(Koki Tanaka at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle)
The terror of allegory is that humans placed under its banner immediately become symbols and their actions extrapolated as universal archetypes (slipping towards stereotypes) and denying the individual for false assumptions about the universal. This exhibitions subtitling itself as “a soundtrack for collective engagement” readies it as an inference, turning a documentary into a parable at the expense of the young adult’s being. The political intimation takes away from the chance of its operation, occluding the risk, and predetermining its allegory and extracting value from it a priori, almost as if the humans in its logic were secondary to it: It mattered little whether they succeeded or failed because the project itself was always bound to extract meaning from it.Demolishing what is the best part of documentaries in that genres liquidate their tropes and the relationship to narrative elements becomes estranged, at all moments one must reposition ourselves in relation to the characters, there is no deity to assuage a sensibility, coherence , or, worst, a moral. Like Restrepo, an antidote to all the Errol Morris style docs, the characters negate the spectrum of types to create a film whose bathos becomes its emotional impact. Far more moving than any of the eternal return fatalism of some recent Best Pictures.
The best part of this isn’t a idea about collectivity, but the base enjoyment of watching people, for which this video is phenomenal. People are generally more interesting than people’s ideas about them.