Pleasure Garden

“We’re running?” Mekas asks the cameraman. “We’re running!” replies the latter. Mekas repeats the question, as if he’s not quite sure. Then he pulls out a watch. “It’s a quarter to two, Saint Paul time. We should be finished by five minutes after two.” So begins Jonas Mekas’s Self Portrait from 1980. Despite the title, Mekas is not filming himself. A cameraman captures him standing in a garden in front of a friend’s cottage in Saint Paul, Minnesota, drinking a can of beer.

This Day Won’t Last carries risk in every shot; through el Salem’s urgency to film, his constraints of what he can film, the aesthetics of lo-fi phone footage, and the images captured on cheap disposable cameras. Even if the undeveloped film can contain desires and identities without danger, even if these clips do not contain immediate reveals, the images we receive are still constrained and chased by fears and threats. However, they are also an assertion of identity and belonging.

Henri Bergson believed that the phenomenon called humour arises when the material world falls short of our spiritual aspirations. Had he lived long enough to savour Chantal Akerman’s work, he could have found proof for his thesis. Not only was Akerman a gifted metteuse en scene of Chaplinesque slapstick, but how she depicted romantic love was also a source of uncontrollable chuckling, thanks to this gap between wishful dreaming and all-too-human reality.

To be a giant comes with the burdensome nature of giant-ness. Most things look infinitely smaller than you. You move awkwardly, lankily, to not inadvertently step on anything you might not see. Thus, this Red Giant proceeds with unsure gestures, sluggishly, as if both depressed and aware of the potential inconveniences his size may cause. Yet, contrary to his stature, a sense of fragility surrounds the giant. Perhaps his nakedness makes him look like a tall, helpless baby. The film’s visual style further underscores this, with the pinkish hues of paint that collect around his small eyes and nose, denoting a form of innocence.

Curator Inge Coolsaet’s argos programme “War Is Not Over” surveys polymorphic responses to some of the major historical conflicts still haunting the West, hybridising once more the space between war and spectacle, reality and fiction—an opportunity for distraction, if not reflection, before we turn to the news cycle again.

Over the last thirty years, Sarah Pucill’s films have shown a sustained engagement with feminist politics, surrealist aesthetics, and the material language of cinema. Her work is connected by a visual and conceptual vocabulary that keeps evolving. Figures, motifs, and techniques reemerge—the principle of continuity is key to understanding how the artist’s work coheres, drawing strength from its self-reflection.