Circumplector (Gastón Solnicki, 2019)
Added 2019-08-29 23:39:41 +0000 UTC
In Latin, circumplector means that which is all-encompassing. True to form, Argentinian experimentalist Solnicki (Kékszakállú) enfolds nearly everything in less than three minutes: sculpture, architecture, devotional music, a painterly still life, a bit of portraiture, and the inklings of a narrative. In the film’s evocative first image, we see a statue being removed from Notre Dame, just two days, as it happens, before the cathedral was engulfed in flames.

So in a certain respect, Solnicki is also expressing his faith in cinema as an embrace, a tool for memorializing human endeavor in the face of uncertainty. The camera cannot see everything, but as Bazin assured us, it loses no part of what it sees.