Let Me Count the Ways: Minus 10, Minus 9, Minus 8, and Minus 7
Leslie Thornton
2004, 20 min, color, sound
Let Me Count the Ways: Minus 10, Minus 9, Minus 8, and Minus 7
Leslie Thornton
2004, 20 min, color, sound
Description
Let Me Count the Ways... inaugurates a new serial work by Thornton. As in her recently completed Peggy and Fred series, Thornton explores the social effects of new technologies and media, but here she pushes even further into autobiographical territory to suggest the ways in which we are all implicated in these changes. Juxtaposing aerial military footage, scientific data on genetic mutation, audio testimony about the bombing of Hiroshima, and a home movie of her World War II Air Force pilot father as he is dispatched to that city, Thornton creates a dense and compelling meditation on violence.
Found, shot and edited by Leslie Thornton. Minus 10: Image Provided by Gunnar Thornton, Los Alamos National Laboratory Archive. Sound: Interview with Hiroshima Survivor "Woman Average Intelligence," Records of the War Department and Special Staff, 1945. Minus 9: Image: Foggy Landscape, Brooklyn, N.Y. From Train, Connecticut, Brussels, 2004. From Plane, New York City, 2001. Test Footage of Tanks and Jet Engine, Cameras, Henry Ford Collection, National Archive. Atomic Bomb Tests, "Operation Hardtack," National Archive. Minus 8: Image: "The Growth of Plants," Department of Educational Talking Pictures, Electrical Research Products Inc. Text: Hersey, John. "Hiroshima," New York: Alfred A Knopf Inc., 1946. Minus 7: Image: "The Growth of Plants." Text: "Research in the Effects and Influences of the Nucelar Bomb Test Explosions," Tokyo: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, 1956.
