Look at me

Image

To me, a movie is good if some of its images, dialogs, and moments come back to me the day after watching it. A movie is even better if it brings me questions I have no answer for. Look at me was such a movie for me today, and I feel its moments come back to me for a few days. It is a beautiful movie, very French in the tradition of Eric Rohmer, and consequently very unpopular, I think. Last night I saw the movie with only three other people in the theater.
* * *
Searching for the movie's website, I found this great photography project. It is an online exhibition of snapshots: old photographs of unknown people looking at us. Here is what the website says about the kind of photos it exhibits:
These photos were either lost, forgotten, or thrown away. The images now are nameless, without connection to the people they show, or the photographer who took them. Maybe someone died and a relative threw away their photographs; maybe someone thought they were trash.
Some of the photos were found on the street. Some were stacked in a box, bought cheap at a flea market. Showing off or embarrassed, smug, sometimes happy, the people in these photos are strangers to us. They can't help but be interesting, as stories with only an introduction.
The "Look at Me" project started with a few photos found by Frederic Bonn and Zoe Deleu in a Paris street in 1998.
The collection now contains 464 photos.

The website gives the regular family photographs a new dimension. The photographs in this website do not stand as a replica of their subjects anymore. The nature of the snapshots is changed by the anonymity of the subjects and the way they are presented there. Unknown family photographs are transformed to a metaphor: an ironic metaphor for all the efforts we make to eternalize ourselves by printing our image on a rectangular piece of paper.
- The Photograph from Project Look at me. To submit a photo to this project click here.
- Look at me's trailer here.

Comments

  1. it's always a pleasure to read u...
    glad that u are posting again...

    ReplyDelete
  2. "To me, a movie is good if some of its images, dialogs, and moments come back to me the day after watching it. A movie is even better if it brings me questions I have no answer for."

    This is word for word how I would describe a good movie.

    Bonus if the plot is non linear and with an unknown cast.

    ReplyDelete
  3. i second mohammad, it is nice to see your new post. i'll check this site u linked to as well. i used to spend a lot of time at flea markets looking at old photos. the ones that were recent (as in from the last 30 years) made me most sad. i always thought the more recent pics were there because something tragic happened to a family, their house got robbed, etc.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I've seen this movie too ( Look at me). Almost up to the middle of the movie, I was expceting that something else should happen! Then gradually I noticed, hey... it's somehow similar to my life!! And then the movie was finished!
    Since you are interested in foreign movies, there is a good one ,well I liked it a lot. It is a French movie and it's called 5X2. I'm still thinking about it (after 4 months)!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular Posts