Guido Hendrikx’s mysterious documentary A Man and a Camera is the fruit of a genius idea, which ends up as a thought-provoking cinematographic object that questions our social norms and behaviours.
Copenhagen is home to one of Europe’s largest documentary film festivals and industry meet-ups: CPH:DOX is currently in full swing, offering a large and rich program of documentary films, from the Nordics and beyond. We were delighted to discover A man and a camera (Netherlands, 2021), directed by Guido Hendrikx and playing in the DOX:AWARD Competition, after being previously presented at the 2021 International Film Festival Rotterdam.
After discovering Guido Hendrikx’s work with his short documentary Onder Ons (english title : Among Us) at RIDM’s 2015 edition (Montreal International Documentary Festival) where it won the award for Best International Short Documentary, I was glad to watch his mysterious latest feature: A Man and a Camera. Presented as part of CPH:DOX’s DOX:AWARD Competition, the synopsis of the film was catchy and tempting, by only saying: “The best way to see this film is not knowing anything about it beforehand. See it before it sees you!”. Obviously really intrigued by the title and the synopsis, I decided to accept the challenge without finding out more beforehand. If you are as intrigued as I was, please stop reading my review now and press play on the CPH:DOX online platform, so you can enjoy the film in the same conditions as I did. Otherwise, stay around for some of my thoughts on the fascinating social experiment conducted by the filmmaker. Read on.
Wandering around with his camera, the man is walking without communicating about his destination. The camera is floating above the ground and it sees gravel, tarmac and lawn. The beginning of the film is as mysterious as it seems. As we follow the man and his camera, the camera is in front of random houses in a small dutch village, and their inhabitants come out and shout: “What is the meaning of this ?”.
Without words or sound, the man seems to become one with the camera, the man borrows the camera’s characteristics : it sees but it does not speak. As clueless as the village’s population, we follow the camera going from house to house. At the beginning, the villagers were quite hostile toward the the man and his camera, getting sometimes quite aggressive, and literally attacking the man and his camera. The man is not harming anyone, yet people seem afraid of being filmed. Their offensive replies are dehumanizing the man by reducing him as something dangerous that harms their privacy. Those many grumpy faces made me wonder: “How would I react if this happened to me ?”. I, then, understood the synopsis.
Gradually, the grumpy faces ended up becoming more curious and friendly faces. People were sometimes silent, sometimes very talkative. As we approached the end of the film, people were inviting the man and his camera into their home. Still without communicating with the host, the balance between them and the man+camera team could be off-put and awkward. Relationships are finally created and it seems that the man becomes again the man, and the camera becomes his tool. By welcoming the man into their houses, they gave him back his humanity. It brought warmth to the experiment that is very touching and shifted the worrisome atmosphere to a feel-good wholesomeness.
Without definitive structure, A man and a Camera is a genius cinematographic object, questioning our social norms and documentary making codes. This experiment is so simple and minimalist yet so dense and thought-provoking. Guido Hendrikx succeeds once again in crafting a transgressive and surprising film about people.
