Valérie Mréjen's Confining Camera

The writer, video artist, and documentary filmmaker Valérie Mréjen is a clever explorer of intimate spaces, whose unassuming and quietly probing films ask what it means to feel confined, what it means to tell the camera secrets, and what it means to watch.¹ This article analyses the powerful psychological, emotional, and ethical effects of cinematic space in her work. It begins by studying the distinctive techniques developed within her numerous short video films, which play instructively with documentary devices.² I shall be interested here not only in how Mréjen's camera maps and creates mentally and visually confining spaces, but also in how these spaces question afresh the complexities of confessional modes, and in so doing rigorously challenge our prevailing cultural climate of unrestrained self-exposure.

The article's second section goes on to explore the ways in which Mréjen's characteristic devices are deployed and further developed within her first documentary film Pork and Milk (2004), an intimate study of some of the intersections between Orthodox Judaism and secular society which won several international awards.³ Mréjen's sensitivity to space takes on new forms and resonance in the context of this culturally sensitive film about schisms, outsiderness, freedom, and shame, which makes an unusual contribution to cinema's intensifying preoccupation with displacement and trans-cultural situations. Here my aim will be to situate the distinctive spaces of Mréjen's film with regard to the current ethical turn in film studies, and to explore the importance of the tensions between confinement and liberation that result from her camerawork. Overall we will see that Mréjen's films, which focus from the outset on states of vulnerability, progressively refine a distinctive screen space of one-on-one encounter in which ethical considerations are uppermost.

Uneasy spaces in Mréjen's short films

Tiny, parenthetical incidents and banal everyday talk provide the base material for Valérie Mréjen's work. The miniature films for which she has gained an international reputation in recent years are characteristically from one to three minutes long and feature people in isolation or interacting in small groups. Her subjects are frequently seated in domestic environments and separated from each other or from us by the simple boundary formed by a table. They are filmed at a measured distance, with a static camera and in a single take. We see only the top half of their bodies and have few visual clues about them as individuals. This specific, pared-down physical grammar provides scant diversion from the real focus: one that brings us, through meticulously staged narrative or conversation, to consider in generic terms the undertow of ordinary interactions. Through the spaces of unease that these films evoke and create, Mréjen ingeniously plumbs with us the pockets of emotional pain, accumulated from early childhood, that are the residue of family life and everyday social relations. The cocktail of coercion, competition, and frustration revealed in a mere two minutes of interaction between a mother and her small daughter as the latter attempts to sing a song she has learned at school (Une noix, 1997) provides a prime example of the filmmaker's attentiveness to such processes, and of her declared interest in "[les] rapports de force dans une relation."⁴ As the mother repeatedly applauds the young singer before she can reach the end of her song, we witness and recognise the formation of angry knots in the ties that bind them. Many of Mréjen's short films, like her writing, focus closely on family roles as well as suggest how individuals become confined through assumptions and constructions of gender.⁵

It is predominantly with the narration rather than the depiction of micro-interactions that Mréjen has been concerned in her video work, and it is her characteristic talking-heads scenario that is my focus in this article. A woman describes brief conversations with her husband which reveal his deep inconsiderateness (Des larmes de sang, 2000); a man narrates some of the everyday events that make his stop-and-start relationship with a difficult...