Joelle on the Work: human flashes, furtive

Sincerity present but ashamed of itself, smuggled in like contraband. Even in the cold early Work, Joelle catches "flashes of something. Very hidden and quick. Almost furtive" — three subliminal cuts to faces "twisted past recognition with some kind of torment," sped up so no one can Pause on them, "as if they compromised him somehow." The ironist can't stop feeling, but he hides the feeling at frame-speed so he can't be caught meaning it — the exact self-hate-buried-in-metasilliness that 138/140 anatomize. (The 240-second Bernini shot works the same way: buried under the campy surface, "an unironic, almost moral thesis," self-forgetting "as the Grail" — moral seriousness disguised as a heavy-art herring.) The register war fought inside a single filmmaker: feeling and the shame of feeling, at war frame by frame.