Wandering through the Intimate Public

There’s something mesmerising about a bustling open-air market in a metropolis. Its space is shaped by loudness, tangled in the flux of languages and accents. Visually, colours spill across the full spectrum, as their vibrancy fuels commerce and connection. In Noonlight (1991), Kayt Schneider turns an ordinary walk through Brussels’s Zuidmarkt into a quiet study of the subtle dynamics between people, the city, and time. The gritty 16mm imagery, layered over the market’s constant white noise, leads us into a past that feels uncannily familiar.

The most intimidating sequence in Noonlight is probably when the camera turns to the animals’ bodies displayed in the market. Ethical and ecological themes around butchery, fragility, and death certainly could provide frameworks for decoding Schneider’s intent. But these shots are also part of the city’s own metabolism, typical of the early ‘90s. Noonlight is not an illustrative fable; instead, it offers a phenomenological experience of gazing back at history, just like lighting up analogue slides in a dimly lit room, with each frame cueing the past tense of one of Brussels’s most vibrant landmarks.

The only explicit textual clue Schneider leaves us with is the dedication that appears at the end of the film: “With Love to Granny Lorraine.” This final reveal of a personal connection adds on to the peaceful poetics of Noonlight; nothing else could better authenticate its nostalgic undertone. Memory can be unsettling, and nostalgia should remain the reminiscence of goodness and calm. Could Granny Lorraine be the elderly woman looking at us, mysteriously, in the film’s opening shot? Is Zuidmarkt where she once bought flowers, gleaned vegetables, or paused to watch a man performing tricks with his trumpet? But mostly, aren’t we all perhaps secretly intrigued by those names and the simple lines of dedications accompanying the artwork, where the utmost love from their makers is loudly and proudly enunciated?

What makes Noonlight familiar is not merely its evocation of curiosity, whether individual or shared, but the way it opens space for our own meaning-making. As we follow the crowd through this particular market, we may, in fact, be thinking of an elsewhere—a lingering yet discreet third space—holding our personal archive of street views, sounds, smells, encounters, quiet observations, and undisclosed dedications. We sculpt our nostalgia in response to what feels absent in the present. Such socially shared sentimentality towards the past can, of course, be easily staged or constructed, especially since “nostalgia” nowadays often becomes synonymous with a certain aesthetic, as if a better version of today’s world were just one filter away. But Schneider’s documentary eye appears less concerned with romanticising the market’s scenery. Noonlight barely points to a flawless past; its grainy texture is the wrinkles of time.