double bill #26
yanco
https://yanco.be/en/double-bill-26
Observing in order to understand: it’s a common premise for filmmakers. Observation comes from the Latin observāre, which can mean not only “to perceive” but also “to guard” or “to keep watch.” But what happens when this perception becomes obsessive?
In Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning, Lynne Sachs references Muybridge’s photographs of a man in motion. Sachs observes a man driving around in his car, getting something to eat at his local diner, playing around between the sheets, and on the harmonica. These seemingly ordinary situations are tinged with a sense of danger: the man feels caged by the camera, by Sachs’s perspective, in this pastiche of the male gaze.
Kayt Schneider’s Noonlight depicts another kind of danger: the unknown. Zooming in on a Brussels market, a peaceful melting pot of eccentric characters, we witness a tattoo on an old man’s hand, the bullets on a police officer’s belt, and the hand of a child being held just a little tighter. A tension forms, an expectation, too. We chop reality into fragments and place image after image, shot after shot, in sequence to construct a story in our minds. But how dangerous is it, really, to juggle raw eggs?
text by Alex Schuurbiers