Two young men live, independently, in liminal space: on the threshold or in permanent transition between two worlds. One of these worlds, filmed with a camera, seems more “real” than the other, represented by computer generated images and explored by a digital avatar. But nothing could be less certain… for what the film seeks to imagine, portray and describe is this other reality of living on the threshold between the two worlds. To express the reality of this threshold, the directors imagined the correspondence between the two explorers, each recording and sending to the other their accounts of their journey into altered reality. The situations alternate between recording and listening, voice-in and voice-over. The film thus produces this reality and the fluctuating way of being that goes with it by constantly folding worlds into each other in the audiovisual image, differently each time. But whether speaking or listening, a common lack seems to affect the travellers, as if the spirit had separated from the body. This separation grants a strange freedom to give oneself a new body, new powers of perception and action – to be one’s own Prometheus, but at the risk of floating, of treading water in suspended time on the threshold of existence, of incarnation itself. This is perhaps what’s meant by the interspersing throughout the narrative of a third mode of perception in the surveillance videos that film everything and nothing continuously, like the one that, pointed at Independence Square on February 24th as it is every day, recorded for nothing the sound of the first Russian explosions around Kyiv. In this film that’s simple yet enigmatic, opaque yet luminous, Gaetano Liberti and Luciano Pérez Savoy call upon one of film’s rarely- used powers – showing, in order to study, a unique or new yet strangely disturbing way of being in the world.
(Cyril Neyrat)