The
Renaissance
Society

In this video diary entry, lyrically expressed thoughts and feelings are either intensified or poignantly offset by footage of a summer day at a seaside park. Leisure offers her no respite from reflections on the nature of being. For Rakauskaite, images of sun, surf, and family bliss do not yield nostalgia but instead a meditation on the body as "separate pieces of meat ruled by the brain." (Think Proust suffused with a Baltic bleakness.) The listlessness of her recitation would have us believe the French patent on ennui has all but expired. The unfathomable psychology of a young woman, shot in extreme close-ups, sums up the union and disjunction between emotion and perception. To ponder whatever fleeting thoughts might be revealed in her gaze is unwittingly to use this portrait as a mirror.