Capturing the Moment

Video essays are the perfect format to reflect upon the many different kinds of audiovisual images that exist today, and how they interact. Which is what this video essay attempts to do: it makes its case about how modern images often lack power culling examples from movies, television shows, video games and cell phone recordings.

 

City Absurdia makes an impassioned plea for images that don’t just reduce an event to a portable reproduction, but reproduce the magic of any given moment. There is a lot of nostalgia here, lamenting the ubiquity of modern gadgets and the waning power of the moving image, but the makers’ dissatisfaction is honest. They borrow a term from Werner Herzog, who himself advocated adequate images. But what actually makes an image adequate proves elusive, even to the makers of Capturing the Moment: In Search of Adequate Images.

 

The closest this video essay comes to a definition of what constitutes an adequate image is one that “communicates something that can’t be expressed by words”. Which is why they make their case in the form of an audiovisual essay in the first place, we suppose.