Virgil Vernier - Karine

Although the camerawork is crude at best at times, there is a lo-fi aesthetic at work that gives the film a more intimate portrait of a lingering malaise that haunts this generation. A sort of morose childlike portrait of a youth hung up by anxiety and fear. Seeking a new way of spirituality but at the same time rejecting what has gone before. Because the past has led itself into this current mess and they look for a way out. Voodoo masks, returning to houses that they once lived in but are now uninhabited, returning from past secret voyages all with the aim of seeking to find oneself.

All of this has happened before with previous generations but Vernier recontextualises this for the present generation. There is a musicality towards his films that has been missing in a lot of films at present. The abrupt edits and seamless flows give the film a strange elliptical feeling that at once is odd and strangely pleasant at the same time. There are moments where I feel Vernier is almost the new Rivette in how he manages to gently unmask how a person wants to be seen and how they really are - perpetually worried in a post-millenial existential anxiety and trying to find a way out. Their only way of seeking solace is seeing how others act.

One can almost feel that there is absolutely nothing in this film and yet the more I watch Vernier's films, the more I recognise something - a certain trait, a mechanism - and without saying much, an awful lot has been said. Vernier may be the unsung hero of a new cinema just brimming below the threshold.

I realise that with my previous Vernier post I had made a connection that there was a synthetic ode to a past that had never been or never was. The more I watch his films the more I've come to see that Vernier is documenting a malaise our generation is enveloped in. Much of his films play like documentaries and he is almost unobtrusive in his filming. We are as much a part in the film and in the making of the film. We are also the characters therefore the boundaries are so dissolved as to be non-existant. Vernier is a socio-political filmmaker and while we as viewers are passive spectators we are allowed to come to our own conclusions.