ILS NOUS PRENNENT POUR DES FANTÔMES
2026 · 2m
Directed by Ron Kenley
Genres: essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
Before a mirror, a woman's voice reflects on how men see women — enchantresses, magicians — in a piece drawn from Guillaume Apollinaire's 1909 'L'enchanteur pourrissant'.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A two-minute essay film about male gaze and enchantment sounds like the kind of earnest literary adaptation that usually makes me want to scream—but Kenley's refusal to *show* the woman, just her voice against the mirror, is genuinely perverse in the best way, turning Apollinaire's 1909 misogyny into something that might actually sting.
Kenley's handling of the Apollinaire source—the spatial compression of voice and reflection, the formal decision to withhold the body while interrogating the male eye—places this in a lineage of feminist essay film that reaches back to Lis Rhodes and forward to contemporary video poetry; the brevity is not a limitation but a refined curatorial gesture.
The whole film turns on one choice: keeping the woman as voice-and-mirror rather than image, which forces every ounce of interpretive weight onto the listener's ear and the *sound* of objectification—a two-minute film that works because it trusts the audience to complete the absence.