EVERY EDIT IS A LIE is an experiment that tests the limits of the cinematic form. Unsettling temporal continuity and familiar sound-image relations, the screening — comprised of three interrelated audio-visual works — considers cinema a fundamentally uncertain medium, a site rich with ontological instability. Through processes of comparison and collision, repetition and fragmentation, the project seeks to unravel the assumptions underpinning cinematic montage and narrative unity, with the series of reconstructed ‘narratives’ thus questioning what unknowable, unclassifiable understandings may emerge from these points of rupture and contradiction.

A central concern across the three works is narrative reconstruction. Here, pivotal sequences from L’eclisse (Antonioni, 1962), Kiss (Warhol, 1964), Vagabond (Varda, 1985) and La notte (Antonioni, 1961) are reinvented and abstracted. Sound-and-image relations become obscured, as the banal is slowly disfigured into estranged aesthetic sensations. For instance, The Silent Listener (2025) reworks the sequence from La notte wherein the emotionally alienated Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) leaves her husband’s (Marcello Mastroianni) book launch and departs on an urban odyssey. The sequence is reimagined, featuring a soundtrack comprised almost entirely of my own quotidian encounters — sneezing, eating, a key opening a door, etc. — with only scarce moments of disjointed speech and dialogue from the film remaining.  

Ambiguity and opacity are guiding principles throughout the project. Within Kiss (2024), the collision of Monica Vitti and Alain Delon’s encounter in L’eclisse alongside Warhol’s experimental montage renders one of cinema’s most recognisable gestures almost unclassifiable. What does the kiss begin to reveal when stripped of familiarity? Likewise, within the reconstruction of Varda’s Vagabond, Finding a Clue in a Detective Story (2026), the ostensibly violent frames point to the arbitrary nature of image production, and the broader creation of ‘stories.’ The piece is accompanied by two distinctive soundtracks — Milan W.’s ‘Wanda’ (2024) and The Sweet Enoughs’ ‘Dream Puppy’ (2020) — further decentring the privilege traditionally granted to the visual register.