Selfportrait
2009 · 2m · Italy
Directed by Isobel Blank
Genres: essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal
Devant sa caméra fixe, dans son salon, l'artiste Isobel Blank dresse en jump cuts un autoportrait fugace d'elle-même, entre peinture et musique, se cachant et se dévoilant tour à tour face au spectateur.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of an artist jump-cutting between hiding and revealing herself in her living room—it sounds like navel-gazing, but Blank's refusal to resolve the contradiction between self-concealment and exposure actually works as a genuine formal argument about the impossibility of the self-portrait, which is a lot smarter than it has any right to be.
Blank situates herself squarely in the lineage of feminist video art and the essay film—the fixed camera, the domestic space as gallery, the jump cut as a tool of fragmentation—and executes with enough formal precision that the fugitive quality of her performance becomes the whole point, not a limitation.
The engine here is the jump cut itself: each cut doesn't just punctuate, it *erases*, making the intervals between revealed and concealed selves do more narrative work than any single gesture could, turning a 2-minute bedroom experiment into something that feels structurally inevitable.
Reviews
Dans ce morceau délectable d'art vidéo, les codes conventionnels du septième art se retournent sens dessus-dessous pour se retrouver aux côtés de l'art contemporain expérimental. Bizarre et excentrique, « Selfportrait » est le reflet de son auteur, et certainement un des plus atypiques des Showreels !