How Long Is “Alternate Ending”?

In the exquisite looped short Alternate Ending (all works 2003), a lantern is raised smoothly through the dark, narrow stairwell of a `3os-era office building, the intricate fretwork of banisters casting streaming, lacy shadows. As the lantern passes a frosted-glass door lit from behind, the camera zooms in on the nameplate, which, black against the light, is impossible to read. An eerie sense that the building`s brain lies behind that door is enhanced by the lantern, which moves like a laparoscope withdrawing from an esophagus-though the mysterious scene is less clinical than evocative of a certain subconscious vulnerability. -ubu.