The Emotions of Others
2015 · 17m · United Kingdom
Directed by Jacob Cartwright, Nick Jordan
Genres: documentary, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, provocative
A documentary essay that probes whether facial expression — in the flesh or in art — is a reliable route to knowing others' minds, staging a debate between a 'voice of doubt' and a 'voice of certainty' over interviews, old-master and contemporary paintings, and classic film clips.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A doctoral thesis cosplaying as cinema—the dialogue-between-two-voices conceit is clever enough, but it's fundamentally safe, a permission structure for playing it straight with Darwin and old masters instead of actually breaking the form apart.
Cartwright and Jordan stage their inquiry with real formal intelligence, letting the antagonism between doubt and certainty breathe through montage rather than resolving it, and the lineage they're drawing—from Martini's devotional faces through Dumas's abstractions to Godard's skepticism about expression itself—feels earned and precisely argued.
The decision to let paintings hold the argument longer than any voiceover wants to is what saves this from being a think piece: that sustained visual pause forces you to actually *look* at a face before the narrators tell you what it means.