Niels Putman

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.

“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.

In this so-called post-truth era, the line between fact and fiction has blurred into a matter of style: what appears plausible is accepted as real. The rise of generative artificial intelligence has not merely accelerated this disintegration but formalised it. Truth is no longer something to be discovered, but something to be produced. Within this context, White Cloud / 白云 by Emmanuel Van der Auwera functions as a case study of the destabilisation of truth, image, and representation.

For a refugee or an immigrant, memories of a prior life are not simply broken; they are snapped in two, three, four, or more pieces and doomed to exist separately. These split memories can emit a particular shine, as attested by Elettra Bisogno and Hazem Alqaddi’s short Old Child. The film dwells in the paradox of its title, where old age and childhood are readily coupled, as if there were no time or space in between these two ends of a human life spectrum. Of course, the title also holds melancholy, which is only one feeling in the vast emotional landscape of Old Child.

Inevitably, some fourteen years after its making, Olivia Rochette and Gerard-Jan Claes’ Because We Are Visual (2010) now feels like it covers a time long gone by, one when we still said video blog instead of vlog. In this collection of video diaries garnered from online public sources and then organised into chapters, Rochette and Claes provide no audio commentary on the material but make implicit remarks solely through editing.