exchange glances but, at this point in the screenplay, we are not aware of who this woman is, or whether the man and woman know each other, nor the significance of the pharmacy location.

The scene is notable for its final line, the indication that “the tall woman's scarf blows in the wind”. The direction seems to serve no conventional narrative or metaphorical purpose, instead suggesting what the Cahiers Du Cinema critics called 'temps mort', or ‘dead time’, a term coined to describe the way Antonioni’s camera frequently wanders to and holds on apparently insignificant details in the frame, non-narrativized elements that have the effect of draining significance from the events that have just unfolded. As Sam Rohdie has noted, “The silence and obliteration which adhere to Antonioni’s moments of abstraction are like moments of death, beckoning with a beauty which simultaneously offers up an absolute of emptiness and of freedom…”. We later learn that the woman in the scene is dying of cancer and ‘T’, it transpires, is also to meet his end before the conclusion of the screenplay.