The Wilkinson Household Fire Alarm (Morgan Fisher, USA, 1973)

From its early beginnings in the 1960s, the work of Morgan Fisher (born in 1942 and based in Los Angeles) has revolved around an analysis of “film’s systems“ - its aesthetic conventions, processes of production, and technological conditions. The singular fascination of Fisher’s films results from a surgical precision, laboratory-like assembly and extreme attention to detail that make for a radically subjective, partly autobiographical gesture - marked by a dry sense of humor. Morgan Fisher has long explored the space that segregates art cinema from industrial movie making. The one-minute-thirty-second-long Wilkinson Household Fire Alarm, an eye-blink homage to Marcel Duchamp, is more obviously engaged with conceptualism than with studio manufacturing. What you see is what you hear.