In the midst of the street fighting and social collapse of Italy in the 1970s, a talented and ruthless police inspector in Rome learns a disturbing fact: there is an unknown number of copies of himself, identical down to the mustache, scattered across the country. To make matters worse, all are taking the law into their own hands, inexplicably multiplying his one-man campaign for vengeance into a veritable killing spree. And so, while being relentlessly haunted by the ghost of what may well be long-dead revolutionary Carlo Pisacane, the inspector sets out to put an end to not only his glitchy and murderous imitations, but also the very source from which they came. . . .

The first part of a planned trilogy, Violent X draws its materials from a dense cycle of low-budget cop films made between 1973 and 1978. For the film, Williams assembled thousands of digital stills and their accidental ghosting into an animated document that slips between the social history glimpsed in the background, and the circulation of such films through the working-class peripheries of Italy. Through this montage surfaces a new speculative tale of violent cops and copying, haunted hippodromes and riots and the revolt of what refuses to disappear.

For its premiere at Images, the films soundtrack will be performed by Williams and Unami. This live presentation joins the films excavation of media, pulp and radical history to the earliest instances of cinematic narration and accompaniment. Conjured in sound, voice and halting frames, these high-speed chases and low-grade rip-offs mark the buried thought of an era.

Preceded by Hacked Circuit Deborah Stratman, 2014.