Body Double (Platoon) (2006)

• 67%
• 2006
• Stephanie Syjuco

Body Double is a feature-length film of a tropical landscape that appears in glimpses, interspersed with varying durations of a completely black screen, and methodically recut from Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986). The scenes of sky, mountains, foliage, and rivers are cropped into slivers, squares, and rectangles and the original cinematic audio track is left intact. By editing out all the visual narrative from the film and cropping the frame to focus on the peripheral landscapes, this work attempts to "search for the Philippines" via negation and reorientation. This video project ignores the original filmic story to focus on the artist's own attempts at discovering her place of birth, through the lens of an American empire that has superimposed its own narratives upon it.