Gong gong chang suo aka in public (2001) dir. Zhangke Jia

As enthusiastic “beginners”, both Jia and Tsai seized the digital camera as a tool that could provide them with a more intimate, closer, way of “grasping” reality. Yet, once again, they end up with a world of missed encounters. The real, said Lacan, is not only what eludes us, but what we tend to resist, and both filmmakers articulate this dilemma with elegance and poignancy. The “intimacy” produced by the digital recording is more with the “subject” than with the “object”, and what strikes at first in both Jia’s and Tsai’s contributions is how congruent they are with the rest of their work – they are, somehow, a form of inverted self-portrait, the “captured” images functioning like a mirror image of their emotions and concerns.