Cinema - Text 2
The action camera and the somatic image go hand in hand, because the former describes a kind of video camera designed to capture the experiences of a body in action and the latter concerns the qualities of an image which shows us something about the body at the source of the movement. The two also meet in works which go beyond the boundaries of what the expression “action camera” initially designated (extreme sports, everyday amateur uses), particularly in a few documentaries in which the filmer’s role is as central as what is being filmed, and even more important in some cases. Such is the case in films such as Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000) and Jonas Mekas’ Walden (1968). Here, Johan van der Keuken is a model, as he rejected the fundamentals of the classical documentary and said of his work that “what one documents in the end is a physical presence: not only that of the other, but one’s own.”[2]
