Thibaut Is Singing On Oberstein Road (2008, 15.5MB, 2:36 min) Rules of Engagement (2008, 18.1MB, 2:15 min) Tremendous work from Robert Croma. The Iraq piece is harrowing but you should watch it nonetheless. The Thibaut piece is simply exhilarating. I was trying to figure out what exactly makes this work so outstanding. I don t think it s just the fact that it is technically so good (although it is). It s to do with Croma s taste, judgement instinct, or at least how he deploys these to tell us something, or rather to intuit-to-us something about being a human being. You couldn t make a rule of it, for that would render it inert mechanical, but, loosely, in these two pieces, it seems to me to lie in a going-beyond -the-expected - a process with its heart in the little codas which open out the pieces in a quite extraordinary way. So the Iraq piece, though supremely well done, is initially not a million miles away from much other remix type work, but it is the final calling-to-attention, the framing, of the gait of one of the people whom we have just seen obliterated that re-doubles its horror but also creates the tiniest ground for hope in the inescapable (thanks to Croma) clear recognition of our common humanity. A similar process occurs in the Thibaut piece - its potency initially seems to reside in the simplicity of the camera exploring the still, the conjunction of the new and old imaging technology and the simple moving fact of evocation of time passed. It s beautiful; and many would have been tempted to leave it there. The final section is a risk - it could have have the opposite effect to what it actually does; it could have closed off, made pat. Here perhaps the technical fluency does play a defining role but the effect is the exact opposite of closure -we re left, once again, in a very different way, filled with a sense of the mystery complexity possibility ( the fragility) of being human.
