For me that’s all they are: they’re not in this show and I’ve only read about them

For me, that’s all they are: they’re not in this show, and I’ve only read about them. But Lewis’s work as a whole sounds promising when you read about it. He has evidently looked at and thought about cinema intently. He believes that the art as it is developed is, for all serious purposes, dead (which I am quite prepared to believe, too), and now the only thing for it is to pick over its remains, its bits, its fundamental elements, with a mixture of primitive delight and disillusioned familiarity ­ to isolate cinema’s effects from their surrounding narratives, take these, the old tricks that once were wonders, and turn them into new means of expression Lewis calls his work “part-cinema”.

I hope it sounds quite promising to you also.I am sorry to report otherwise. The five short films showing in the galleries of MOMA are neat, clever, solid and sometimes fantastically elaborate in their making They have their ­ extremely brief ­ moments. But essentially, they are what you might fear Lewis’s films would be: not so much new means of expression, as slightly estranging exercises in “the language of cinema”.Upside Down Touch of Evil, for instance, takes the famous opening sequence of the Orson Welles film, a very long and complicated moving crane-shot, restages it with new actors and new everything in Vancouver ­ wow! ­ changing a few points apparently, but I didn’t remember the original well enough to notice what exactly, but re-shoots it in silence and with the camera upside down. I can’t quite get my head round the question of whether this would be the same thing as simply projecting it upside down Perhaps not, otherwise no need for a remake. But what happens is that you lose the story and suspense of the sequence, but keep its complex sense of movement through space.So what? Don’t you have that sense anyway in the original, at the same time as the story? And besides, as with the paintings of Georg Baselitz, upside-downism never simply suspends one sort of interest ­ narrative or figurative ­ it always also introduces another sort, namely that everything is upside down, but why? The couple walking along the pavement in the Welles seem to be walking across a ceiling in the Lewis. Is that a good idea?Peeping Tom involves another remake (and a remarkable coincidence, since the killer film-maker in Powell’s original is also called Mark Lewis).

Here, Lewis assembles all bits of film that in that film the fictional Lewis shoots, and re-shoots them, again making changes I couldn’t gauge, and puts them in a single reel. Powell’s 1960 film is often seen as a pioneering study in the violence of the cinematic gaze Lewis’s 2000 retake is a fast-forward digest of that. I guess that the name-coincidence made it irresistible, but it seems far too obvious a film for an artist who is interested in film to be interested in.Other pieces make no specific references. North Circular starts with a static long shot of a derelict factory block, and then moves into a long slow track in, over a big drop in the ground, and up to the first- floor window-sill where a top is spinning. It’s nice when the camera leaves the ground, like a plane in take-off.In Smithfield, it’s night, and the camera circles round a lighted street-level room ­ triangular, all windows ­ belonging to one of those narrow jutting wedge-shaped corner buildings in the City of London.