double bill #20

In video diaries, life is both lived and observed. The camera becomes a mirror, reflecting a performance of the self in time. The found footage in Olivia Rochette’s and Gerard-Jan Claes’s Because We Are Visual amplifies what Jonas Mekas captured in his Self-Portrait decades earlier: our desire to transform the mundane into something lasting.

Curating fragments of existing YouTube vlogs, the filmmakers capture a raw digital intimacy in which solitude becomes a spectacle. Mekas conducted a video diary of his own life—an analogue record of the self, tender and personal. These fleeting moments become immortalised on screen; whether preserved in celluloid or MP4, they become memories we can replay forever. 

Exposing the tension between privacy and exposure, intimacy and performance, both works showcase how self-documentation turns private life into a shared experience. The featured filmmakers took our yearning for closeness and made it tangible. After all, to film oneself is merely a desire to be seen.