Found footage film deconstructing classic Hollywood film codes turns here to film music. The family scenes, which in the original last only seconds and are not particularly notable, are surgically sectioned into single frames. Using repetition of these single cells and a new rhythm - a kind of cloning procedure - Arnold then creates an inflated, monstrous doppelgänger of the original cuts lasting many minutes. The hidden message of sex and violence is turned inside out to the point where it simply crackles.
In Alone... the crossing of three harmless teenager films gives birth to an Oedipal drama in which not only mother love mutates to sheer lust. Since passage à l'acte, and contrary to other found-footage filmmakers who choose to remove their work into the realms of silent nostalgia, Arnold has re-worked the sound track along with the image. Because of this what one hears in Alone... is the eerie, rasping silence of sound film, pregnant with suppressed tension. And exactly at the point where the illusion of full, living present is seemingly at its strongest - in the screen presence of Judy Garland singing - one senses the machine, and, implicitly, death, at work.

Dirk Schaefer