The Art of Rewatching

On Jennifer and Kevin McCoy's Crystal Films (2026) at Corridor

Crystal Films at Corridor

In April, I attended a talk on the “language of cinema” with filmmakers Tony Bui and Tran Anh Hung, who won Best Director at Cannes for The Taste of Things (2023). The conversation was structured like a masterclass (Bui teaches at Columbia’s film program) and while there was a lot of talk about filmmaking techniques, Tran spoke extensively about the importance of rewatching movies. If you liked a movie you saw in theaters, he said, rewatch it at home on a smaller screen. Watch it again, but with the sound off. Then “watch” it again with only sound. Do this again and again, and you will begin to dream of the film; you will begin to dream in film.

Tran’s method goes against the common idea that movies should be rewatched for comfort; instead, he frames repetition as something rigorous and time-consuming, even extreme, in what it demands of the viewer’s attention. What captures our attention on first watch? What can be noticed when we look closer? These were questions I kept returning to while encountering Jennifer and Kevin McCoy’s Crystal Films, recently on view at the micro-gallery Corridor.

Six glass-encased screens loop scenes from Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai (1947) in the dimly lit hallway of a private Chinatown apartment. Smaller than a tablet and larger than a phone, the sculptures appear like floating home movies. I hadn’t watched The Lady from Shanghai before visiting, as I suspected (based on the McCoys’ previous works) that Crystal Films does not rely on the viewer’s prior knowledge of the source material. The show reconfigures Welles’ noir and, quite literally, recasts it into cinematic fragments. This shifts any prior understanding of the film from narrative—the typical logic by which we approach and metabolize a movie—towards something more archival: a collection of discrete images, gestures, and scenes. In this way, the work refuses the viewer an idea of the bigger picture (narrative), opting instead to dissect the movie, slowing down and digitally modifying scenes to create the impression of suspending it “in amber,” per the artists’ statement. The grooved glass, cast from 3D-printed molds, have a filmy quality to them, as though a thick layer of condensation hangs between the viewer and the moving image.

This emphasis on materiality is what makes Crystal Films so hypnotic—and more romantic than the McCoy’s earlier work in this vein. For decades, the duo has repurposed films, television shows, archival footage, and photographs to investigate the systems and technologies behind the original creations. In simpler terms, their practice is oriented around deconstructing images to reveal the process of their making. In works like 201: A Text Algorithm (2001), which translated Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey into a textual database of shot descriptions, and Every Shot, Every Episode (2001), which catalogued thousands of shots from Starsky & Hutch according to recurring actions and formal techniques, the familiar source material is reworked and narrative or chronology is stripped away in favor of classification. These works reflect a systems-based way of seeing and organizing content, one that feels increasingly relevant now, when images arrive faster than we can fully register them.

Every Shot, Every Episode (2001)

We are not built like David Bowie’s alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth, who’s capable of absorbing ten screens at once. The average watch-time of an Instagram Reel is about three seconds. There’s too much slop and sameness cooking our attention spans. Maybe that is why I find myself drawn to work that exposes the facade: art that asks us to look beyond an image toward the structures and relationships that produce it. The challenge is that systems-conscious art can often be more compelling to think about than to actually look at. Crystal Films relies on Welles’ striking cinematography to avoid that problem. By working with a canonical film and filtering it through glass, the show enacts a slower, stranger relation to what otherwise might be familiar images. The isolated moments resist continuity and the loops don’t accumulate into a coherent record or inventory. Still The Lady of Shanghai remains underneath, a flicker of familiarity, though access requires some level of physical negotiation—getting your face closer to the glass, nearly breathing on it, waiting for the image to sharpen (there are no gallery attendants or markers dictating how close you can stand).

If the McCoys’ earlier projects sought to translate cinema into information, Crystal Films turns back toward the image and cinema as physical objects. The work arrives at a moment when images are increasingly frictionless, generated, shared, and discarded at a scale that would have been unimaginable when The Lady from Shanghai was made. Against this backdrop, Crystal Films directs us to evaluate the habits of our own sight: Watch it, watch it again, this time slowed down, then without image, then without sound.

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