Out of the Blue

One could, with good reason, call it a video essay for Morgane Frund develops here a proper analysis of a former winner film in Cannes – whose title I choose to omit, sympathetically playing with Frund’s choice of omission in their essay – but watching such a video essay in a Winterthur cinema theatre, I understood that it is probably something more than a video essay, precisely due to its commitment to a sort of image omission, subtly playing with nothing but the challenge of iconoclasm. At first it seemed a problem for me, the difficulty in recognizing an image and the memory of the film on the big screen – which is definitely easier on a little screen – but this problem became the source of a fundamental reflection: how to criticise the violence of images without attending to their reproduction and the reproduction of the violence itself? The constant company of Frund’s voice provides the arguments of the criticism, in line with Laura Mulvey’s doctrine on the male gaze, and the demonstration sounds convincing even if sometime didactic and self-assured, but the most interesting line of this essay is, to my eyes, exactly what my eyes simultaneously see and not see on the big screen of the cinema theatre: the fact that this hesitation between visible and invisible becomes perceptible. Out of the Blue is a perception exercise, also one of falling – literally – out of the blue of an infamous film and its memory, right into its darkness. The difficult image experience in this film is the core of the criticism itself, between and against both the gnostic and the purely iconoclastic options. There is an art of omission that creates the space for dialogue and criticism. A space that, at the end of the film, Frund is also able to occupy self-critically, in recognizing a part of pleasure (as victim or responsible?) in their own male gaze.

Morgane Frund | CH 2023 | 15’ | Special Mention at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2023 | Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2023, Solothurner Filmtage 2024
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