Looking privately at someone who can't see you

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin of choppedliver.info (posted from below, the boy in the ninja mask) have only one film on the site, called Going Under. As with much of their work the subject is three-dimensional, the focus, and just highlighted by the artistic choices here. The context is the work, though it's all well-executed and suffers no lack at all of technical mastery. In this case the appeal is simply access, and the kind of access. An old man is in the center of a static framed shot, we hover above him as he lays in a hospital bed and wears an oxygen or anaesthesia mask. The monitor beeps jump in the background, we register he hears them, his expressions show for the first minute or so. He fades in and out of different levels of consciousness, he never confronts the camera. Once he's out completely he's intubated procedurally, not roughly and not gently, the tube is taped down, his eyes are taped shut. It isn't uncomfortable to watch, because it doesn't feel as if it expects to be watched. This is a difficult sensation to pin down - the purely voyeuristic. It anticipates no response, it seems dreamlike, as if it is not an action taken to have really looked at this man. It affects nothing necessarily. In this newer genre of art film, especially video work, you may watch the entire process of a beautiful man losing consciousness, without subjectivity and without charading as related to practical concern. It is response to news footage of the outskirts of every gory happening, those newcasters with crime scenes at their back, far enough away that you can only see a door, a slab of road, or a gate, that masquerades as relevant for concerns of safety and information. It's simply a window, almost not a camera. You keep looking because his eyes are beautiful, or he's strange, or you empathize and wonder how losing consciousness seems despite knowing how it feels. Because everyone involved in the making of it has somehow agreed it is elementally interesting, this window exists. (This window exists in plenty of incarnations -- the last video art I saw was the artist's two hands fucking one another in a black box -- this window just happens to be captivating.) It is as directed as those two hands I guess, it is one room, and you could be equally bored by both. My fascination with unconscious appearance makes Going Under the opposite of the self-awareness and reference of that Other video art.